14
votes
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
The verb "to grok", having been coined by Robert Heinlein for his Novel Stranger in a Strange Land has gained significant popularity and is used with the same meaning as in the original language.
I ...
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11
votes
Accepted
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
Danish has borrowed the word Volapük (spelt volapyk in Danish) from the conlang of the same name, however unlike in the source where it means "world language", in Danish is has come to have the ...
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10
votes
How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
Should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form?
In natural languages, borrowed words are almost always "destlang-ized" to some degree, but it won't necessarily always to the same ...
- 3,391
8
votes
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
The most common one I can think of is yahoo, which was the name for brutish humans in the language of the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The words Lilliputian and Brobdignagian ...
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6
votes
Accepted
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
If you want to be strict, coerce them into your phonological rules.
Macy's: that would fit as macys; if /y/ is not a vowel, then macis
Outback: start with a consonant, so use one that is not too ...
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5
votes
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
At the risk of sounding too obvious, the word Esperanto has been borrowed into many natural languages, with the meaning of "universal neutral way of communication". See e.g. phrases like "mathematics ...
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4
votes
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct?
If you believe in optimality theory (OT), this comes down to the constraints on valid words in the language. ...
- 3,356
4
votes
How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
There are a few words in Esperanto that are arguably borrowed from Ido; examples include olda "maljuna, malnova" and kurta "mallonga". With respect to the subquestions: These words didn't need any ...
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4
votes
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
The word Qapla' ("success") is listed as an English word on Wiktionary, which in essence means that it is regarded as an English loanword from Klingon. It has sparked some debate, but it has survived ...
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3
votes
How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
One thing you may want to consider is how the sourcelang word reached the destlang. If the word was spread through literature to the destlang speakers, then it may be spelled the same as it is in the ...
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3
votes
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
You can look at how it is done in real languages. What typically happens is that the word is phonologically morphed to match the phonotactics of the adopting language.
Japanese provides some obvious ...
- 731
2
votes
How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
An addition to Sparksbet's excellent answer I'd add one tool to your armamentarium:
DENATURALISATION of BORROWINGS
Sometimes foreign words borrowed a long time ago from L1 become naturalised in L2 ...
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