What Do You Know About Loan Words In Languages?

Most of them(not all) are considered as “official” Local Dialects not Languages…
Romanian dialects for example:
Transylvanian, Moldavian, “Walachian” are just dialects not languages

Moldavian a "peasant’s dialect" became a language in Moldova for political reasons…

Not to seem wishy-washy, but my view is in between Romanian's and Gaetano's.

I agree with Romanian that most of the languages listed by Gaetano seem more like dialects. I generally conceive of 10 Romance languages: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Rhaetian, Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian.

Nonetheless, I agree with Gaetano that Romanian is not the least known Romance language. I think people generally know more about the "national" Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian) than about the "minority" Romance languages (Galician, Catalan, Occitan, Rhaetian, and Sardinian).

Yes Lazar! Non-veto I agree with you! (Romanian -The least known “national” Romance Language…)

No wonder people never heard of Occitan or Sardinian language for instance, when I get “compliments” about Romania’s “Russian language”!!!

Yeah, Americans seem to know a bit about Western Europe and that's about it. Sorry. :)

Romanian,

Do you know a good site where I could get info about the history of the Romanian language and its basic grammar or features ?

>>(un) shopping [SopiN] or [Sopin] = mall

This would seem to have come from "shopping centre", a term which is still used in many English-speaking countries, and which avoids confusion with the other major meaning of "mall":

"a place where the game of mall was played. Hence: A public walk; a level shaded walk". [1913 Webster]

This : http://www.economist.com/diversions/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1489147 is an interesting report about English loanwords into other languages.

An interesting article, altho I'm consistently surprised at attempts at linguistics-related subjects in respected magazines, TV news reports, newspapers, etc. which pass off as solid, serious descriptions of language but are little more than "folk-linguistics." Articles like this tend to overemphasize the role of loanwords in languages, as if by adding a certain number of loanwords then a language isn't itself anymore--when languages are really so much more than words.

"It is an utter mongrel itself, born of Latin, Greek, German, French and more, plus sundry ex-imperial spatterings"

Hmmm...not really. Linguistically speaking English is undoubtedly a West Germanic language, even tho thousands of words have indeed come from other sources. English was "born" as a West Germanic language which still remains so (once again, looking again at so much more than just words...syntax, phonetics/phonology, morphology). I have no ax to grind with emphasizing the "Germanicness" of English (some earlier posters on this topic in other posts were questioned on whether they were "ashamed" of the Latin/Romance influence in English...as a speaker and learner of two Romance languages that's not the case for me)...it's just that linguistically speaking English is overwhelmingly Germanic. At least the article does conclude that loanwords are exactly as they've been thruout human history, just loanwords, and don't lead to the death of languages.

Kirk,

I think "The Economist" - a good title anyway - has to sell paper every week and thus sometimes indulges a some degree of soft 'sensationalism'.

Greg! Some links for you…enjoy

“Do you know a good site where I could get info about the history of the Romanian language and its basic grammar or features?”

General
http://www.romaniatourism.com/album.html

Romanian Poetry in Five Languages with Audio.
http://www.romanianvoice.com/index.html

Language
http://www.romania.org/romania/history1.html
http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/romanian.html

Yeah, I would strongly agree with Kirk that the article significantly overemphasized the importance of loaning in English, which while it has significantly affected English vocabulary at the dictionary level, it's been far less pronounced when it comes to actual word usage rates, as a whole, and it has had even less effect on the underlying grammar and syntax of English, which it, as a whole, has barely touched, borrowing from Old Norse being a notable exception. Most of the outside influence on English by languages other than Old Norse has been rather superficial, all things considered, even though it may seem massive at first glace. But anyways, though, I've argued plenty about this already on this forum in previous threads, and I don't think we need to go over the same thing yet again.

Lazar: >>I agree with Romanian that most of the languages listed by Gaetano seem more like dialects. I generally conceive of 10 Romance languages: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Rhaetian, Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian.<<

I basically agree too, except that I would add Furlanian to the list (although some would consider it to be a dialect of Rhaetian). On the other hand, seen from a strict linguistic viewpoint, some dialects in Northern Italy (like Genoese or Piedmontese, judging from occasional samples I encountered at this forum) seem so remote from Standard Italian that they can be taken as separate languages - they are much more distant from Italian than Galician is from Portuguese, for example. Same for Gascon in comparison with Languedocien, if the latter is taken as "Standard Occitan".

>>This : http://www.economist.com/diversions/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1489147 is an interesting report about English loanwords into other languages.<<

On the whole, I think taking English loanwords is for most languages a temporary fad that will reach its climactic point and then will slowly decrease with time. Taking most languages in Eastern Europe, for example, they don't nearly have "enough" English loanwords to affect the balance of these and "domestic" words (of course most loanwords become "household items" sooner or later). The only exception I know is Serbian, which has absorbed many French, German, and a number of English loanwords, but these are mostly used in "learned" talk or journalese, and the language itself is still recognizably Slavic. Of course the case is different for German and some East Asian languages, so let's see what becomes of these in, say, two or three generations. :)

I think about 80 of the most commonly used languages in English are native words, coming from Old English. "The" is the most common.

I meant to say "Words" not "languages."

And that's 80 of the 100 most common words.