this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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The dispersal of the Indo-European language family from the third millennium BCE is thought to have dramatically altered Europe’s linguistic landscape. Many of the preexisting languages are assumed to have been lost, as Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Armenian, dominate in much of Western Eurasia from historical times. To elucidate the linguistic encounters resulting from the Indo-Europeanization process, this volume evaluates the lexical evidence for prehistoric language contact in multiple Indo-European subgroups, at the same time taking a critical stance to approaches that have been applied to this problem in the past.

Part I: Introduction

Guus Kroonen: A methodological introduction to sub-Indo-European Europe

Part II: Northeastern and Eastern Europe

Anthony Jakob: Three pre-Balto-Slavic bird names, or: A more austere take on Oštir

Ranko Matasović: Proto-Slavic forest tree names: Substratum or Proto-Indo-European origin?

Part III: Western and Central Europe

Paulus S. van Sluis: Substrate alternations in Celtic

Anders Richardt Jørgensen: A bird name suffix *-anno- in Celtic and Gallo-Romance

David Stifter: Prehistoric layers of loanwords in Old Irish

Part IV: The Mediterranean

Andrew Wigman: A European substrate velar “suffix”

Cid Swanenvleugel: Prefixes in the Sardinian substrate

Lotte Meester: Substrate stratification: An argument against the unity of Pre-Greek

Guus Kroonen: For the nth time: The Pre-Greek νϑ-suffix revisited

Part V: Anatolia & the Caucasus

Rasmus Thorsø: Alternation of diphthong and monophthong in Armenian words of substrate origin

Zsolt Simon: Indo-European substrates: The problem of the Anatolian evidence

Peter Schrijver: East Caucasian perspectives on the origin of the word ‘camel’ and some notes on European substrate lexemes

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

I picked English for the examples due to the amount of those borrowings, but the general process happens in other languages, in different situations - even without the whole class association between Anglo-Norman and English speakers.

Other two examples that I can mention of the same process are in Portuguese:

1. Basque ⟨txakur⟩ pup, cub → Portuguese ⟨cachorro⟩ puppy or dog (dialect-dependent meaning). Initially the borrowing displaces the native word ⟨cadelo⟩ puppy, from Lat. ⟨catellus⟩; then in some dialects it gets widened to refer to any dog, thus also displacing ⟨cão⟩ dog, from Lat. canis - with ⟨cão⟩ becoming a formal word. The process is specially obvious because the feminine ⟨cadela⟩ is still widely used.

2. English ⟨bacon⟩ is clearly replacing the native ⟨toicinho⟩~⟨toucinho⟩ in Portuguese, even if both refer to practically the same pork cut containing both meat and fat, typically cured and often smoked.

Romanian also has a rather relevant example: it did not inherit Latin ⟨columba⟩, and yet it borrowed ⟨hulub⟩ "pigeon" from some Slavic language; potentially Ukrainian.

I still would find it odd that the word would be loaned either in the early period that you propose (no apparent practical need for such a word to be loaned, esp. considering the spread of the species, it simply wouldn’t be needed for the Slavs).

If the borrowing happened as early as 500~600, the motivation could be contact with that species of bird. It's worth noting that Common Slavic expanded further into the region than the modern range of the Slavic languages hints - it goes as West as a good chunk of what's today Austria.

And, if the borrowing happened in later times, like 900 or so, it could be motivated by religious significance.