Adaptation

Once a borrowed word has been thoroughly “naturalized”, its subsequent history is like that of any form already in the language. French state, navy, danger came into ME with stressed [á ^v], also found at the time in such inherited words as [ná ^vmə ] ‘name’, [š á ^vkə ] ‘shake’, [bá ^vð ə ] ‘bathe’; we now have [é j] in all these words. [...]

...during the period of importation, the shape of an incoming word is subject to more haphazard variation. Dif­ferent borrowers will imitate a foreign word in slightly different ways. Monolinguals to whom the word is passed on will alter its shape even more. This modification of the shape of the incoming word is called adaptation: usually it leads to a shape more in keeping with the inherited pronunciation habits of the borrowers.

The buffeting-about of the incoming word often results, in the end, in a single surviving and fixed shape, but sometimes two or more shapes become more or less equally naturalized and survive, side by side, in competition. Thus garage has three current pronunciations: [gə rá ^vž ], [gə rá ^vj], and [gæ rij], the last primarily British. In the future, one of these may spread at the expense of the other two until finally only one survives.

If a language or dialect takes only scattered loans from a single donor, one is not apt to find any great consist­ency in the adaptation. The few English words from Chi­nese, such as chop suey, chow mein, typhoon, entered Eng­lish at various periods and from different Chinese dialects, and show no regularity of correspondence with the shapes of the Chinese models.

On the other hand, if many loanwords come from a single source over a relatively short period, there may develop a fashion of adaptation, which then makes for greater consistency in the treatment of further loans from the same source. The Normans, later the North French, had such a fashion for the importation of learned loans from book or clerical Latin. English borrowed many of the words which had come into French from Latin in this way, and in time developed its own fashion of adaptation for words taken directly from Latin. Procrastination came into English directly from Latin; it does not occur in older French, yet has just the shape it would have had if it had been borrowed via French. Indeed, we are now able to make up new English words from Latin (or Latinized Greek) raw materials, even when Latin or Greek did not have the word, and the shapes taken by the coinages depend ultimately on the fashions of adaptation just mentioned: eventual, immoral, fragmentary, telegraph, telephone.