TOEFL iBT Practice Test 14

Transcript (on the real test you hear this once)

Listen to part of a talk in a linguistics class.

Professor: So, here's a word you all know: "ice cream." If you heard a speaker of Japanese say it, though, it might sound more like "aisukurīmu." Why? That's really our topic today: what happens to a word after one language borrows it from another.

A borrowed word, or loanword, almost never keeps its original pronunciation. It gets reshaped to fit the sound rules of the language that borrows it. Linguists call this adaptation. Japanese syllables mostly end in a vowel, and the language doesn't allow most groups of consonants. So speakers added vowels to break up the consonants in "ice cream." To an English speaker, that's a big change. But to a Japanese speaker, the new form just sounds natural, and that's the whole point.

Now, adaptation isn't only about sound. Sometimes the meaning shifts too. Take the English word "beef." It comes from an old French word that could mean the animal, the ox, as well as its meat. But once English borrowed it, it settled on just the meat.

OK, so here's a puzzle. If borrowed words get reshaped this much, how can anyone tell where a word started out? Well, pronunciation and meaning drift, but spellings were often written down early, and old manuscripts tend to preserve them. So let's pull up a few of those and see what they can tell us.