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

significance of the proportions of different loanword layers will differ greatly for
different fields, this latter observation should not be given too much weight).
There is certainly no single principle behind the ordering of the LWT semantic
fields with regard to the proportion of loanwords they contain. Nevertheless, it may be
observed that several fields consisting, to a considerable extent, of abstract concepts
(e.g. Quantity, Spatial Relations, Cognition, Possession, or Emotions and Values)
possess relatively low proportions of loanwords, whereas numerous fields that mostly
contain very concrete meanings (e.g. The House, The Modern World, Agriculture and
Vegetation, Clothing and Grooming, or Animals) possess relatively high proportions of
loanwords. Some of those semantic fields that stand out in Table 5 in various respects
are discussed below:
The field The House shows the highest proportion of loanwords. There are only three LWT
meanings that must be expressed by an indigenous word: ‘house’, ‘door’, and ‘to live,
dwell’ (< ‘to sit’). 18 It is likely that some loanwords in this field have been cultural
insertions accompanying the speakers’ sedentarization and other changes in their dwelling
patterns and conditions (e.g. ‘room’), although other loanwords have demonstrably replaced
indigenous words (e.g. ‘board’) or pre-sedentarization loanwords (e.g. ‘stove’). It thus
remains unclear to what extent extralinguistic factors can be made responsible for the
extremely high proportion of loanwords in this semantic domain. The fact that this LWT
field consists almost exclusively of nouns, which are the most borrowable word class in
Selice Romani (see Section 4.3), may also be significant.
The second highest proportion of loanwords in the field The Modern World is not
surprising. Unlike The House, this field contains, expectedly, an above-average proportion
of Hungarian and current loanwords. In fact, the only pre-Hungarian loanword in this field,
caklo ‘glass [material]; bottle’ from South Slavic, has acquired its latter, modern-world,
meaning through calquing the polysemy of the Hungarian noun üveg. In addition, there are
a few relatively recent internal derivations in this field, and an indigenous noun meaning
‘song’, which is an ancient rather than modern concept in Romani culture.
The field Religion and Belief stands out in showing the highest proportion of old, pre-
Greek, loanwords. However, given that there are only three of them, viz. ‘priest’, ‘witch’
18 In addition, there is an indigenous noun meaning ‘space under one’s head in bed’ (whereas ‘pillow’ is a
loanword), and two polysemous indigenous nouns that can be used to refer to ‘floor’ (primarily ‘earth;
land’) and ‘bed’ (primarily ‘place’), for both of which there are borrowed synonyms in the relevant
specific meanings.
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 22 of 65