Oral borrowings:
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Written borrowings:
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Inch, meel, street (L.)
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Sombrero (Mex.)
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Husband, gate, take, die, fellow (Scand.)
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Sari, riksha (Ind.)
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Table, face, figure, chair, sport (Fr.)
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Formula,phenomena (Gr.)
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Typological categorization within lexical fields and conceptual domains.
The basic idea underlying cross-linguistic research on categorization within lexical fields and conceptual domains (coherent segments of experience and knowledge about them) is that human experience is not delivered in nicely pre-packed units, categories and types, but has to be chunked, organized and categorized by human beings themselves. Categories correspond to experiences that are perceived to have features in common. When experiences are systematically encoded by one and the same linguistic label (e.g., by the same word) they are, most probably, perceived as being fairly similar to each other; that is they are taken to represent one and the same class, or to correspond to one and same concept or lexical meaning.
A simple example of what can be meant by different ways of categorizing, or carving up a conceptual domain across languages is given in Table 1, which shows how the inventories of body-part terms in six languages differ in the extent to which they distinguish between hand vs. arm, foot vs. leg, and finger vs. toe by conventionalised, lexicalised expressions (“labels”).
Table 1: Hand vs. arm, foot vs. leg, finger vs. toe in English, Russian, Uzbek, Italian, Rumanian, Estonian and Japanese.
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