Lexical and semantic change

Lexical and semantic change
for number, and in many languages they are also marked for case and/or
grammatical gender. Borrowed nouns must be fitted into all this morphology
in one way or another, and the result may be disturbances to the borrowing
language's morphology.
Consider first number. With just a handful of exceptions like feet and
children, English nouns form their plural with an invariable suffix -s:
books, cars, discos, databases, CD-ROMs, and so on for virtually every
noun, old or new. With borrowed nouns, however, we agonize and vacillate.
Many nouns borrowed from Greek and Latin have been taken over
complete with their foreign plurals: hence phenomena, indices, crises,
formulae, cacti, bacteria, and some dozens of others (or hundreds, if
we count purely technical terms like protozoa and hominidae). Such un­
English plurals disrupt the ordinary English morphology, and speakers
often fmd them confusing and rearrange them in various ways. We formerly
had singular datum and plural data, but the more frequent plural
form just doesn't look like a plural to English eyes, and most speakers
now treat data as a singular (as in 'This data is interesting'; compare the
earlier 'These data are interesting', now confined to a handful of conservative
speakers - many of whom are actually linguists!), and data now
has no plural. Something similar is perhaps happening with criterion/criteria,
phenomenon/phenomena, and bacteriumlbacteria: very few of my
students seem to be at all sure which form is the singular and which the
plural, and use them the wrong way round as often as not: this criteria,
these phenomenon, a new bacteria.
Confusion arises in other ways. The Greek word syllabus has a Greek
plural syllabontes which is rarely used in English, but the model of Latin
nouns like radius/radii has misled some speakers into creating a plural
syllabi, which is now so frequent that it's recognized by most dictionaries.
In the same way, the uncommon Latin loan nexus, whose Latin plural is
nexus, has been given a surprising English plural nexi by some speakers,
including even by a few linguists who use it as a technical term, and I have
even seen the startling form casi bellorum used as the plural ofcasus belli
'cause ofwar', whose Latin plural is again just casus belli.
We borrow a few other foreign plurals, such as cherubim and kibbutzim
(from Hebrew), concerti and castrati (from Italian), and bureaux and
beaux (from French), but we don't always take over a foreign plural. Latin
circus, Italian pizza, German kindergarten, Greek daemon, French beret
and Eskimo anorak all just form regular English plurals in -s: nobody tries
to use such plurals as *circus, *pizze, *kindergarten, or *daemones; the
French plural happens to be berets anyway, and how many ofus have the
faintest idea how to form a plural in Eskimo?
When the borrowing language has a large number of different ways of
forming plurals, the problem becomes more acute. German, for example,
Morphological treatment of loans 033
has a wide variety of patterns for plurals: Weg 'way', plural Wege; Mann
'man', Manner; Mensch 'person', Menschen; Uhu 'eagle-owl', Uhus;
Lehrer 'teacher', Lehrer; Bruder 'brother', Bruder; Hand 'hand', Hdnde;
Blume 'flower', Blumen; Buch 'book', Bucher; Mineral 'mineral',
Mineralien. Loan words have to be given some plural form or other, and
German-speakers have made various decisions. Many loan words are stuck
into one pattern or another in a seemingly arbitrary manner: Tenor 'tenor',
Tenore; Film 'film', Filme; Ski 'ski', Skier; Pilot 'pilot', Piloten; Experte
'expert', Experten; Boxer 'boxer', Boxer; Fossil 'fossil', Fossilien. By far
the largest number of recent loans, however, take the -S plural: Test,
Bungalow, Teenager, Kiwi, Job, Schock 'shock', Kamera 'camera', Bar
(for drinks), Lady, Party, Story, Ghetto, Kasino 'casino', Kommando
'commando', Hobby, Baby, Zebra, Hotel, and hundreds of others all form
-s plurals (Tests, Bungalows, Teenagers, and so on). This is slightly surprising,
since the -s plural is one of the rarest patterns of all for native
words: there are perhaps fewer than a dozen native words of any antiquity
that form this kind of plural. Interestingly, the plural in -s is beginning to
tum up in colloquial speech in native words which never used to have it,
and one can hear things like Mddchens 'girls', Frauleins 'young ladies'
and Onkels 'uncles'. Perhaps these are the first signs that German may be
going the same way English went many centuries ago: generalizing the
once obscure -s plural at the expense of a dozen other patterns. (Old
English was just like modem German in having many different ways of
forming plurals.) There has, however, been considerable influence from
French and more recently English upon German, both, of course, being
languages which use -s as the default plural marker.
In German, the problem of dealing with loan words is made still more
acute by the fact that the language has a case-system - and naturally different
classes of nouns take different sets of case-endings. Table 2.1 shows
just a few ofthe patterns which exist; the names ofthe cases are Nom(inative),
Acc(usative), Gen(itive), and Dat(ive).
Loan words which take the -s plural are accommodated in an unexpected
way: with just one exception, they simply don't take any caseendings,
as shown in Table 2.2. The one exception is that certain nouns do
take the genitive singular ending -s, even though this makes the genitive
singular look just like all the plural forms.
In Russian, which has a substantially more complex case morphology
than German (six cases and well over a dozen different patterns for forming
them), most loan words are treated in the same way: they just don't take
any case-endings at all.
A language with grammatical gender, like French, German, or Russian,
has the additional problem of assigning loan words to a gender. French,
which has only two genders, traditionally called 'masculine' and 'feminine',