KINSHIP LOANWORDS IN ENGLISH,CROATIAN AND BOSNIAN

KINSHIP LOANWORDS IN ENGLISH,CROATIAN AND BOSNIAN

Dupanović, Edin

This paper presents three small corpora of kinship terms borrowed into three languages: English, Croatian and Bosnian. In all three cases, kinship terms were borrowed from the languages of the respective conquerors. The English language borrowed kinship terms almost exclusively from French after the Norman Conquest; Croatian loanwords in this semantic field came mostly from Italian, German and Hungarian; while most of the borrowed kinship terms in Bosnian came from the Turkish language. On the one hand, words are, in most cases, borrowed from other cultures along with new commodities, ideas or concepts; but on the other hand, the existence of kinship is universal to the humankind. There are simply no human societies without some form of kinship. Out of this apparent paradox a question arises – why borrow words for the already existing concepts. By using methods of anthropological linguistics and examples from the kinship corpora, this paper argues that language borrowing is a far more complex phenomenon than it appears at first glance. Language borrowing is not just about language itself, but about both culture and language as its vehicle. This paper reveals some of the intricacies in connections between kinship systems and accompanying terms, having to do with their stability, change, and other factors. Thus, it improves our understanding of interdependences between the language change processes and culture in its anthropological sense. Keywords: kinship terminology, loanwords, English, Croatian, Bosnian

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3411