Re: Nativized loanwords vs. code switching?

John Atkinson wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

[...]

What would be the differences in the source languages that produced
different forms?

I've no idea. Ï was hoping someone (Paul or Radovan?) would make a
suggestion, similar to what me and another did in the case of English.

The Cz names of the goddess and continent were acquired
centuries ago as Cz "Evropa".

The "v" was probably a result of an early decision. That is
the way it was pronounced and so it was spelled that way
in Czech even though the Czechs spelled it with a "u" in
Latin texts.

My guess is that "o" doesn't have the length marked since
the length marks were not used when the word was borrowed.
The lengths were not consistently marked as late as 16th
century. By the time, the various ways of representing long
vowels (or not representing them at all) were standardized
as acute accents, Evropa was already fully nativized word
and pronounced staccato by large numbers of hoi polloi who
had little knowledge of Greek.

There are some rules how the words from various languages
are to be spelled depending on whether they are foreign,
borrowed, or fully nativized.

When one looks at the lists of antique words in the Cz orthography
manual, one can see the length loosely corresponding to
what it was in the original Greek.
Dionýsos
Diogenes
Dórové (Cz plural)

pjk

P.S. It may surprise some that in Czech both Zeus and Dia
forms (Cz. case markers) are used. The Cz nominative is
"Zeus", gen."Diův", dat.&loc."Diovi", acc."Dia", instr."Diem".

"Zeus" is strictly reserved for nominative singular.
I don't think I ever used plurals in anger. :-) I suppose they
would be all the usual declensions of "Dia" form.


The reason the word for Europe has a long vowel is pretty obvious -- it does
so in other European language that mark phonemic length -- Ancient Greek
Eurōpē (Ευρώπη), Baltic languages (Lithuanian Europa, but Lith <o> is always
long, so, unlike other vowels, takes no diacritic), and Finno-Ugric
languages (Hungarian Európa, Finnish Eurooppa, Estonian Euroopa) -- and
German and Latin, which don't mark length explicitly, have Europa, with
phonemic long o too (I'd assume Sk got it from one of these last two).

But what about the moon Europa? It was named by an Italian, and while vowel
length arguably isn't phonemic in Italian, it would be automatically
pronounced long in that language because it's stressed and followed by a
single consonant. So why is it short in Sk? And for that matter Finnish
(Europa)? What about German -- is the moon perhaps stressed on the first
syllable in German (so the second syllable becomes schwa, not long o)?

Just to confuse matters further, if you can believe Wikipedie: in Czech,
the goddess is Európa (not Evropa, as Paul says), the moon is Europa, and
the continent is Evropa -- *three* different words.

John.

.

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