Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek

Download or read book Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek written by Stavroula Varella and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cypriot is unique among the Modern Greek dialects in possessing such a variegated vocabulary - testimony, indeed, to the chequered history of the island. This book presents a thorough investigation of the foreign component of the Cypriot lexis. It traces, firstly, the relevant socio-cultural factors that gave rise to it. It presents, secondly, a detailed account of how words from sources as diverse as Romance, Arabic, Turkish and English became fully nativised and indistinguishable from the native stock. A fresh case study of language contact and lexical borrowing, it addresses such issues as the extent of lexical borrowing, the types of vocabulary borrowed, the relationship between the social integration and the structural adaptation of loans, and the degree and predictability of the phonological, morphological and even semantic modification affecting foreign words.