Simple Words

1) In the case of simple (non-compound) lexical elements, the most common type of interference is the outright transfer of the phonemic sequence from one language to another. Examples of such loanwords are available from practically every language described.

Simple in this connection must be defined from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category of simple words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalyzed form. Many interjections belong in this class, e. g. Penna. German holiš mok (< holy smoke(s)!) as well as whole interjectional sentences of the type of American Italian azzoraiti ‘that’s all right’, vazzumara ‘what’s the matter? ’ There are also the nominalized interjections, like Acadian French faire la didouce à ‘tosay hello to’ (< how do you do) or le donquia ‘carefree person’ (< don’t care), and words of other classes: Amer. Italian siriollo ‘city hall’, sanemagogna ‘son of a gun’, Amer. Norwegian blakkvalnot ‘black walnut’, Amer. Portuguese о fodejulai(a) ‘Fourth of July’, Volga German saditsen ‘to sit down’ (< Russian saditsja), and so on and on. Italian pizza ‘large, hot, open cheese pie (with various salty fillings)’, which has been adopted in Amer. English and “reinforced” into pizza pie, has even been retransferred as an unanalyzed compound into Amer. Italian: la pizza-paia. [...]

2) The other major type of interference involves the extension of the use of indigenous word of the influenced language in conformity with a foreign model. If two languages have semantemes, or units of content, which are partly similar, the interference consists in the identification and adjustment of the semantemes to fuller congruence.

In Russian, for example, the semanteme represented by the expression ‘uroven’ comprises the concept of ‘level’, concrete and abstract. In Yakut, the semanteme represented by tahym was originally restricted to ‘water level’. Through the interference of Russian, tahym has been extended to represent all ‘levels’, whether of water or of development, skill, etc.

Often two existing semantemes, X and Y of one language are merged on the model of another language, where the combined content of X and Y is represented by a single sign, Z. In the process, the expression of either X or Y is utilized for the merged pair and the other is discarded. For example, in dialectal Yiddish, the semantemes ‘bridge’ and ‘floor’ have been merged on the model of Belorussjan most with brik (originally ‘bridge’) expressing the combined content, and the earlier word discarded.

Since lexical interference has been particularly well studied among genetically or culturally related languages, a great many cases could be discovered where the expressions in the two languages in contact were already similar before the units of content were brought into alignment. In Colorado Spanish, for example, ministro ‘cabinet official’ acquired the new meaning of ‘Protestant ecclesiastic’ on the model of English minister, extending the previous similarity of expression to the content as well. Polish-Russian bilinguals are reported to broaden the use Polish tylko tocover all meanings of the similar Russian tolko, even in such phrases as tylko wczoraj ‘ only yesterday’ (for dopiero wczoraj)on the model of Russian tolko vč erá. [...]

3) Finally, a mild type of lexical interference occurs when the expression of a sign is changed on the model of a cognate in a language in contact, without effect on the content. E. g. when Spanish Europa becomes Uropa in Tampa, Florida, or when vaká tsje ‘vacation’ becomes vekejš n in Amer. Yiddish.