phono-semantic matching

English

Alternative forms

  • PSM (initialism)

Etymology

Coined by Ghil'ad Zuckermann in 1999.

Noun

Examples
  • French génie (“genie”) from Arabic جِنِّيّ (jinniyy, “demon, genie”), given that génie already meant “guardian spirit” or “daemon”, a sense borrowed from Latin genius.
  • Icelandic tækni (“technology”), from tæki (“tool”), matching Danish teknik in pronunciation and meaning.
  • Cherokee ᎠᎹᏰᏟ (amayetli, “United States”), from ᎠᎹ (ama, “water”) and ᎠᏰᏟ (ayetli, “center”), modeled after English America

phono-semantic matching (usually uncountable, plural phono-semantic matchings)

  1. (linguistics) The borrowing of a word into one language from another which completely or partially preserves both the original sound and meaning but does so via substitution of etymons.

Translations

See also

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