A Note on BORROWING

Julius Obote, Kampala, Uganda.

Borrowing. What a stupid word. In normal life, you borrow a thing from another person. That person gives the thing to you and so no longer has it anymore. Later you give it back, Sometimes, of course, you don’t give it back, in which case you have reneged on the promise you implicitly made in borrowing it. So, to borrow is to transfer possession of an item from someone else to oneself with the promise of return at a later date.

Compare the linguistic use of the term borrowing with its normal meaning, and you’ll find that the two have little in common. What goes on when one language “borrows” a word from another might better be called copying. The “borrowing” language identifies a word in another language and makes a copy of it for its own use. There is a problem with the term copying, however: it is insufficiently scientific. Anglic words just don’t have the same scientific ring to them as Latinate ones. Hence, instead of copy we should use replicate, which means the same thing but is longer and seems more technical. Or, if we want a flashy, catchy name, we could ask the Xerox corporation if we could talk about Xeroxing words. The related but non-copyrighted term photocopying seems less suitable, as do reproduce, which has a specialized meaning outside of linguistics, and reduplicate, which has another meaning in linguistics. But whatever word we decide upon, borrowing should be eliminated from our list of technical terms.

	A Reinterpretation of Some Aspects of the Indo-European Expansion—William C. Spruiell
	Dictionary of Essential Linguistics Vocabulary by Crystal Gayle (Review)—Jean-Pierre LeBeau
	Babel Vol I, No 1 Contents