47.5. The Need-Filling Motive

The most obvious other motive for borrowing is to fill a gap in the borrowing idiolect. [...]

...new experiences, new objects and practices, bring new words into a language. […] Tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocoa, chocolate, tomato have spread all over the world in recent times, along with the objects to which the words refer. Typhoons and monsoons have not spread, but direct or indirect experience with them has. […]

Immigrants to the United States in the last seventy-five years have drawn heavily on English for new words, partly on the prestige basis and partly for need-filling purposes: the two motives must often be mingled, and we cannot always say which was more important in a given instance. In exchange, however, American English has acquired only a sparse scattering of need-filling loans from the various languages of the immigrants: delicatessen, hamburger […] from immigrant German, chile concarne, tortilla from Mexican Spanish, spaghetti from Italian — to stick to the sphere of humble foodstuffs. [...]

If a local dialect gains ascendancy for political and economic reasons, then one expects extensive borrowing from that dialect for prestige reasons, but forms borrowed into the ascendant dialect have to be explained — and usually, if the records are not too scanty, explanation on the need-filling basis is possible.

Kinds of loans

48.1. The examples of borrowing given in § 47 involve in most cases the development of an idiom — be it word or phrase — in one language or dialect on the basis of one already current in another. There are several different ways in which this can come about, and there are also known or suspected cases of borrowing of other than lexical items. In this section we shall sort these out, and also specify the kinds of phylogenetic change that can be brought about, directly or indirectly, by the different kinds of borrowing.

Whenever the need-filling motive plays a part, the borrower is being confronted with some new object or practice for which he needs words. Under these conditions [...] three rather distinct things may happen, giving rise respectively to loanwords, loanshifts, and loanblends.

48.2. Loanwords

The borrower may adopt the donor's word along with the object or practice; the new form in the borrower's speech is then a loanword.

The acquisition of a loanword constitutes in itself a lexical change, and probably we should say that it constitutes or entails a semantic change. A shape change is sometimes involved. [...] English acquisition of wiener ['wijnər] involved no such change, since the language already had a morpheme represented by the shape [wijn] and several morphemes represented by suffixed l-ər]. Our acquisition of allegro [ə'legrow], on the other hand, entailed a shape change of the type just described.

Other kinds of phylogenetic change are not directly implied by a single new importation, but they may come about as the result of a whole wave of loanwords from some single source, along the following lines: