Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 102

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Pétur Knútsson
Bloomfield visualizes the loan as passing through certain stages in
its entry into a language: it starts as a foreign-sounding word, and
undergoes a process of phonetic adaption until it conforms with native
phonology. At this point it has achieved “the status of a loan-form”
(2). However Bloomfield appears to regard this status as not altogether
a stable one, since the established loan-form is still prone to further
adaption (1935:450):
(2) Both during the progress towards the status of a loan-form,
and after this status has been reached, the structure is likely to
be unintelligible. The languages and, within a language, the
groups of speakers that are familiar with foreign and semi-
foreign forms, will tolerate this state of affairs; in other cases,
a further adaption, in the sense of popular etymology, may
render the form structurally or lexically more intelligible.
Amongst other things, Bloomfield’s concept of “unintelligible struc-
ture” must surely give us pause for thought here. Over half a century
has passed since Bloomfield wrote, and it is arguably more problem-
atic now than it was then to draw clear lines between “structure” and
“meaning”. If we succumb to post-stmcturalist despair in the face of the
non-linguistic nature of the hors-texte, then the concept of “unintelli-
gible structure” in a word which is otherwise linguistically serviceable
is meaningless. In fact this, surely, would also hold for the structuralist
Bloomfield. On the other hand, if we opt to accept a traceable link be-
tween sign and referent, we find that a loanword which has “achieved
native phonology” has only to be associated with its referent — and
presumably loanwords do not enter a language without referents — for
the hearer to accept it naturally.
2. Bloomfield’s formulation in practice
2.0 Monosyllabic constraint on morphemes
One way to make sense of Bloomfield’s formulation is to assume a
receptor language composed solely of monosyllabic morphemes which
normal speakers, if they ever think about it, can pick out as discrete