CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                    INTRODUCTION

The notion of loanwords remains inescapable in many studies about languages of the world. As a very crucial source of language change, borrowing or lending is a process of lexical change. It entails adding new items to a language or dialect by taking them from another language or dialect directly or indirectly. Speakers of different languages always come in contact for different reasons that range from religious to political.  Where speakers of one language do not have a word available for a particular item, but the speakers of the other language do, the former borrow from the latter. In a normal learning situation, one finds an object for which there is no known name in the dominant language. Since that dominant language is absent, the name or label for the object is either borrowed from the local language or by some other means.  This is common in a situation where those who ‘gave’ the language have gone away at the time of the need for a name for that particular new item. Everyone is thus faced with the need to account for these new items for which no name has been given in the target language.

In borrowing, there is an unconscious effort not to over-borrow or else there would be a breakdown in communication. This is because a group of persons who do not speak the language from which a large number of lexical items have been borrowed is not likely to understand the new dialect when spoken.

According to Michael (2011) Loanwords come into a language as a result of linguistics borrowing. A special type of borrowing is described as loan translation (Yule, 2006).  It is otherwise known as morphological change (Andrew, 1992). Loanwords are features of bilingualism. Loanwords are lexical items taken from one language to another as a linguistic material (Spence, 1991).

When languages adopt loanwords, they typically modify the new items in keeping with the pre-existing structure of the recipient language (Campbell, 1998). In other words, loanwords are modified to fit the phonological as well as the morphological structures of the recipient language. For instance, the sound /0/ in the English word ‘thousand’ /0auznd/, is replaced with Anaang /t/ in /atausin/, /0/ is absent in Anaang, therefore since /t/ and /0/ share same phonetic similarity in place feature and voicelessness, /t/ is substituted for /0/. Where adoption is impossible, deletion or insertion rule is applied to modify such words.

Below are some examples of loanwords with their source and recipient language.

Table 1.1:  Loan words in Anaang

Source:  Michael (p.183)

From the above examples, it can be clearly seen that the Anaang language which phonotactics permits a concord marker at the word initial position, has modified the borrowed words in order to match with its sound system.

1.1     Background of the Study

          When two languages come into contact, words are borrowed from one language to another. Lexical borrowings or loanwords are by far most commonly attested in language contact phenomenon. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) states that “invariably, in a borrowing situation, the first foreign elements to enter the borrowing language are words”, and based on a cross-linguistic survey of lexical borrowings in forty-one languages. Haspelmath and Tadmor (2009) states that no language in the sample and probably no language in the world is entirety devoid of loanwords. Loanwords are studied from many different perspectives, touching upon different subjects of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology and semantics, as well as sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. Loanwords are not only recognized as the most common of language contact phenomenon but also occupy an important position in general linguistics due to the evidence they bring to  our understanding of the grammatical structure of language and to the theory of language change and historical linguistics.

Some major questions that arise in the study of loanwords include:

1.       Definition – what are loanwords? How are loanwords different from or similar to codes-witches?

2.       Borrowability– why are words borrowed? Are certain types of words more likely to be borrowed than others?

3.       Emergence and evolution – how are loanwords introduced? How do loanwords evolve overtime?

4.       Adaption – why and how are loanwords adapted?

In this work, phonotactics will not be exempted as it has a very vital role to play. Words which are borrowed from English into Ibibio or say Anaang are not directly imposed on the recipient language but are modified. This modification is to align with the phontactics of the recipient language.

Phonotactics is concerned with the freedom and restrictions that languages allow in terms of syllable structure.  Which sounds can precede and follow which other sounds, whether consonant clusters are allowed, and what sorts are allowed; whether a language has syllabic consonant, and if so which ones; whether length is contrastive in vowels, which sounds can occur in a syllable coda: these are all examples of phonotactic restrictions that can appear in a language.

For instance, in English we can characterize the following words (all of which are one syllable long) according to their phonotactic patterns.

Table 1.2

          We can see that at least two of the variables in English are the maximum size of the onset (three consonants, in the example above), and the maximum size of the coda (only two consonants in the example given here, though three are possible). It is relevant to examine the kinds of consonants that can occur in different positions.  These examples show the privileged status that liquids enjoy as the second element in clusters, and the privileges that are associated with /s/ in the outermost (forties from the vowel) member of clusters, both in the onset and in the coda.

Similarly, there is great variation in the permissibility of certain kinds of segments in different positions: many languages restrict plosives in codas to unaspirated voiced stops, for instance, or disallow velar nasals in onset position (Steriade, 2007).

It is true that in all languages there are constraints on the way in which these phonemes can be arranged from syllables. These constraints are sometimes known as phonotactic or phoneme sequence constraints and they severely limit the number of syllabus that would be theoretically possible if phonemes could be combined in an unconstrained way. Some simple examples of phonotactic constraints in English include: all three consonant clusters at the beginning of a word start with /s/ (Spirit, ‘square’, ‘stew’, etc); nasal consonant cannot occur as the second consonant in word-initial consonant clusters unless the first consonant is /s/ there are no words in English that begin with /bm/ or /dn/ etc,although this is certainly possible in other languages (e.g. German which allows /kn/ in words like ‘Knoten’, meaning ‘knot’ – we can see from the spelling that English used to allow this sequence as well). Another important point about phonotactic constraints is that they vary from language to language, as this example of English and German has just shown. Coming back home, Ibibio whose phonotactics does not permit nouns to start with consonants except syllabic nasals (n,m,ŋ) nasals and does not permit verbs to start with vowels, for instance see the following Ibibio nouns and verbs: (a) Esio, Ufok, Ikpang, Usan,Nkanika for nouns and (b) da, feghe, tie, dia, waak, duoketc for verbs. From the above examples, it can clearly be seen that Ibibio nouns and verbs syllable structure are different where nouns mostly have from 2 syllables upward and verbs operates from one syllable (monosyllable) upwards. Nouns start with a V or syllable nasals while verbs starts with a C.