Journey of words: Manuscript to Mind

The vocabulary of any language comes from different sources as words are frequently borrowed, especially in situations of language contact. English, for example, shares many words with French as a large number of Romance borrowings entered the English language after the Norman Conquest in 1066. However, other languages, such as Dutch and German, have also borrowed substantial numbers of Romance words. When a word is borrowed, its pronunciation is adapted to fit the phonological system of the new language (e.g. 'beef' from Old French 'boef'). This results in instances where the same word is borrowed into different languages but is pronounced differently. In this project, we are investigating the stress patterns of Romance loans in Dutch, English, and German. Some of these loans are pronounced in the same way in all three languages (e.g. 'vendétta') while others show certain differences particularly in vowel quality and stress (e.g. 'crócodile' (E), 'krokod'il' (D), 'Krokod'il' (G)). The project consists of two distinct strands: (i) a historical theoretical study in order to create both a diachronic timeline of borrowings and a synchronic description of patterns of phonological adaptation into the three host languages (ii) a psycholinguistic investigation concerned with the processing of items which differ in their stress patterns across the languages in Dutch and German second-language (L2) learners of English. The historical investigation is concerned with charting the borrowing of Romance loans into Dutch, English, and German and investigating the resulting stress patterns as well as the changes borrowed items 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 languages. We will be working with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on this part of the project and 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 sources. In the psycholinguistic part of the project, which is, at least in part, based on the historical findings, we are concerned with investigating the effects of divergent pronunciation patterns (e.g. stress and vowel changes) on the language processing of learners of English who have Dutch or German as a native language. Our aim is to ascertain whether words which are pronounced differently in English compared to a learner's native language require greater effort in processing than those where the pronunciation patterns are largely similar. If this is the case, particular focus on these forms in teaching and providing systematic rules (where they exist) to explain the differences may facilitate learning and processing. The overall results obtained from this project will be used to create a digital resource (website/app) which explains the correspondences and differences in pronunciation (going beyond stress patterns of Romance loans) between Dutch, English and German to assist English language learners. When this information is available, it is often presented in highly specialist terms and thus is not intelligible to teachers and learners without historical linguistic knowledge. As all three languages are West Germanic and show a large degree of overlap, there are a number of rule-based historical changes which explain variation that may, at first glance, seem idiosyncratic. If these rules can be simplified and explained in such a way that they can be used in language learning and teaching, this may facilitate a more rapid progression and allow students to apply these rules not just to words they have already learned but also to new material they encounter.