The adaptation of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French

This paper examines several factors affecting loanword adaptation, using a data set of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French. After exploring the position of loanwords in the lexicon and the nature of the two contact situations, the author considers relevant social, morphological, and phonological factors. First is the difference in the loanwords’ semantic domains and their motivations for being borrowed. Next, the author introduces the morphophonological factors considered—stress, desinence class, and gender assignment—and discusses their behavior in the core vocabulary and previous relevant studies. Subsequently, the author examines the loanword data in detail, comparing and contrasting the Turkish- and French-origin loanwords. The author concludes that one must consider different modules of the language—the phonology and the morphology—and that only by contrasting borrowings from different languages into the same language can one determine the relative effect of internal and external factors on the outcome of contact.