A pseudo-anglicism is a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning.[1][2][3][4][5]
For example, English speakers traveling in France may be struck by the "number of anglicisms—or rather words that look English—which are used in a different sense than they have in English, or which do not exist in English (such as rallye-paper, shake-hand, baby-foot, or baby-parc)".[6]
This is different from a false friend, which is a word with a cognate that has a different main meaning. Sometimes pseudo-anglicisms become false friends.[7]
Definition and terminology
Pseudo-anglicisms are also called secondary anglicisms,[8] false anglicisms,[9] or pseudo-English.[10]
Pseudo-anglicisms are a kind of lexical borrowing where the source or donor language is English, but where the borrowing is reworked in the receptor or recipient language.[11][12]
The precise definition varies. Duckworth defines pseudo-anglicisms in German as "neologisms derived from English language material."[11][13] Furiassi includes words that may exist in English with a "conspicuously different meaning".[14]
Typology and mechanism
Pseudo-anglicisms can be created in various ways, such as by archaism, i.e., words that once had that meaning in English but are since abandoned; semantic slide, where an English word is used incorrectly to mean something else; conversion of existing words from one part of speech to another; or recombinations by reshuffling English units.[15]
Onysko speaks of two types: pseudo-anglicisms and hybrid anglicisms. The common factor is that each type represents a neologism in the receptor language resulting from a combination of borrowed lexical items from English. Using German as the receptor language, an example of the first type is Wellfit-Bar, a combination of two English lexical units to form a new term in German, which does not exist in English, and which carries the meaning, "a bar that caters to the needs of health-starved people." An example of the second type, is a hybrid based on a German compound word, Weitsprung (long jump), plus the English 'coach', to create the new German word Weitsprung-Coach.[11]
According to Filipović, pseudoanglicisms can be formed through composition, derivation, or ellipsis. Composition in Serbo-Croatian involves creating a new compound from an English word to which is added the word man, as in the example, "GOAL" + man, giving golman. In derivation, a suffix -er or -ist is added to an anglicism, to create a new word in Serbo-Croatian, such as teniser, or vaterpolist. An ellipsis drops something, and starts from a compound and drops a component, or from a derivative and drops -ing, as in boks from "boxing", or "hepiend" from "happy ending".[16]
Another process of word formation that can result in a pseudo-anglicism is a blend word, consisting of portions of two words, like brunch or smog. Rey-Debove & Gagnon attest tansad in French in 1919, from English tan[dem] + sad[dle].[17]
Scope
Pseudo-anglicisms can be found in many languages that have contact with English around the world, and are attested in nearly all European languages.[18]
Some pseudo-anglicisms are found in many languages and have been characterized as "world-wide pseudo-English",[19] often borrowed via other languages such as French or Italian:[20]
skinship – platonic hand-holding, hugging, etc. (스킨십; seu·kin·sib)[37]
Romance
French
French includes many pseudo-anglicisms, including novel compounds (baby-foot), specifically compounds in -man (tennisman), truncations (foot), places in -ing (dancing meaning dancing-place, not the act of dancing), and a large variety of meaning shifts.[38]
German pseudo anglicisms often have multiple valid and common ways of writing them, generally either hyphenated (Home-Office) or in one word (Homeoffice).[60] Infrequently, CamelCase may also be used.[citation needed]
^Ilse Sørensen, English im deutschen Wortschatz, 1997, p. 18, as quoted in Onysko, 2007, p. 53: "words that look English, but which deviate from genuine English words either formally or semantically"
^Onysko 2007, p. 52The term pseudo-anglicism" describes the phenomenon that occurs when the RL['receptor language'; p.14] uses lexical elements of the SL['source language'; p.14] to create a neologism in the RL that is unknown in the SL. For the German language, Duckworth simply defines pseudo anglicisms as German neologisms derived from English language material.
^Nicol Spence 1976, as quoted in Ayres-Bennett, 2014, p. 335
^Henrik Gottlieb, "Danish pseudo-Anglicisms: A corpus-based analysis", p. 65 in Furiassi 2015
^Carstensen 2015, p. 77 The influence of a 'donor language' upon a 'recipient language' can be seen also, and above all, in the so-called pseudo-loanwords, as the literature names them. Den intensiven Einfluß einer donor language auf eine recipient language zeigen auch und ganz besonders die in der Literatur so genannten Scheinentlehnungen an.
^Duckworth 1977, [page needed] : Neubildungen der deutschen Sprache mit Englischem Sprachmaterial.; as quoted in: Carstensen (2015, p. 77)
^Furiassi 2010, p. 34, quoted in Lujan-Garcia (2017, p. 281) "[A] word or idiom that is recognizably English in its form (spelling, pronunciation, morphology, or at least one of the three), but is accepted as an item in the vocabulary of the receptor language even though it does not exist or is used with a conspicuously different meaning in English."
^Broder Carstensen, "Euro-English", in Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries: in honour of Jacek Fisiak..., 2, in Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs32, 1986, p. 831
^Cristiano Furiassi, "How jolly is the joker? Problemi di traducibilità dei falsi anglicismi" in the Atti del 5° congresso di studi dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata (AItLA). Bari, 17,18 febbraio 2005
Carstensen, Broder (16 November 2015) [1st pub. Gunter Narr:1980]. "Semantische Scheinentlehnungen des Deutschen aus dem Englischen". In Viereck, Wolfgang (ed.). Studien zum Einfluß der englischen Sprache auf das Deutsche [Studies on the Influence of the English Language on German]. Tübingener beigrag zur Linguistik #132 (in German). BoD – Books on Demand. p. 77. ISBN978-3-87808-132-6. OCLC1006045710.
Duckworth, David (1977). Best, Werner; Kolb, Werner; Lauffer, Hartmut (eds.). Zur terminologischen Grundlage der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der englisch-deutschen Interferenz. Kritische Übersicht, und neue Vorschlag [The Terminological Basis of Research in the Field of English-German Interference. Critical Overview, and New Proposal.] (in German). Tübingen: Niemeyer. ISBN9783484102859. OCLC185584225. Neubildungen der deutschen Sprache mit Englischem Sprachmaterial.
Rey-Debove, Josette; Gagnon, Gilberte (1990). Dictionnaire des anglicismes : les mots anglais et américains en français [Dictionary of Anglicisms: English and American Words in French]. Usuels du Robert (in French). Paris: Le Robert. ISBN9782850360275. OCLC756955952.
Rosenhouse, Judith, Rotem Kowner, eds., Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages, 2008, ISBN1783091533
Scheibel, Larissa (21 February 2007). "2.2 Entlehnungen". Anglizismen/Amerikanismen im Deutschen und Russischen am Beispiel von Online Zeitschriften (Master's thesis) (in German). GRIN Verlag. pp. 10–. ISBN978-3-638-59645-9.
Yang, Wenliang (1 January 1990). "1.5.2.1 Fremdwort und Lehnwort". Anglizismen im Deutschen: am Beispiel des Nachrichtenmagazins 'Der Spiegel'. Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, 106 (in German). Tuebingen: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 12–. ISBN978-3-11-167615-9.
James Stanlaw 2004, Japanese English: Language And The Culture Contact, Hong Kong University Press.
Laura Miller 1997, "Wasei eigo: English ‘loanwords' coined in Japan" in The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright, edited by Jane Hill, P.J. Mistry and Lyle Campbell, Mouton/De Gruyter: The Hague, pp. 123–139.
Geoff Parkes and Alan Cornell 1992, 'NTC's Dictionary of German False Cognates', National Textbook Company, NTC Publishing Group.