Lexicology/Lexicologie

LEXICOLOGY/LEXICOLOGIE PERSIAN LOANS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE In continuation of the series on loans in English, this collection of 600 loans is analyzed and supplemented by 238 distant loans ultimately motivated by Per- sian items, to be followed by a complementary article (in this journal) on the sometimes overlapping Turkish loans. Persian has had more lexical influence than was previously thought. The data emend dictionary information about temporal and regional labels, etymologies, and “earliest” records, especially any Persian corpus retrieved through OED2 CD-ROM, besides showing mutual influences among languages in contact over the centuries. This article continues a series of studies about lexical items borrowed into the English language, as collected from standard general monolin- gual dictionaries. There are book-length studies on German, Arabic, and Japanese (PFEFFER - CANNON 1994; CANNON 1994a; 1996, respectively), and articles on Chinese, Malay, and Turkish (CANNON 1988; 1992; 1999). These are complemented by delimited articles on post-1949 items: two on Spanish, plus Japanese, Arabic, and German (CANNON 1994b; 1995a; 1995b; 1997; 1998a). As in the previous studies, the 600 Persian loans include both loanwords and loan translations. The corpus began with the electronic retrieval of headwords in the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Third New International Dictio- nary of the English Language, and Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dic- tionary (OED, 1989; O-A1 and O-A2, 1993; O-A3, 1997; NSOED, 1993; W3, 1961; W10, 1993, respectively). The data throw light on (1) the importance of using a closed corpus in historical studies, where native speakers are unavailable and perfor- mance rather than projection is the focus; (2) the importance of stan- dardizing procedures in loan studies when possible, especially to permit comparisons of data; and (3) the implications of multiple languages in direct or indirect contact, where lexical transmission by two or more transferring languages may reveal mutual influences. We begin with the collecting procedure, the chronological and semantic aspects, the degree of naturalization within a four-degree scale reflecting the currency, and the labels, particularly correction of the temporal and regional ones. Next we consider variants and graphemics — phonology, word classes, 148 G. CANNON word formation and productivity (inflection and derivation, functional shift, and compounding), transmission via translation or loanword or reborrowing, distant (i.e., not transmitted by Persian) and multiple- source loans, and emendation of existing etymologies and “earliest” dates. Finally, we compare our corpus with that generated by OED2 CD- ROM when Persia(n)/Iran is clicked on, and assess the place of Persian items in the general English lexis and in their modern rate of transfer. The collecting of our corpus from dictionaries posed three problems for a normally fairly straightforward procedure. That is, some items from the language-intermixed Middle East and South Asia might also be from Turkish, Arabic, and/or Hindi/Urdu, rather than solely from Per- sian. Our manual searches expanded the Oxford and MERRIAM - WEB- STER data with additional items from the other seven continuously updated college dictionaries and new-word collections like the Third Barnhart Dictionary of New English (B3, 1991) and Barnhart Dictio- nary Companion (BDC, 1982-), and in Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (F&W, 1963), Random House Dic- tionary of the English Language (RH, 1987), and five older works (Noah WEBSTER’s American Dictionary of the English Language [1858], Cen- tury Dictionary [1889-91], Universal Dictionary of the English Lan- guage [UD, 1897], and Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language [W1, 1909; and W2, 1934]). The obvious first problem was verification of the dictionary etymologies. There were few questions if the item came only from one language, as did peshcush from Persian. But if transmitted through an intermediary language that did not substantively change the sense and/or form, it might still be accepted into our corpus if at least one of its newly dis- covered citations contextually documents a second language-source, or an existing citation is not language-specific and can fit this second language. The loan is then analyzed as having two sources constituting a single transfer. Four examples from Sir John MALCOLM’s History of Per- sia (1815) will illustrate. MALCOLM’s Farsee (= Farsi) documents the Persian source, but FRASER’s 1838 identical spelling adds the dual Ara- bic one (Per. & Ar. farsi). OED2 etymologizes gholam (< Ar.) as com- ing from Arabic, though the citations (1820 to 1882) refer to Persia; MALCOLM uses ghulam (< Per. ghulam), which OED2 lists as a variant, thereby acknowledging this second source. W3 derives ‘urf “Persian customary law” from Arabic (i.e., < Per. & Ar. ‘urf), whereas Malcolm heard his urf in Persian areas. OED2 (1855), NSOED, and W2 cite Turk- ish and Persian jointly for Sheriyat (i.e., Turk. sheri‘at < Ar. shari‘ah); MALCOLM’s Persian source gives Sherrâh. Any loan substantively altered by an intermediary language was excluded from our corpus. This became a distant loan, which is a non- PERSIAN LOANS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 149 direct, supplemental one. For example, Arabic added an article in bor- rowing Per. nil; the resulting Ar. hybrid an-nil was then taken by French as anil. As French, not Persian, gave English the considerably altered anil, Persian was relegated to a distant source. Further, as anil was trans- ferred from a common European language and seems to have been per- ceived as an ordinary loan, it should not be considered an exotic item from the Middle East. While such perception must be taken into account, distant loans shed light on language contacts and should not be disregarded. Our Appendix 2 lists 238 Persian distant loans and their transmitters. Second, unabridged dictionaries like Century (subtitled Encyclopedic Lexicon), W1, W2, and RH include some proper nouns belonging in atlases, encyclopedias, or research studies. So all the names found there had to be checked to see if they should be discarded as encyclopedic items. Deleting purely geographical or biographical terms like Hamadan “Iranian city” and Yezdegird III “last Sassanian monarch of Persia”, which are omitted from OED2 and W3 on principle, we accepted Hamadan as the name of a kind of rug woven there. Similarly, the suf- fixation Yezdegirdian (see MUFWENE 1988) provides insights into Eng- lish word-formation. In abandoning MERRIAM - WEBSTER’s encyclopedic coverage in W1 and W2, W3 eliminated their pearl section, where “minor words, foreign words and phrases [i.e., wholly unadapted loans often given the double- track lines indicating complete foreignness], abbreviations, etc.” were placed in reduced size at the bottom of the page (see CANNON 1998b). These pearl sections have provided us with valuable information about words’ history in their English naturalization. W3 does formulaically record the unchanged adjective use of place-names, such as Teheran “in the manner of Teheran …”. As this reveals only the fact of functional shift from the noun, implicitly hiding the contrast with the form Tehrani (which we retained), we excluded such adjectives. F&W similarly rejected 63,000 of the 513,000 items examined because they were dead or obsolescent, “of little or no use”, or too rare or specific [p. xi]. We deleted all 15 items denoting an essentially ethnic nomenclature, as recorded only in Century, W1, W2, and/or RH: abadi, Ardebil, artaba, asar, azam, bisti, Dagestan, dung, izafat, jerib, kanara, kasbeke, Teheran “carpet”, Zardushti, and Zohak. In the travellers’ accounts where some of these items were employed as an aid to local color, the words were usually italicized and glossed, further motivating our deci- sion. We also deleted all but ‘alif of the 28 letter-names of the Arabic writing system, which RH recorded on principle. The Orientalist Sir William JONES (1746-1794) used them in his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) as Persian letter-names, and so probably justifying a 150 G. CANNON joint Arabic and Persian source for the pairs of names that are pro- nounced similarly. We retained ‘alif because of its inclusion in W3 and two college dictionaries. Ya, the 28th letter-name, was deleted because JONES’s conversion to the Persian pronunciation ye changed the Arabic name too phonetically, despite W2’s inclusion of Ar. ya. Similarly, though W2 and OED2 record Ar. waw, dated 1916, we dropped it because JONES’s vau transcribed the Per. vav. No general dictionary records the four letter-names that JONES had to add to complete the Per- sian alphabet: pe, cim, ze, and gaf, representing /p, c, z, g/, respectively. The last problem arose from errors contained in etymology and labeling and our antedating of dictionary entries. The etymological errors com- monly appear for borrowings from related or juxtaposed languages, as his- torically explained by the chronology of the unified Persian empire in the Middle East until the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century, the Turk- ish Seljuks’ control of the area until the Mongols brought Mongolic into the language patchwork beginning in the 13th century, the Ottoman Turks under the Persianized Turkish literati, and the concurrent occupation of the Indian subcontinent by the Persian-speaking Moguls. The form and meaning of some older loans are thereby so similar in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and/or Hindi/Urdu, that loans like tekke should be attributed jointly to Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Further, the persons introducing the words into English had to transliterate all of them, excepting the romanized Turkish ones after the Arabic script was altered for Turkish. Our etymological emendation principally changes a single-language attribution to the actual joint transfer, and/or credits Persian as the underlying source (not a distant loan) even though only Turkish (e.g., para = Turk.

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