Language Contact and Globalisation: The camouflaged influence of English on the world’s languages—with special attention to Israeli (sic) and Mandarin

This paper discusses the camouflaged influence of Modern English (mainly American) on Israeli (a.k.a. ‘Modern Hebrew’) and Mandarin Chinese (especially Modern Standard Chinese) within the broader context of linguistic and cultural globalisation. Among the questions it attempts to answer are the following: What is the extent of phono-semantic matching (PSM) of Anglicisms in Israeli and Mandarin? What are the terminological and lexicopoietic types of PSM? What is the sociolinguistics of word-formation and neologisation in those languages?* A wise man hears one word and understands two. (Yiddish proverb, cf. Bernstein 1908, p. 243) Both in 1975 and 1992 I sought to conjecture as to the polyglot future in the face of the global detergence by an Anglo-American esperanto, itself splitting into more local though cognate forms. Chinese remains a formidable but inwardly focused rival. Culturally and demographically, Spanish is on the march. ‘Smaller’ and isolated languages, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa and throughout Amazonia, are perishing, as is the ecology inwoven in their unique image of life. Thus one is tempted to suppose that the triumphalism of science, of technocracy, of international finance and the mass-market media will assure the long-term hegemony of Anglo-American (computer languages reflect and enforce this prepotence). Reality, however, is always subtler and more ironic than our suppositions. It may well be that the Tower of Babel will continue to cast its creative shadow. (Steiner 1998: viii) English is already the world’s universal language. The number of spoken languages (about 6,000) is diminishing every year, whereas English is used as a second language in more and more countries. It seems inevitable that—with CNN and the ab initio English-dominated Internet (and despite the imminent development of advanced technological methods of translation)—the world will become by and large bilingual, with people mastering both English and their native/national language (if different). I believe that, at some further point in time, English will achieve complete dominance and the native/national lan* The author would like to thank Churchill College, Cambridge; the British Academy and the National University of Singapore. ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/03/020287-21  2003 Centre of International Studies DOI: 10.1080/0955757032000096174 288 Ghil‘ad Zuckermann guage will become obsolete—with the decline of national boundaries and the emergence of non-geographical economic affiliations; someone working for Walmart in Jamaica will feel closer to a Walmart worker in Slovenia than to a Jamaican artist, and so forth. This might also occur because of the lay belief (currently refuted by most linguists) that speaking two languages as a mother tongue degrades the level of each one of them. Consider, for example, Chinese Singaporeans’ tendency to apologise for their ‘low level’ in both English and Chinese. The interactions between lexis (vocabulary) and politics are, unfortunately, often neglected, especially by modern theoretical linguistics. Stress, for example, which seems to be solely a linguistic feature, can, in fact, tell us a lot about international affairs. Consider Israeli (a.k.a. ‘Modern Hebrew’) yerı́kho ‘Jericho’, synchronically speaking a derogatory form of , usually yerikhó, the oldest town known in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine). Israel’s late former Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, pronounced as yerı́kho once it became clear that the area was going to be ceded to the Palestinians, as though attempting to create revulsion for this land by hinting that ‘it is not biblical [jər̂ı̄ ō] but rather alien yerı́kho’. Possibly, the stress was also induced by Arabic [ʔar ri: a:] ‘Jericho’. An example working in the contrary direction, which might sustain the argument that penultimate stress can reflect alienation or foreignness, is Israel’s former Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s pronunciation of the Israeli acronym ʔ.ʃ.p. ‘PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation)’. In what I perceive as an attempt to ‘humanise’ the PLO at a time when it was widely seen in Israel as a terrorist movement, Peres pronounced as asháf, unlike the common pronunciation áshaf. As you can see, I use the new coinage Israeli rather than Modern Hebrew. The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied linguists since the language emerged in Eretz Yisrael at the beginning of the 20th century. The still prevalent, traditional view suggests that Israeli is Semitic: (Biblical/Mishnaic) Hebrew revived (cf. Rosén 1956 and Rabin 1974). The revisionist position defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997), i.e. Yiddish, the ‘revivalists” mother tongue, is the substratum whilst Hebrew is only a superstratum. My own mosaic (rather than Mosaic) hypothesis is that Israeli is simultaneously both Semitic and Indo-European; both Hebrew and Yiddish act as its primary contributors (rather than substrata). Therefore, the term Israeli is far more appropriate than Israeli Hebrew, let alone Modern Hebrew or Hebrew (tout court). Coming back to globalisation, and bearing in mind that futurism is considered unacademic, this paper analyses the contemporary influence of English, mostly American, on national languages. The transparent impact of English has been studied extensively, especially in the case of lexical borrowing, e.g. phonetic adaptations of Anglicisms in Japanese. But the camouflaged one has not been researched—perhaps with the exception of the disguised impact of calquing. Examples of calques introducing a new sememe, or ‘semantic loans’, 1 cf. political use of euphemisms, e.g. Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of the neutral peimót, lit. ‘beatings (of the heart)’, to refer to the stages in the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. The term peimót might lessen the opposition of right-wing Israelis to such ‘withdrawal’ (Israeli nesigá). Language Contact and Globalisation 289 are Israeli kokháv, Russian zvezdá, Polish gwiazda and Finnish tähti, all words basically meaning ‘star’, but which acquired the sememe ‘(pop/film)star’ owing to English star. Similarly, Israeli atár ‘site’ and Italian sito ‘id.’ acquired the sememe ‘website’ owing to English site. Italian salvare ‘save’ (as in Jesus saves, not as in Jesus saves, Moses invests) acquired the sememe ‘save (a file/document)’ owing to English save (mentioned by Orioles 1994, p. 671). Modern Standard Chinese (henceforth, MSC) bı̄ng, lit. ‘ice’, currently also refers to the drug Ice. Sometimes, calquing links two English homonyms even when they are etymologically unrelated. Consider Yiddish glaykh ‘similar to, like’, which acquired in American Yiddish the form gláykhn, ‘to like’ owing to the homonymity between English like (adj.) ‘having the same characteristics as, similar to’ and the etymologically distinct English like (verb) ‘be fond of, derive pleasure from’. An example of a calque introducing a new compound (cf. ‘loan-translation’) is Modern Standard Chinese (MSC) lánqiú ‘basketball’, consisting of lán ‘basket’ and qiú ‘ball’, thus imitating English basketball. Interestingly, while tennis was nativised in MSC as wǎngqiú, lit. ‘net-ball’, netball could only enter MSC as yı̄ngshı̀lánqiú, lit. ‘English-style basketball’, constituting a secondary derivative of the calque MSC lánqiú ‘basketball’—cf. (Singapore) Mandarin nǚzı̌lánqiú ‘netball’, lit. ‘ladies’ basketball’. An example of an ‘etymological calque’—in which the calquer pays attention to the sense of the Anglicism rather than to its referent—is MSC règǒu ‘hotdog’ ( rè ‘hot’ gǒu ‘dog’). Similarly, cocktail entered MSC as jı̄wěijiǔ, lit. ‘chicken tail alcohol’. However, most Chinese calques are not merely etymological. But, as previously stated, normal forms of calquing have already been explored. This paper, on the other hand, focuses on an important mechanism of camouflaged borrowing which has not yet received scholarly attention: phonosemantic matching (PSM). What is PSM? Let me begin with an example. Medieval Hebrew [dib būb] ‘speech’—cf. Biblical Hebrew [do beb śip̄ tējəʃe nı̄m] ‘causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak’ in Song of Solomon 7 10—came to refer in Israeli (as dibúv, often pronounced divúv) to ‘inducing (someone) to speak’, and then to ‘dubbing’—owing to English 2 English like (adj.) ‘having the same characteristics as’ derives from Early Modern English lı̄ch, lı̄k, a shortened form of Old English elı́c, cf. Old High German gilı̂h, Middle High German gelı̂ch, Modern German gleich. However, English like (verb) ‘be fond of’ derives from Old English lı́cian, cf. Old High German lı̂hhên, lı̂chên, which goes back to Old Teutonic *lı̄kæ–jan, *lı̄kōjan, from *lı̄ko‘body’ (cf. Oxford English Dictionary). 3 cf. chiens chauds, spotted in vendors’ signs in Canada in 1964 (Raphael Loewe pc). 4 cf. the semanticised phonetic matching MSC mǎtı̄nı̌, lit. ‘horse kick you’, referring to Intl martini — perhaps due to the effects of consuming such a potent alcoholic beverage. Ramsey (1989, p. 60) attributes this multisourced neologism to the prominent 20th-century Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao (Yuánrèn ZHÀO). However, this coinage did not gain much currency and the native Chinese-speakers whom I have interviewed use the plain phonetic adaptation MSC mǎtı́nı́, lit. ‘horse point out Buddhist nun’. 290 Ghil‘ad Zuckermann dubbing. This neologism is recent—while Even-Shoshan (1970, p. 387b) does not mention it, it appears in Even-Shoshan (1997, p. 277c). The following figure illustrates the process: