This confirms the importance that historical linguists have long attached to including regular sound changes into attempts to reconstruct protolanguages, identify borrowings, and infer the genealogical history of a set of related languages, including their probable dates of origin and subsequent divergences.
Reynolds identifies specific borrowings or allusions in a wide range of nineteenth-century music.
It can help us to improve the quality of our datasets by identifying possible hidden borrowings and erroneous cognate assignments.
In a recent survey of 1,504 common words in English, for example, 616 (41%) were judged to be loanwords 48, yet in the traditional English Swadesh list there are still 32 borrowings out of 200 (16.5%), mostly from Old Norse and Old French 18; and in a recent revision of the Albanian Swadesh list, 34 out of 107 words (31.8%) were identified as possible borrowings 49.
Although the Altaic peoples were early in contact with speakers of Semitic, Indo-European, and Uralic languages, few prehistoric borrowings have been identified.
The book identifies a broad range of borrowings, including phonological diffusion, contact-induced change in syntax and semantics (loss of agent focusing, inclusive-exclusive distinction, split ergativity), and direct morphological borrowings (e.g., person, voice, aspect, plural markers).
Of the 105 cognate sets in the data that contain known hidden borrowings, the method identifies 76 correctly (see the specific results in Supplementary Material I).
One Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified, said that for the first nine months of this year, the borrowings will indeed add to the deficit but will not prompt larger spending cuts under Gramm-Rudman.
The language he creates in its place blends the black vernacular with puns, patois, and linguistic borrowings that most readers (this one included) will struggle to identify.
But to rely on those borrowings as signs of something intrinsic to modern Chinese composition would be like trying to identify American music solely by the presence of saxophones and swing rhythms.
