LING 2049 - Languages in C21: Cultural Contact & New Words

North Terrace Campus - Semester 1 - 2015

This multifaceted course will introduce students to a range of mechanisms through which new words and meanings are concocted in the modern world. It will explore borrowing ('stealing', or more accurately 'copying'), word-formation, neologization, calquing (loan translation), phono-semantic matching, lexical engineering, semantic shifting of pre-existent words, descriptiveness, purism and etymythology (popular etymology). It will focus on phenomena of lexical expansion and semantic enrichment that are based on contact between cultures and languages. The course will combine sociolinguistic insight with philological expertise, thus being polychronic, i.e. simultaneously diachronic and synchronic. We shall integrate innovative etymological, morphological, ecological and cultural analyses of words in various languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Israeli (a.k.a. Modern Hebrew), Japanese, Icelandic, Turkish, Estonian, Yiddish, Australian Aboriginal languages, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, creoles, minority and endangered languages.

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