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In:Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux
[Contact Language Library 59] 2021
► pp. 269–288

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Detecting loan words computationally

 | Open University of the Netherlands
 | National Museum of Natural History, Paris
 | L-Università ta’ Malta
 | University of Groningen | University of Freiburg
Published online: 12 October 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.59.11zha
Abstract
A loanword is a word that is borrowed from one language and adopted into another; examples are the English words toboggan, skunk, and hickory, all of which were borrowed from Algonquian languages. Among languages that are not (closely) related, loan words are recognizable because they are semantically related and are more similar in pronunciation than one would expect by coincidence. This chapter applies techniques for measuring pronunciation similarity, focusing on edit-distance measures and a sound-class based method. The novel issue in loan-word detection is the circumstance that loan words are normally modified to fit the phonology of the borrowing language, meaning that sensitivity in measuring pronunciation similarity may be deprecated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mufwene’s perspective
  • 3.Previous work
  • 4.Data
    • Example data
  • 5.Measuring pronunciation similarity
  • 6.General setup
  • 7.Evaluation and results
    • Examples of detected loans
  • 8.Discussion and prospects
    • Conclusions and a speculation
    • Future work
    • Prospects
  • Supplementary data
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (31)
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