Borrowed words in Chumburung

Abstract

In general, cross‐grammatical category borrowings in Chumburung are few. Most of the borrowings are nouns, with some verbs from Twi, though rarely from English. Phonological assimilations reveal the pressure of a strong CV syllable pattern which forces loans to split consonant clusters and avoid consonantal endings. A borrowed word that ends in a vowel has the vowel lengthened to preserve its identity across vowel‐junctures. Tone‐bearing loanwords tend to carry across the same tones. Remote borrowings via Twi show up mostly in the noun class system. Chumburung‐speakers have problems assigning a noun class to words which have a mismatch of class prefixes, especially Twi singular prefixes which look like plurals in Chumburung. The problem shows up again in the assignment of the correct concordial personal pronoun, and there may be a mismatch between pronoun and prefix. Animacy and humanness are relevant factors. Size may be relevant in the assignment of a prefix to a loanword that has none. Reinterpretation of the first syllable of a loanword as a prefix is, contrary to the well‐known Swahili case, quite rare. There are also mismatches caused by Twi singular/plural suffixes which are not recognised as such by Chumburung‐speakers. This may indicate that such borrowings took place before their present widespread knowledge of Twi as a second language.