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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

Detecting loan words computationally

| Open University, Netherlands
| National Museum of Natural History, Paris
| L-Università ta’ Malta
| University of Groningen & University of Freiburg
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.
Keywords: loan words, automatic detection, edit distance, sound class alignment, language contact
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
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.59.11zha
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List, Johann-Mattis, Robert Forkel, Simon J. Greenhill, Christoph Rzymski, Johannes Englisch & Russell D. Gray
2022. Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features. Scientific Data 9:1 DOI logo
List, Johann-Mattis & Robert Forkel
2021. Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo

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