Talk:Expressive loan

I think it's strange that the article uses Finnish examples, also how is an "expressive loan" different from a "folk etymology"?
 * I'm not a native speaker of English, so it's a bit hard for me to find the English examples. Anyone? I can't think of anything but "Ginkgo", which is not a Japanese word (or Chinese, for that matter), but is instantly recognizable as a vaguely "Oriental" word, because it has -ng- and -k-. This suggests its meaning, a medicinal herb from Asia. --Vuo 03:29, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Isn't Ginkgo just a Chinese word that has been changed in the spurce langugaes?
 * No. It's a misreading of a misreading. As I recall, Roy Andrew Miller showed that it was a misreading of handwritten ginkyo, i.e., someone misread y as g, which itself is a misreading of the characters used to write ginkgo in Japanese. Godfrey Daniel 20:53, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

A misreading of a misreading, or mishearing of a mishearing, or misreading of a mishearing, etc are surely among the most common ways words change when they pass between languages. I don't see Godfrey Daniel's distinction.67.161.173.249 01:20, 9 September 2006 (UTC)(Richard L. Peterson 9/8/06)

"The borrowing language, Russian, has no front vowels ..." This is patently obsurd, though I suspect you mean "rounded front vowels".

Two other points:
 * It appears from context you mean that Russian is the source language (with words borrowed into Eastern Finnish)?


 * I don't think you're likely to find many examples of this sort of loaning in English. Sometimes (native) words are combined for effect (e.g. "smog" from "smoke" and "fog"), but when borrowing we normally just "steal" a word and leave it as is.

Damezi 10:04, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

English - Spanish
I think I found some examples between English and Spanish. (Finnish - Russian is too foreign for me). --Error 22:47, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Desperado from Spanish desesperado ("without hope") and English desperate.
 * zapear from Anglicism zapping and Spanish ¡zape! (used to scare cats).
 * The first is much like an expressive loan; first, it conveys the idea of a Spanish word without being one, this being the expressiveness; and second, it may be a loan from desesperado (is it?). --Vuo 01:04, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I realise this is rather an old discussion, but how about 'hoosegow' from juzgado? garik 13:51, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Questions
1) Is the last sentence about "foreign concepts" somewhat POV? 2) Can the use of native morphology was a foreign-rooted word be considered a related phenomenon? (e.g. "Beijinger"--probably doesn't work for proper nouns since intrinsically have to be to be borrowed, except for a few examples such as Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, which are translated literally in the target language). 3) Would some other examples be Italian greca < English "greatcoat" or French dogue < English "(bull)dog"? --Dpr 01:10, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Obviously it's point-of-view, because it motivates the fact why the speakers don't just go with a regular sound change (djogot &rarr; tokotti, jokotti) but introduce non-original elements (djogot &rarr; tökötti). In the Finnish culture, talking like a Russian would give the impression you're a Russian too, and that's not good. This anti-Russian attitude was seen even in the attitudes towards refugees from Karelia in WW2. Thus, there was a definite interests in "Finnifying" Russian loanwords.
 * 2) Native morphology on non-native words is simple borrowing, e.g. Finnish newyorkilainen /nyyjookilainen/ "New Yorker".
 * 3) If an element is missing from the source language, and it is positively and purposely added to the word to make it look native and not from the source language, then it's an expressive loan. Particularly, if it's pseudo-onomatopoetic. I think that you could find expressive loans from North American place names of Native American origin, as in there, there has been interest in removing the "Indian" elements of culture and making it "plain English" -like. --Vuo 15:33, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Thanks for the answers. You have a very impressive knowledge of language(s). Thanks for explaining some cultural-historical background. I'll look for some of the Native American examples. 2) Also, one issue that ought to be discussed--different languages have different levels of requirements for transforming a word into native morphology in order to be used. In other words, Esperanto adds an -o to all nouns, Latin typically added a proper ending (-a/-us-/-um), Spanish/Italian add -a/-o etc. In English (or German) we can use any for, hence many Latin words used in English (and possibly even more so in German) which are identical to the original: affadvit, consensus, census (not "cense"), octopus, antenna (not "antenne"), cervix, etc. etc. And English don't even add diacritics where English would. Even further down the spectrum of the of "morpho-transforming" tendency are languages written non-alphabetically like Chinese and Japanese, which intrinsically cannot express the same sounds (in written form), but instead must conform to the native syllables to be used at all. Does this have some connect to expressive loans? It must somehow. Some language "require" expressiveness, while others don't require it at all (except for adapting to the target language's phonology). --Dpr 16:35, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * See sound symbolism and ideophone instead. The rules for how a word is borrowed are highly regular and can be derived from the low-level phonotactics. For example, Finnish adds 'i' as paragoge if a consonant stem is borrowed, as illustrated by "studen" &rarr; "tyyteni". If the word is not left there, then it may be an expressive loan. Also, expressive constructions (onomatopoeia, ideophones, etc.) are found in Finnish also elsewhere than in expressive loans. --Vuo 21:23, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Is Russian "studen" meaning студень? Had to spend a while, converting phonetic? latin characters, into cyrillic, to thus come up with "студень", meaning "Jelly" according to Google Translate. Not sure if this is even an issue.HighTechHippie (talk) 03:02, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Hyypiö?
It occurs to me that either this word is a false friend, or that it is a borrowing from English hippie. Vuo--or anyone else who knows Finnish--can you confirm which analysis is right? Godfrey Daniel 21:01, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Definitely not. Hyypiö is a kind of owl; the term is mainly seen in heraldics. --Vuo 17:27, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

NPOV?
Isn't this entire article guilty of POV? This is one of my first forays into discussing an article, so I could be wrong...but it seems to me that this article is only talking about Finnish, which doesn't give the reader (especially the reader of the ENGLISH Wikipedia) much information. Just my .02. PeteJayhawk 17:38, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it's a term specific to Baltic-Finnic languages. Since languages rarely just swallow loanwords whole, I would assume the same phenomenon would occur in any language. But, has it been described by linguists in any other language, and do they use the same term, these are the problems. --Vuo 21:09, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Globalize
While I respect Finnish, and I'm all for internationalization, this is the English Wikipedia, after all. Finnish is a really difficult language for many English speakers because its phonemes and the way it uses the alphabet are very different, and using it as the sole source of examples is not particularly illuminating for someone who does not speak the language. I'm not saying we can't use it, but this article seems to only give the (Southeast) Finnish point of view. Doesn't this phenomenon occur in other languages? Thor Rudebeck 14:45, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes. I'll add it when I next have a moment.  A good example in English (which I've also mentioned above) is 'hoosegow', from Spanish juzgado.  It's  not a very common word though.  garik 13:52, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Is this really even a concept in linguistics? I wonder.
This whole article seems dubious; I can't seem to find any references to "expressive loans" anywhere else. If you google the term "expressive loan", you will find duplicates of this article, no more. And there are things about the article that just don't seem right.

The external link at the end is to a press release for a doctoral dissertation on loan words from Russian in the Finnish language and expressiveness in Finnish dialects. This article appears to be built upon the story of the word tökötti, which has gone from a loan word with a specific meaning (tar distilled from birch bark) to an expressive word for "sticky substance" or "goo" in general, superficially no different from a number of similar words (mönjä, töhnä). Now expressive here means simply having the property of conveying some sort of feeling about the subject, just as the English words "goo" and "gunge" are expressive words for "sticky substance". No mention of "expressive loans" there, just loanwords that have become nativized so far as to be as good as indistinguishable from native expressive words.

"[A]n expressive loan is changed on purpose, the speaker taking the loanword knowing full well that the descriptive quality is different from the original sound and meaning." This does not seem right; most Finnish speakers have no idea what tökötti once meant, for instance.

And so forth. Can someone come up with justification for this article's existence or should it perhaps be deleted?--Rallette 20:19, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * As others have suspected above, this concept either does not exist in linguistics, or perhaps exists under some other name, and has been erroneously named or translated as the title.
 * Article deserves deletion. Mathglot (talk) 22:24, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Article deserves deletion. Mathglot (talk) 22:24, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Nominated for deletion
This article has been nominated for deletion. See Articles for deletion/Expressive loan.

Notifying top editors having 5% or more of edits or text, here: and on their talk pages. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 22 April 2018 (UTC)