LORETA VAICEKAUSKIENĖ

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

NEW ISSUES IN THE STANDARDIZATION OF RECENT LOANWORDS

INTRODUCTION

For the past couple of decades, both linguists and the public have continually expressed a need for the professional assessment of new foreign words as a phenomenon that distinctly marks contemporary Lithuanian. At the beginning of restored independence, efforts were made to collect data on how such words function in usage, but later this work dwindled and was no longer carried out systematically. During this period, there was no clear methodology for preparing loanword standardization tools; foreign words were often assessed on the basis of prescriptive attitudes rather than research findings, and studies of foreign-word usage were sorely lacking. An attempt was made to fill the gap in publicly available information on foreign-word usage and standardization recommendations through the consultation databases of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language (VLKK), but these contain few recent loanwords, and most are described solely from a standardizing perspective, with the label “not to be used” and a Lithuanian equivalent.

This article analyzes the loanword standardization tools approved by the VLKK, presents new principles for standardizing loanwords, and describes renewed and methodologically strengthened efforts to collect data on foreign-word usage. The article aims to show how combining prescriptive and descriptive methods can improve the quality of standardization work.

TOOLS FOR STANDARDIZING FOREIGN-ORIGIN VOCABULARY IN LITHUANIA SINCE 1998

The most important official tools for standardizing foreign-origin vocabulary during the period of restored independence are VLKK Resolution No. 68, “On di-

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the list of major language errors” and its section “Lexical errors,” which contains the lists “Unacceptable new foreignisms” and “Unacceptable foreignisms and their derivatives” (VŽ 1998), as well as the booklet Language Advice 4. Lexicon: Use of Loanwords (KP (L1) 2005), considered by the VLKK. The VLKK’s list of new foreignisms includes 61 word families, mostly of English origin; the list of unacceptable foreignisms comprises 144 word families, mostly of Russian origin, while the booklet Language Advice contains more than 3,000 loanwords and foreignisms of various origins, not grouped into word families. Lists of foreignisms are instruments for implementing negative codification, whereas Language Advice presents, alongside items that are strictly negatively evaluated, items subject to milder negative codification and secondary norm variants, as well as loanwords equivalent to Lithuanian words.

The above-mentioned normative instruments were prepared on the basis of the general principles and criteria for standardizing Lithuanian and foreign vocabulary, published mostly in the 1960s and 1970s by Lithuanian linguists (first and foremost, Aleksas Girdenis, Pranas Kniūkšta, Jonas Palionis, and Aldonas Pupkis), as well as the guidelines for preparing the third edition of Advice on Language Usage (see Guidelines 1998). There seems to have been no separate system of standardization criteria for new loanwords, but an analysis of language recommendations (Miliūnaitė 2004) and the 1993–1997 minutes of the VLKK and its subcommittee (Vaicekauskienė 2007: 129–144) suggests that, most likely, an attempt was made to follow the traditional approach. Unfortunately, both studies concluded that standardization criteria are not applied in a methodologically consistent and systematic way, and that relevant research is lacking¹.

Both in terms of selection and evaluation, systematicity and a coherent conception are particularly lacking in the most recent instrument, intended for the broadest audience, Language Advice, into which the entire lexical section of the list of major errors has been transferred and which essentially reflects the tradition of correcting foreign-origin vocabulary in Lithuanian prescriptive linguistics.

Alongside well-known (literary) dialectal words of foreign origin (e.g., pečius, sarmatlyvas, sermega, smala, zupė, etc.) and archaisms from early written texts (žemčiūgai), one can also find items established throughout the standard language, such as cepelinus, rūbus, koldūnus, etc.; the colloquial word durnių; Soviet-era and contemporary jargon or slang (ciongas, ryžas, liuks, lūzeris); and the decorative staple of all such recommendations, sosiska, with various spelling and morphological

¹ Interestingly, in international works on standardization theory, the problem of applying standardization criteria systematically is often acknowledged to be insoluble (see Cooper ²1996; Vikor ²1994).

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variants, new English loanwords subject to strict correction (nonsensas, ofisas, serfingas, supermarketas), and common international words (e.g., brokolis, celiuliozė, ceremonija, seksualinis, and so on). Thus, any lexical unit borrowed from another language is considered an object of standardization here.

The evaluations presented in the publication are based, on the one hand, on a fairly complex and—one might think—flexible system of evaluation levels and, on the other, on a very vague conception of a foreignism to be negatively codified. An unacceptable foreignism is defined here as “a word that has come from another language, contravenes the norms of the standard language, and has a correct Lithuanian equivalent” (Mikulėnienė 2005: 5). In what sense does it contravene them? Which norms, and how are they understood? What is considered an “available” equivalent? New (English) loanwords receive the most negative evaluation, “ntk.” (unacceptable), per se; the introduction, following the guidelines of Advice on Language Usage, says that they are evaluated especially strictly. International words are at best treated as equivalent variants of the standard-language norm or—often—as words that may be used but are less suitable. For example, reliktas, regresas are treated here as secondary norm variants, while preference is given to liekanai, išlikai ir atžangai.

A major problem with Language Advice is the conception, acceptability, and identity of equivalents. The proposed equivalents often carry additional components of connotative meaning, or nuances; the usage ranges of the loanword and the proposed equivalent differ, and their semantics do not coincide (for example, the loanword frankofonas is codified as unacceptable because it is apparently assumed to have an identical equivalent, prancūzakalbis). Moreover, in a number of cases, the principle of providing equivalents—that synonymy between equivalents should be avoided when an established equivalent exists—is applied uncritically. Presumably, the items considered established include grynis, pasauga, spirgintuvas, saldukas, traputis, vamzdučiai, and the like.

The broad definition of the object of standardization, the varying value of loanwords and their relationship to the standard language, its usage, and its users raise doubts about the authority of this official publication. Like the other lexical-standardization instruments mentioned, it is characterized by excessive prescriptivism and disregard for actual usage.

PRINCIPLES FOR STANDARDIZING NEW BORROWINGS

In recent years, the VLKK has taken the initiative to discuss problems in standardizing borrowed vocabulary and has prepared and approved the project “General

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naujųjų skolinių norminimo principai“ (2007). Viliamasi, kad šis dokumentas turėtų tapti pagalbiniu įrankiu tolesnėms norminamoms priemonėms teikti.

The project in question first defines the criteria for selecting borrowings to be standardized: it states that data for general standardization recommendations should be collected from public written usage, whereas words used in specialized contexts (slang, professional jargon, and technical terms) should not be included in standardization lists. This selection criterion is related to the reasons for borrowing and the functions of borrowings. New borrowings considered for standardization are words that enter Lithuanian out of a need to designate a (partly) unfamiliar, new reality or concept, and for which there is no (fully equivalent) counterpart in Lithuanian at the time of borrowing. From the perspective of standardization, borrowings used for stylistic or sociopsychological reasons—that is, to achieve a stylistic effect or to signal a particular social identity of the user—are in principle not assessed and are not included in standardization recommendations. Such foreign words also differ in their functions in a text: they usually perform an expressive, emotional, social, or metalinguistic function.

Alongside the domain of usage, frequency of use is identified as a criterion for selecting borrowings to be standardized: the principles recommend selecting more frequently used borrowings for standardization measures, while including isolated borrowings only with reservations.

The new principles also assess borrowings from the perspective of standardization. First and foremost, the definition of an international word is finally clarified: new borrowings used in several major languages (English, German, French, and Russian), whose forms do not conflict with Lithuanian spelling and morphology rules, or which have endings typical of indeclinable international words, are new international words and are therefore considered standard, just like those formed from roots of classical-language words. Unadapted words—that is, words that do not meet Lithuanian spelling or grammatical requirements—are classified as nonstandard, except when they may be regarded as (international) lexical quotations; these are most often fixed two-word figurative expressions, for example: new age ‘a cultural trend or movement’, carte blanche ‘complete freedom to act as one sees fit’, and so on.

The assessment of borrowings from the perspective of standardization must, of course, follow the principles for managing standard Lithuanian (Principai 1997): in the case under discussion, tradition is observed, and it is stated that priority must always be given to the principle of lexical purity—

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—over it. When suitable equivalents become available, they must always be recommended for use, including alongside new international words. Another principle recommended for observance is consistency in Lithuanian grammar and spelling. This principle aims to reduce the number of foreign words in usage that are written in non-Lithuanian spelling and remain indeclinable.

The general standardization principles provide for two ways of standardizing new borrowings: 1) standardization by adapting the foreign word (that is, Lithuanianizing its spelling and morphology), and 2) standardization by replacing it with a substitute. The first method is based on the natural integration of a borrowing into the system of the recipient language, a process familiar both to Lithuanian dialects and to the standard language. Although apparently nowhere recorded in writing, this method of standardization is well known in Lithuanian language-standardization practice. The second method was used in preparing the standardization measures mentioned in the article; it has been criticized by both language users and scholars because the proposed substitutes are not always suitable or because the number of units being standardized is severely restricted (see Vaicekauskienė 2007: 145–152; Girčienė 2007).

What is valuable in the principles under discussion is the effort to prevent the recommendation of unsuitable equivalents by defining criteria for evaluating equivalents; alongside familiar word-formation requirements, these address the equivalence of meaning between a counterpart and a borrowing, as well as the counterpart’s emotional and stylistic neutrality. The principles do not discuss the criterion of how widespread an equivalent is in usage, which is relevant to codification and especially clearly reveals competition between a borrowing and its substitute; nor do they emphasize the importance of equivalents coined by users themselves².

COLLECTING DATA ON NEW FOREIGN WORDS

VLKK patvirtinus skolinių norminimo principus (2007), imtasi atgaivinti duomenų apie skolinius kaupimo darbą. Komisija kreipėsi į Lietuvių kalbos instituto Kalbos kultūros skyrių siūlydama parengti šiai temai skirtą projektą ir tais pačiais metais buvo suformuluoti tokie būsimo projekto tikslai ir uždaviniai:

² An analysis of the discussion forum on substitutes established by the Norwegian Language Council in 2000 shows that the prevalence of a substitute in usage is a very important factor; it was also observed that the success of substitutes depends directly on the extent to which the criteria for a good substitute identified by scientific research were followed in creating them (see Torp 2007).

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– to conduct a study of the written use of foreign words over a single decade (1998–2008), compiling as representative a large-scale text corpus as possible from a variety of printed and electronic sources and describing the foreign words selected from it according to several different features in a database;

– on the basis of the principles for standardizing foreign words approved by the VLKK, to prepare and submit for the Commission’s consideration advisory lists of foreign words for standardization, together with basic data on their usage.

At the end of 2007, under the 2006–2015 Programme for the Standardization, Use, Development and Dissemination of the State Language, funding was allocated to a group of five researchers³ to conduct A Study of the Use of New Foreign Words in Lithuanian: 1998–2008. The Lithuanian Language Institute provided additional funding to create a computer database and frequency-measurement tool in the search system Google. It is planned that the computer database of foreign words, which was fully tested and operational by the end of 2008, will contain nearly 800 individual foreign words and word families with a common root, as well as about 3,000 examples of usage drawn from the political and social press, specialist and cultural publications, youth periodicals, the Internet, non-periodical publications, public information sources and documents; the data will be described according to the principles of the model for describing foreign words under study, approved by the working group.

During the first year of the project, methodological guidelines for collecting foreign words were prepared and the necessary technical infrastructure was developed—a computer database program and a special query-formulation tool in the Google system for determining the frequency of foreign-word usage. In keeping with the principle of representativeness established for the SDB, this tool is used to construct highly precise search strings for word forms, both by including as many inflectional paradigm forms and spelling variants as possible and by narrowing the search field to exclude English-language results or ambiguity in Lithuanian forms. Frequency is determined using the median derived from the first couple of hundred words—that is, the value indicating the centre of the frequency distribution—separately for nouns and verbs. Relative frequency is calculated in quartiles (which divide the series into four equal parts, with the second quartile coinciding with the median): nouns found in up to 800 instances are considered rare, and

³ At various stages of the project, staff of the LKI’s Language Culture Department participated in compiling the database: Skaistė Aleksandravičiūtė, Jurgita Girčienė, Agnė Kalinytė, Rita Miliūnaitė, Giedrius Tamaševičius, and Rasuolė Vladarskienė; the project was led by Loreta Vaicekauskienė.

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verbs with up to 400 instances; of medium frequency are nouns with 800 to 30,000 instances and verbs with 400 to 5,000 instances; and frequent are nouns found more than 30,000 times and verbs found more than 5,000 times (for more on the search capabilities of Google, see Aleksandravičiūtė 2008: 266–282).

As can be seen from the objectives and the theoretical and methodological preparation, the project is primarily devoted to the scientific study, on the basis of usage, of foreign words entering Lithuanian. Systematic selection of foreign words and usage data are intended to measure the number of new foreign words used in written Lithuanian during the less-studied period of 1998–2008 and to answer questions about the nature of English-language influence: what effect do new English (American) foreign words have on Lithuanian, how many are borrowed, in which texts they occur most often (in electronic media, youth language or general usage), how do they relate to Lithuanian grammar and spelling, and does the borrowing process during the period under discussion differ qualitatively and quantitatively from what was observed only after independence was restored, in 1991–1997 (cf. Vaicekauskienė 2007)? Part of the study is devoted to documenting lexical changes in administrative language and is expected to provide data on new international words and their meanings used in state documents, which have so far been little studied.

On the other hand, the database of new foreign words has been designed to have practical value and to provide representative material for preparing language-standardization tools.

FOREIGN WORDS TO BE STANDARDIZED IN THE CURRENT SDB

As noted, the general principles formulate two main criteria for selecting foreign words: public written usage and frequency of use.

When selecting from the data collected in the SDB, the concept of public written usage needs to be refined somewhat. Alongside the national periodical press, the internet is an important source of data. It is precisely in the internet environment that much supplementary and sometimes even primary data on the use of foreign words can be found. In essence, the publicly accessible textual part of the internet as a whole may be regarded as public written usage, but it is highly heterogeneous in terms of the nature of communication. In developing a model for describing the foreign words under study, it was decided to divide online

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sources in the SDB provisionally into two parts—informational and communicative. In setting the boundaries of public written usage, this division makes it possible to exclude the communicative part of the internet, since it is more akin to a (more or less) private spoken-language variety in written form.

Since it is necessary to focus on the most relevant words, those most widespread in general usage, boundaries can likewise be drawn, at least at the outset of the work to prepare the lists, around certain areas of public written usage, leaving administrative language, non-periodical publications, and perhaps also specialized areas of the periodical press (by which is meant cultural publications, publications in various professional fields, youth publications, as well as publications intended exclusively for men or women, etc.) for a later stage, and taking data first and foremost from the social and political press. Such a restriction would make it possible to exclude borrowings that have clear equivalents but are used for stylistic effect or to express a different identity (a large proportion of these are slang and jargon words used less frequently in the public, more standardized written domain). Thus, the borrowings selected for standardization, as recommended in the principles, would primarily be those that have entered Lithuanian out of a need to name (partly) new realities or concepts and that had no fully identical equivalent at the time of borrowing.

The principles allow an exception to the aforementioned requirement that foreign words selected for standardization be frequently used, in order to make standardization work more effective—that is, presumably, in cases where the recommendation is clear-cut, easy to formulate (perhaps because a good substitute is available), and the borrowing is considered likely to spread. However, during the first stage of codification, it would probably be advisable to focus on words that are used frequently or at least with moderate frequency.

The borrowings selected in accordance with the standardization principles under discussion are then evaluated in terms of the norm and may be recognized as standard if they can be granted the status of a new international word, and if they fill a gap in the Lithuanian lexicon and conform to Lithuanian spelling and morphological norms or can be readily adapted to Lithuanian. Borrowings that compete with a Lithuanian equivalent of similar meaning or have a specially created good substitute are considered nonstandard, as are words that do not meet the requirements of Lithuanian spelling or grammar.

Such rules, simple at first glance, are in fact only very general guidelines for codification work. The further evaluation of each selected word is fairly complex, and in reaching a decision it is essential to rely on

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using descriptive data: taking into account the loanword’s prevalence and establishment in usage, its accommodation to and integration into the Lithuanian language system; thus, among other things, considering the following questions:

1) prevalence in usage: in how many fields is the loanword used?

2) establishment in usage: how many years of usage tradition does the loanword have?

3) conformity with Lithuanian spelling and morphology norms: to what degree has the loanword adapted, is it always used in an adapted form, or does usage vary in this respect? Is the loanword graphically distinguished from Lithuanian text (by quotation marks or italics)?

4) establishment in the Lithuanian lexical system: to what extent has the borrowed root branched into Lithuanian derivatives?

5) establishment in the subsystem of international or foreign words within the Lithuanian lexical system: how many loanwords with the same root and how many word families have been borrowed?

If sufficiently representative, the database of foreign words can provide relatively reliable data on the questions listed here and serve as a useful aid in evaluating loanwords for the VLKK. Its data show that even the most topical, frequent, or moderately frequent loanwords found in the political and social press differ greatly from the point of view of codification.

Some of them could be considered new international words, for example, driftingas “controlled lateral sliding of a car’s wheels; a motorsport discipline in which a car slides along a track and must perform certain tasks (maintain a certain speed, negotiate turns, etc.)” (English drifting); fankas “a genre of popular dance music with elements of blues and soul, characterized by a particularly strong rhythm” (English funk); kemperis “a touring (recreational) vehicle that stays at campsites and can be slept in” (English camper) (these words were borrowed from Russian, German, and French). Quite often, words sharing a root with such new loanwords are included in dictionaries of international words; cf. TŽŽ driftingas “a vessel for fishing with drifting nets”; TŽŽ kempingas “a campsite for motor tourists.” Normative recommendations should also list available Lithuanian descriptive equivalents for new loanwords, for example: driftingas – controlled lateral sliding; car-drifting competition; kemperis – wheeled home, recreational vehicle. Lithuanian and borrowed derivatives of the root being codified must also be evaluated, for example, driftingas: driftinti, driftas, drifteris. As provided for in the general principles for standardizing loanwords, if the orthographic and morphological adap-

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Since usage varies, the form that best fits the morphology of Lithuanian should be codified; compare the variants fankei, fankas, funk (it should be noted that SDB currently has examples of this word in use dating from 1998), for example:

Everything else is a year or two old: “drum” bass, jazz, and fanki compositions. (Lietuvos rytas 1998)

According to critics, “Snooze” is the most promising and original French dance-music project. D. Dalcan has West Indian ancestry and likes “funk.” (Lietuvos rytas 1998)

Patchanka is an incredible mix made up of fanki, salsa, rap, flamenco, ska, and Arabic raï, seasoned with uncomplicated Spanish, French, English, Arabic, and Portuguese lyrics [...]. (Lux 2005)

Tai vakaras, kurį praskaidrins roko, dž iazo ir fanko gaidos. (TV diena 2008)

In accordance with the aforementioned principle of the morphology system, the less common variant fankas should be codified in this case. The adjectival derivative of this word, fankiškas, meaning “in the style of funk” (English funky), should also be standardized, since when referring to music it is used only in its unadapted form; compare:

In 1988 I studied at the B. Dvarionas Music School, played the violin, and one teacher suggested I try my hand at singing jazz rock and funky pop music. (Respublika 1998)

Many events will take place; one of them is a concert in the courtyard of the Vilnius Picture Gallery featuring the Kaunas Big Band and Lithuania’s most famous jazz musicians, “Samba del grigo”—music with a strong funky, Latin, and hip-hop feel! (Panelė 2006)

SDB also contains further examples of possible international words whose spelling or morphology should be standardized, for example: gorgonzola / gorgondzola / gorgan-zola / gorgonzolla; carpaccio.

Alongside international words, SDB also contains foreignisms for which Lithuanian equivalents should be recommended to users, for example, go-go (go go), “a description of dancers or their dance who entertain guests and excite the audience in clubs” (English go go). This word could perhaps be replaced by club dancers; club dance. The foreignism go-go is also unacceptable under the general principles for standardizing borrowings because its form cannot be adapted orthographically or morphologically.

When there is clear evidence, in some cases the standardizing recommendations could also include foreign words that the norm

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From this perspective, they should in principle not be evaluated, since they are used for stylistic or sociopsychological reasons. What is meant here is the highly widespread general slang (kreizi, cool, and so on). According to the SDB, these words, which are not adapted morphologically and often not adapted orthographically, are used in the political and social press, youth and cultural publications, and the communicative and informational sections of the internet as if no Lithuanian equivalents existed, for example:

You show your work in one gallery and then another, and you are also a teacher, educating the younger generation. Do you perhaps also drum all sorts of such „kreizi“ ideas into young people’s heads? (Šiaurės Atėnai 2003)

For the first time – „CRAZY“ WEEK. Super prices. [...] Tests of the latest models! (Lietuvos rytas 2005)

You can also “spice things up” with brightly colored knee-high socks or sling a huge tašę over your shoulder, covered in comic-book prints. You’ll have a crazy Japanese-style look! (Panelė 2006)

But how is that any different from the kreizi kreizi kreizi parents who buy their little ones expensive toys—toy computers, lifelike kittens, vypimaxes, and so on? (Internet, communication section 2006)

Since she was quite wild, at least at university, the book should be just as „crazy“. (blog.delfi.lt, informational section 2007)

[...] Morning exercise is not my thing. Dancing is a much more enjoyable alternative! It’s great to relax first thing in the morning and not think about the work ahead. Maybe a little crazy, but a perfect recipe for happiness. (Internet, communication section 2008)

Exhibition curator Kęstutis Kuizinas suggested the theme “Cool Places.” [...] “Cool” has long since become an international word, although linguists in non-English-speaking countries have probably not yet sanctioned it. (Lietuvos rytas 1998)

Ultimately, the character she plays—a blonde who handles a sword flawlessly—is very successful, very „cool“. (Lietuvos rytas 2003)

Autorius šaiposi iš tų, kurie labai stengiasi atrodyti cool. (Šiaurės Atėnai 2004)

I really like Druskininkai; I don’t know why, perhaps because I live in Druskininkai myself. Druskininkai is cool!!! (Internet, communication section 2004)

There I discovered the good side of the elite—students at the then Art Institute, all kinds of eccentrics—and although I did not become part of that cool culture, it was very important for me to experience it. (Šiaurės Atėnai 2005)

Užtat merginos palaiko. Joms tai cool! (Panelė 2007)

SDB data can also provide additional information about borrowings already included in normative recommendations. For example, data are available on the borrowing spamas, meaning “unwanted email messages,”

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advertising, especially those sent to large groups of users at once” (English spam) show that the recommendation needs to be repeated or softened: although KP considers it a non-recommended foreign word, this word is common and deeply rooted (KP does not provide any derivatives of it), cf.: (anti)spaminis, spaminti, spamintojas; spameris. The new recommendation could be supplemented, in addition to the substitutes already offered, šlamštlaiškiai, nepageidaujami el. laiškai, pašto šiukšlės, with the substitute brukalas.

The borrowing blogas, “an online diary accessible to everyone” (English blog > web + log), is particularly problematic – interneto dienoraštis, tinklaraštis, asmenraštis. This word is widespread in the public, political, cultural, specialist, and youth press, as well as in the informational and communicative domains of the internet; its root-based word family has branched extensively into Lithuanian derivatives, and there is a large group of other related borrowings, cf.: blòginimas, blòginti, blògintojas; audioblogas, blogeris, blogerizmas, blogologas, blogorama, blogosfera, blogra-tis, fotoblogas, moblogas, superbblogas, veblogas, videoblogas. Replacing all of them systematically with the proposed substitutes would be difficult⁴.

To promote wider dissemination of equivalents or to establish one of the forms more quickly, the current recommendations could also include those universally widespread borrowings that are already discussed in terminology dictionaries, cf. the computing term hostingas – priegloba, as well as the aforementioned gorgoncola, which is included in the dictionary of cheese names currently being compiled (cf. Girčienė, Liutkevičienė 2007: 115).

SDB data show that, despite the VLKK online consultation, the foreign word butikas (butykas, boutique, boutiquė’as), meaning “a shop selling luxury (designer) clothing and accessories” (French boutique), has for some time been spreading in public usage in various forms. The graphic highlighting, orthographic adaptation, and morphological adaptation of this foreign word vary considerably; cf.:

Perfumery will be profitable only when there is plenty of it: hundreds of varieties of little bottles. Nothing is worse than when your “boutique” has only 2–3 shelves. (Moteris 1998)

Your career path has been particularly winding; how did it happen that, after trading in real estate until the age of 35, you suddenly opened a boutique in Vilnius six months ago selling global brands and luxury clothing, butiką “Vaizdžio namai”? (Ieva 2005)

Sandals from last year’s “Ferre” collection in a boutique window or on a lady’s little feet would mean one thing: the boutique had gone bankrupt. (Laima 2005)

The fashionable district’s status is also reflected in the boutiques of the most famous designers, butikai, scattered along Rue du Roi-de-Sicile and Rue des Rosiers. (Ieva 2006)

⁴ For more about the borrowing blògas and its other derivatives, see this issue of Kalbos kultūra (pp. 50–64). – Red.

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After Notre Dame, a walk awaits through the [...] streets of the Latin Quarter, lined with cafés representing cuisines from all kinds of countries and in all kinds of styles, as well as shops, “boutiques” and anything else the heart desires. (blogas.lt, communication section 2007)

[...] she [the clothing designer] does not have a butyko. (Pravda 2008)

[...] Natalie PORTMAN (27) also came to Paris Fashion Week, but she spent her free time in the city not browsing among the racks in luxury boutique, but walking around with her parents. (Žmonės 2008)

It may be that in this case the proposed substitutes little shop, small store do not seem sufficiently adequate to users.

The loanwords segvėjus, baneris are also still frequently used; alongside VLKK’s proposed substitute riedis, the normative recommendations could disseminate the substitute segvejaus recorded in SDB, transporteris (if riedis seemed unacceptable to anyone), and offer a further substitute, dynamic transparent, for the baneriui included in KP.

Thus, systematic and continuous collection of usage data yields new information about substitutes for codified loanwords, Lithuanian formations, and related loanwords with the same root, which could be useful for ongoing normative work.

CONCLUSIONS

Over the past couple of decades, the need for the systematic, methodical normalization of new foreign words entering the Lithuanian language has remained undiminished. The official normative tools approved to date were prepared in an effort to fill emerging gaps in standardization as quickly as possible, guided by the principles of standard-language standardization and an unwritten intuition about the normalization of words of foreign origin. They are characterized by excessive prescriptivism and disregard for actual usage.

General methodological principles for the normalization of new foreign words were prepared specifically for this purpose and approved by VLKK only in 2007. It is to be hoped that these principles will finally provide a theoretical foundation for developing strategies and tools for normalizing foreign words in Lithuanian.

The new principles reflect a requirement that normative work necessarily be based on usage research data, or, in other words, that a prescriptive approach be combined with a descriptive one. That same year, at VLKK’s initiative, work began on fi-

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The extensive preliminary work of compiling a written-usage database of new foreign words for 1998–2008, besides its scholarly research value, could also have practical benefits. Analysis of the first data collected in it already shows that systematic and methodical collection and description of material make it possible to solve the problem of ensuring that the data needed for standardization are representative.

The general principles for standardizing new borrowings do not prescribe a choice of standardization strategy; however, in view of the increasingly liberal positions of the VLKK, one can expect that, when these principles are applied, recommendations will seem more acceptable than resolutions carrying the threat of fines. If the principle of flexible recommendations were chosen, preparing a standardizing instrument would not be very difficult. In Lithuania, the traditional instrument for standardizing foreign words is a two-part list of foreignisms and their equivalents. A more modern and promising means of disseminating standardization recommendations would be an online database providing users with more information about the prevalence and use of foreign words. An interactive solution could be particularly appealing, with a field for equivalents suggested by users and another for linguists’ comments.

Methodically prepared recommendations for standardizing borrowings, based on representative usage data, would resolve the conflict between prescriptivism and descriptivism, be more appealing to users, and ensure better dissemination of codified variants.

LITERATŪRA

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NEW ISSUES IN STANDARDISING NEW BORROWINGS

Summary

The paper sets out to examine measures which have been approved by the State Lithuanian Language Commission to standardise borrowings since 1998 (lists of unacceptable loanwords). The article also introduces principles of standardising new loanwords (adopted in 2007) and demonstrates the methodology of storing representative data of the usage of borrowings.

The paper also gives illustrations from the new databank of loanwords used in written discourse in 1998–2008. It thus aims to demonstrate that the quality of standardisation could be improved by combining prescriptive and descriptive methods: to avoid being too prescriptive and promote access and dissemination of codified variants to the user.

LORETA VAICEKAUSKIENĖ

Lietuvių kalbos institutas

P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius

[email protected]

L. VAICEKAUSKIENĖ. Naujų naujųjų skolinių norminimo klausimai

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