This is borrowing, isn’t it?
An interesting case of foreign word borrowing by linguists appears in a paper by Emily Bender and Dan Flickinger entitled Peripheral Constructions and Core Phenomena: Agreement in Tag Questions (in the volume Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation). In part of the semantic specification for auxiliaries that appear in tag positions (e.g., this won’t suck, will it?), they give the name name ne_rel to the sort of semantics that tags contribute. At first I thought this meant “non-empty relation,” which seemed pretty ridiculous. But then I noticed the footnote:
[ne_rel is] So named because both German and Japanese have particles similar in function to English tag questions spelled ne. As it happens, Potawatomi also has a question particle of the same spelling
Proponents of Proto World, take notice!
And on a related note, Language Hat and Language Log are working on a campaign to rename the ukemi construction in English. Gambatte!
Huh! That’s interesting about ne! It reminded me that one the features of the genius war-strategy children’s school slang in Ender’s Game was a negative tag question particle that I think was spelled ‘neh?’ (to which , if you agreed with the statement, you could answer with the affirmative ‘eh!’)
Maybe Orson Scott Card is channelling Proto-World! :) Or maybe he speaks German, Japanese or Potawatomi. I suppose the latter would be almost as amazing.
Huh, very interesting. I tried to find something on the web that would give hint of why he went with neh and eh, but nothing came up except noticing that Japanese has the word. Of course there’s always another possibility: it’s a human universal that /ne/ sounds like “looking-for-confirmation,” and languages that don’t currently have ne are destined to have it in the future.
(Just to confuse things, Korean has a word ne, but it means ‘yes,’ and appears at the beginning of (or completely comprises) utterances. Mandarin also has a word spelled “ne” in pinyin, but it’s actually pronounced /nə/ and can act as a marker for questions of the “what about [you/that/the condition in Canada/etc]?” variety.)