Uri Tadmor

Loanwords in the world's languages : a comparative handbook

This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the projects methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.

Loanwords in Imbabura Quechua

Imbabura Quechua is spoken in the northern Andes of Ecuador by some 150,000 speakers. Although the majority of them rely on agriculture, an increasing number live also on the trade of handicrafts in and around the town of Otavalo. Others sell their labor to different factories in the province or migrate temporarily to work in the nearby cities of Ibarra and Quito. The socioeconomic status of Imbabura Quechua speakers is considered one of relative prosperity in comparison to that of other ethnic groups in Ecuador. Imbabura Quechua is part of the Quechua IIB dialect group (Torero 1964). This branch covers an extensive area that includes “the dialects of the Ecuadorian highlands and Oriente (the eastern lowlands); the Colombian Quichua dialect usually called Inga or Ingano (Caquetá, Nariño, Putumayo); the dialects spoken in the Peruvian department of Loreto in the Amazonian lowlands (which are, in fact, extensions of the varieties spoken in the Amazonian region of Ecuador); the Lamista dialect spoken in the area of Lamas (Department of San Martín, Peru); and that of Chachapoyas and Luya (Department of Amazonas, Peru)” (Adelaar & Muysken 2004: 186f). Figure 1 gives an idea of the place of Imbabura Quechua within the Quechua language family. Map 1 charts highland and lowland varieties of Ecuadorian Quechua. Differences between northern Quechua (Ecuador), locally known as Quichua, and southern Quechua (Peru and Bolivia) occur at all levels of linguistic structure but are particularly noticeable in morphology. Like other Ecuadorian dialects, Imbabura Quechua has undergone a gradual process of morphological simplification involving the loss of verb-object agreement and possessive nominal suffixes. Typologically speaking, Imbabura Quechua is much more analytic than Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua, even though it preserves the typical agglutinative character of all Quechua languages.