Loanwords in Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia 1 ...

Source
language
Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs Function
words
Total
pre-Indian 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2
Indian 0.8 0.3 3.2 0.0 0.0 0.8
Persian 1.3 1.2 1.6 0.0 0.9 1.3
Kurdish 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1
Ossetic 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1
Armenian 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.6
Greek 2.0 0.9 0.0 0.0 4.3 1.8
South Slavic 2.2 1.2 4.0 0.0 3.4 2.2
Hungarian 63.0 41.0 42.1 50.0 21.8 52.7
Slovak/Czech 4.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.7
Vlax Romani 0.1 0.0 0.8 0.0 0.0 0.1
Loanwords 75.6 44.7 51.7 50.0 30.3 62.6
Non-loanwords 24.4 55.3 48.3 50.0 69.7 37.4
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.00 100.0
Table 2: Loanwords in Selice Romani by semantic word class (percentages)
Of all word classes, nouns exhibit the highest proportion of loanwords: over three
quarters. The other content word classes lag behind nouns and are roughly similar to
one another with regard to loanword proportions: loanwords represent half of all
adverbs, just over half of all adjectives, and somewhat less than half of all verbs.
However, adverbs only amount to 4 items in the LWT template, and so the proportion
of loan-adverbs is clearly beyond statistical significance. In fact, all Selice Romani
manner adverbs that semantically correspond to Hungarian-origin adjectives are
themselves lexical borrowings from Hungarian, rather then internal derivations from the
borrowed adjectives, and so the proportion of loan-adverbs could be very different in an
extended meaning sample. Finally, function words show the lowest proportion of LWT
loanwords: just below a third.
Table 3 displays the proportions of selected diachronic layers of loanwords to all
loanwords by word class (the word classes are arranged by decreasing loanword
proportions), plus arithmetical differences from the total proportion of this kind. The
an expression of the corresponding language-specific morphosyntactic word class. There are only very
few exceptions: for example, there is no adjective meaning ‘stinking’, only a verb meaning ‘to stink’ in
Selice Romani. Consequently, the breakdown of loanwords by Selice Romani word classes would show
numbers almost identical to those of Table 2.
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 19 of 65