The historical investigation is concerned with illustrating the borrowing of Romance loans into Dutch, English, and German. We further investigate the resulting stress patterns and the changes borrowed words may have introduced in the pronunciation systems of the individual languages.
While studies on loanwords exist, there is no comprehensive study which provides an overview of borrowings across these three languages.
The Historical Linguistics strand has two main objectives:
- Timeline of borrowings
The first objective of the historical investigation is to provide a comprehensive timeline of the borrowing of Romance loans into Dutch, English and German from the 14th century onwards using manuscripts (mostly verse) focusing on stress changes due to the differing stress systems of Romance and West Germanic languages.
- Phonological change
The second objective is to look closer at the phonological changes that Romance loanwords induced in the host languages and chart these alongside different patterns and types of borrowings.
For example, while early German and Dutch allowed long vowels in stressed final syllables, this was prohibited by English phonology. As a result, Romance words such as “fátal” are stressed initially in English while in Dutch and German adopted the final stressed syllable with a long vowel (e.g. “fatál” (G), “fatáal” (D)).
How can we trace stress and other phonological changes through centuries?
Although etymological dictionaries provide a good indication of when the loans come into a language, they almost never state how these words were stressed. Fortunately, early rhyming dictionaries (e.g. Levins 1570) provide some indication of where stress fell. Work, such as Dobson's (1957) encyclopaedic account of English pronunciation between 1500 and 1700, is also invaluable.
Another excellent source of determining stress and other phonological phenomena is verse which is the main source for our investigations. There is considerable literature where stress is indicated by transcribers, but we also investigate stress according to the rhythmic pattern of the verses.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The historical strand of the project, is also working with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Our findings will be used to add to the information currently available in the OED. The OED does have information on cross-linguistic correspondences but it is not consistent and focuses mostly on inherited words. There are many instances where the information we are planning to gather can only be obtained by consulting several different historical sources.
