Contrastive Analysis 1

Unit: Language Borrowing

The Macedonian language is continuously subjected to the invasion of Anglo-American words

lexis and linguistic structures (e.g. Имајте убав ден! Have a nice day!) The new terms are
influenced by the technological development and usually come from the fields of economy and
business. Loan words or borrowings become parts of the local language but their foreign origin is
noticeable (радио, телевизија).
The most commonly loan words come the following fields: technology, economy, management,
marketing, finance, politics, arts, culture (music, media). In fact, this is a result of the process of
globalization.
In the past, merchants used a mixture of languages, predominantly Italian and Spanish with
elements from Arabic, Turkish and French.
The influence of the English language on other languages (including Macedonian) is manifested
through:
1. The contact that communities have with English language and its culture through media,
especially music, films, TV programs
2. The inclination of the society towards modernization and development
3. Mobility (job-related, study-related)
4. Travelling
5. English perceived as a prestigious language
6. Other we mentioned in class??? (I think there was something more)

Types of borrowings:

1. Real borrowings: No change in meaning or form (or minimal change). Usually

technology-related (happens fast, we Macedonians are slow in catching up). Internet
terms (мејл, линк, блог, постира, провајдер итн.). Marketing terms (бренд, лиценца,
портфолио, аукција).

2. Morphological adaptation: Macedonian is an agglutinative language (with highly

developed morphology). By series of mainly prefixes and suffixes grammatical and
semantic meanings are expressed. Verbs get suffixes for person, tense and aspect.
Examples: лиценцира, изменаџира, френдни (ме), блогови, маркетинг агентка.
3. Calques: Literal translations of single words or phrases. Examples: е-бизнис наместо
електронски, бизнис/деловна комуникација, безбедносна компанија.

It seems that translation is the most influential source that supplies Macedonian with
English borrowings, direct or translated.

Problematic direct loans: ,,прв дојден, прв услужен” , ,,имајте убав остаток од денот”
,,umbrella” (чадор организации).
Some direct loans are used more frequently than the Macedonian equivalents (маус или
глушец), си-ви, симнува или доунлодира, менаџерка или управителка, тренинг или
обука.

4. Compounds: Noun1-Noun2 combinations. Земји-кандидатки, земја-членка, прес-

конференција, кикоф-митинг. Some combinations consist of Macedonian translations,
some of loan words plus Macedonian word and some are loan words only.

5. Abbreviations versus acronyms

The spelling of these can be both in Cyrillic and in the Latin alphabet (usually with
pronunciation in Macedonian).
Examples: ЕСМ, ДВ (Дојчевеле), ЦИА (CIA), UNHCR (УНХЦР)

The most frequent borrowings are related to food, drinks, clothes: хамбургер, пица, паб,
аеробик, џинс and professions (stylist/стилист, мејк-ап артист). Another source of
borrowings are job advertisements which appear in English and are literally translated.

Translation does not only facilitate word borrowing but it also makes way for
grammatical and cultural features of the source language to get in. The translations can be
inappropriate (Како да поминам побрзо и повеќе? Би рекла дека треба да се
изложите на конструктивна непријатност).

Online material
(taken from
https://borrowings.io.ua/s109779/types_of_borrowings._reasons_for_borrowings)

Borrowings are subdivided into: completely assimilated, partly assimilated and non-
assimilated (barbarisms).

Completely assimilated borrowings are not felt as foreign words in the language, if the
French word «sport» and the native word «start». Completely assimilated verbs belong to
regular verbs, e.g. correct -corrected. Completely assimilated nouns form their plural by
means of s-inflexion, e.g. gate- gates. In completely assimilated French words the stress
has been shifted from the last syllable to the last but one.

Semantic assimilation of borrowed words depends on the words existing in the borrowing
language, as a rule, a borrowed word does not bring all its meanings into the borrowing
language, if it is polysemantic, e.g. the Russian borrowing «sputnik» is used in English
only in one of its meanings.

Partly assimilated borrowings are subdivided into the following groups: a) borrowings
non-assimilated semantically, because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the
country from the language of which they were borrowed, e.g. sari, sombrero, taiga, kvass
etc.

b) Borrowings non-assimilated grammatically, e.g. nouns borrowed from Latin and

Greek retain their plural forms (bacillus - bacilli, phenomenon - phenomena, datum -data,
and genius - genii etc.

c) Borrowings non-assimilated phonetically. Here belong words with the initial sounds
/v/ and /z/, e.g. voice, zero. In native words these voiced consonants are used only in the
intervocal position as allophones of sounds /f/ and /s/ (loss - lose, life - live ). Some
Scandinavian borrowings have consonants and combinations of consonants which were
not palatalized, e.g. /sk/ in the words: sky, skate, ski etc (in native words we have the
palatalized sounds denoted by the digraph «sh», e.g. shirt); sounds /k/ and /g/ before front
vowels are not palatalized e.g. girl, get, give, kid, kill, kettle. In native words we have
palatalization , e.g. German, child.

Some French borrowings have retained their stress on the last syllable, e.g. police, and
cartoon. Some French borrowings retain special combinations of sounds, e.g. /a:3/ in the
words : camouflage, bourgeois, some of them retain the combination of sounds /wa:/ in
the words: memoir, boulevard.

d) borrowings can be partly assimilated graphically, e.g. in Greak borrowings «y» can be
spelled in the middle of the word (symbol, synonym), «ph» denotes the sound /f/
(phoneme, morpheme), «ch» denotes the sound /k/(chemistry, chaos),«ps» denotes the
sound /s/ (psychology).