Help With Grammar

[Hlafordlaes]

Anecdotal aside: Never give a linguist a dog if you do not want to hear weird things.

Since dogs mostly differentiate vowel sounds, you can vary the words spoken for the same reaction.

For example, my dogs go nuts when I say "Go for a ride?" as they love riding in a car. They have the same reaction when I ask, "Fried gopher?"

In Spanish (they are, er, bilingual), when I need to get by, instead of "Cuidado," it's "cao."

Apparently, old linguists and dogs tend to create their own little codes (exaggerating, of course).

 

[aleCcowaN]

[*Por cierto, eso del doble negativo que se viene comentando en la conversación hasta ahora me afecta a mí un montón, ya que desde finales de los setenta, me desenvuelvo a diario en castellano, no inglés. Ya nunca me "suena" bien si no aplico el negativo sobre todos los elementos en la frase, y en inglés me encuentro acosado por duda cada vez que intento escribir algo.]

It's the price one pays to reach such a high level in a different language.

Because of English, I also have my daily deal of problems while using my Spanish, but sadly my English improves at a painful pace.

By the way, I love the postmodern feudal twists in your nick and custom title.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

It's the price one pays to reach such a high level in a different language.

Because of English, I also have my daily deal of problems while using my Spanish, but sadly my English improves at a painful pace.

By the way, I love the postmodern feudal twists in your nick and custom title.

Thanks for that last. Yes, it reflects my transition, many decades ago now, from fundamentalist to ethical secularist with a commitment to truth, as best as one might define that slippery thing.

I love how the etymology of "lord" in English is derived from "loaf-guard."

And the old term for "ocean" is precious, one of my faves: "whale way."

PS: My nickname on other boards, since no one likes typing out all those letters, is "Hlaf." Goes with my preference for humor as another tool in effective discourse.

PPS (Sorry): The literal translation of "liurning cnicht" is "learning boy" or disciple, used of old to designate squires in training for knighthood duties; thus OE cnicht -> ME knight.

 

[Olowkow]

...
In my original query, I was wondering if it was case grammar or similar that attracted you more than generative syntax, or if the fact that linguistics as a discipline must face the "horrors" of meaning, and so get lost easily in philosophical discussion was what put you off. There is no question, however, that linguistics is merely a specialization within cognitive psychology and like it, increasingly also looks for hard neurological evidence for some observations.
...

My research was in bilingualism, code switching. We studied and recorded the linguistic behavior of bilingual Mexican-American kids of migrant worker families in various settings, and the analysis of their language was done within the context of the generative theory of the time. I was not in a position, nor smart enough, to invent my own theory of grammar or adopt any competing one for the purposes of the research.

The only iconoclastic claim at the time was that bilinguals, in a community of bilinguals, can develop a grammar of code switching, and that linguistic rules for the use of English and Spanish in the same sentence or syntactic structure (sometimes called code mixing) or across sentences are shared by members of the community. In other words, bilinguals do not simply switch randomly from one language to the other, mid sentence or between sentences in hopeless confusion, without any sociolinguistic or syntactic constraints. There are such things as ill-formed code switches.

• *Parece que ella no ha understood me.

• *Please put the book en la table.

Code switching is a tool which is available to bilinguals, in a bilingual community, to convey various sociolinguistic information. The children tended to speak English in school, Spanish at home and code switched when dealing with each other.

• No van a aceptar a una mujer que can't talk English.

(They aren't going to accept a woman who can't talk English.)

• No estoy seguro, but my teacher told me it was like enchiladas.

(I'm not sure, but my teacher told me it was like enchiladas.)

....speakers practice code-switching when they are each fluent in both languages. Code mixing is a thematically related term, but the usage of the terms code-switching and code-mixing varies. Some scholars use either term to denote the same practice, while others apply code-mixing to denote the formal linguistic properties of language-contact phenomena, and code-switching to denote the actual, spoken usages by multilingual persons.[4][5][6] In the 1940s and 1950s, many scholars considered code-switching to be a sub-standard use of language.[7] Since the 1980s, however, most scholars have come to regard it is a normal, natural product of bilingual and multilingual language use.[8][9]

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Good stuff, Olowkow. As a code switcher myself (we sprinkle family conversations with English, bad French, Catalan, and Spanish), I see this on a daily basis. Confess I haven't thought about it much.

Those examples are very good and are of switching an entire verb phrase, and while we do do this, there are also lots of simple single word substitutions obviously, usually for the emotive coloring one language might provide for the case.

There is an interesting phenomenon in Spanish of syntax leveling when a phrase turns into a fixed expression, which is not an example of the above, but comes to mind at the moment for whatever reason.

As an example, we have the Castillian "como la copa un pino" to express being on top of the world. The missing "de" is now gone, and shows a transition from phrase to a word-like encapsulated concept.

 

[Modified]

French has an interesting usage, which I believe is called "emphatic." For example, they sometimes add "me" at the beginning of a sentence, much as in English we might add the phrase, "as for me."

Moi, je ne suis pas feu, literally is, "Me, "I'm not crazy," but should be translated as "I'm not crazy!"

"Me, I'm not crazy," seems like an OK translation for the spoken version to me, as it can mean pretty much the same thing as "As for me, I'm not crazy." It may be rarely used but with "you" it is more common: "You, you're not like that." "Me? I'm not crazy," is more common as well but has a different set of possible meanings.

 

[Olowkow]

Good stuff, Olowkow. As a code switcher myself (we sprinkle family conversations with English, bad French, Catalan, and Spanish), I see this on a daily basis. Confess I haven't thought about it much.

Those examples are very good and are of switching an entire verb phrase, and while we do do this, there are also lots of simple single word substitutions obviously, usually for the emotive coloring one language might provide for the case.

There is an interesting phenomenon in Spanish of syntax leveling when a phrase turns into a fixed expression, which is not an example of the above, but comes to mind at the moment for whatever reason.

As an example, we have the Castillian "como la copa un pino" to express being on top of the world. The missing "de" is now gone, and shows a transition from phrase to a word-like encapsulated concept.

Como la copa un pino was even a restaurant, apparently closed.

Glad you like the discussion. What often happens is that someone who is not a member of a current bilingual community, but who is fluent in two languages, claims that code switching restrictions do not exist for their grammar. I agree. This is why I always emphasize "community" of bilinguals.

Examples of single nouns or adjectives sprinkled in the language of code switchers abound for sure. These are not "borrowings" per se. Often, although an equivalent might exist in Spanish for instance, the exact English term, pronounced as in English, is preferable as a signal to others in the community that the speaker is referencing shared experience, i.e. American high school:

• El año pasado yo era un (estudiante de primer año) freshman.

(Last year I was a freshman.)

​

Whereas, common words with no real sociological implications or specialized purpose would be odd as code switches:

• ?Voy a comprar un pencil.
• *?Voy a comprar a pencil.
• But:Me voy a comprar un 3D Pen.

A research technique that worked well for us was to read a sentence to the child, containing either a properly formed code switch, an ill formed code switch, or no code switch, and ask him to walk over to another researcher 50 feet away and repeat this sentence. Ill formed code switches were very difficult for them to remember, and they usually performed interesting "corrections" when repeating them.

As an example, the above might become, after a period of reflection by the child:

• Me voy a comprar un lápiz, hmm I mean,... a pencil.
• Compré un....I have to buy a pencil.

But this is a very difficult class of lexical items to define.


From an interesting paper Code-switching or Borrowing? No sé so no puedo decir, you know:

Anyway, yo creo que las personas who support todos estos grupos como los Friends of the Earth son personas que are very close to nature.

Mixing morphemes from two languages at the word level is not permitted. It's not clear, however, whether this is a universal principle. It may depend on the binding strength of the morphological boundary.

• */I wreck+é mi carro/ (I wrecked my car), or */yo try+aba a aprender/ (I was trying to learn).

 

[Rat]

Rat, good that you didn't use "warm" instead of "kalt" "Ich bin warm" has a very different meaning (especially for males) from what you'd expect.

As to why "mir is kalt": German still has datives, whereas English has largely lost the dative (but not completely: "give me the book").

Now genitives are a completely different issue in German:

Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod^WP

for some fun (I know you like the German language - I am a fluent speaker)

I am also a fluent speaker. Just not in German.

What does occur to me now is "Woe is me". I can't parse that in any meaningful way.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Olowkow, upon reflection, I don't think the rest of the family are actual code switchers, since all non-Spanish languages are not close to native level. Well, except Catalan, but for non-language reasons, we switch less than what one might normally expect (as a somewhat threatened language, using it in a mix with Spanish is seen as poor practice, even if commonly done in Barcelona.)

I've done it more often in the ways you describe actually when on biz in Mexico, since I am "bi." (OK, let's keep the context in mind!)

At home, our "switching" is more a function of inserting a word or phrase that captures a mood from when we lived in a certain place, or since we watch movies in many languages, as catch phrases from them. So, doesn't really qualify much.

...

Strange how one can become attached to a language via sentimental attachment to an experience. Again, in the case of movies. None of us at home can stand to watch Men in Black I in English, since the Spanish version is how we first "met" it and where we get any quotes from. Arguably, the translators did such a good job that it is also a lot funnier.

We can only see Enemy of the State or Mousetrap in French, though. As Good As It Gets must be in English (Jack Nicholson is just too unique for any other voice to do.)

 

[aleCcowaN]

About "grande como la copa un pino" might be mostly oral (it's exclusive or some regions of Spain), and I don't know any meaning of it like "on the top of the world" but "grand" or "big fat": "una mentira grande como copa un pino" ("a big fat lie"). That sort of condensation is common and many students ask about phrases, idioms and sayings showing that process: "agua pasada no muele molino" ("a mill cannot grind with water that is past").

About the whole "code-switching or borrowing", we really have to look into what is really "speaking a language". I experienced talking with a lot of folks in the States that were supposed to speak Spanish, because they were born in Mexico or Honduras, or simply because they grew up in "el barrio". My darwiness! Communication was almost impossible and I had to switch to or reinforce it with English, and my English was then a twentieth of what it is today and I avoided using it the most I could. They mostly speak Spanglish, which is a pidgin language: they "vacunan la carpeta" -litterally "they vaccinate the folder" in Spanish, but meant as "they vacuum the carpet". So "no sé so no puedo decir, you know" sounds as born in such kind of context, a context that is mostly subjunctive-blind and even prefer to change vocabulary to use positive commands instead of using subjunctive ("Quédate" -Stay- instead of "no te vayas" -don't leave-).

A proof of that is the pig Spanish that is talked extensively in all Hollywood productions in a way it almost has replaced the real deal completely. That's why talk in pig Spanish may have translated subtitles in the Spanish speaking world or simply be ignored. Some weeks ago I watched a movie where "¿Cómo te gusta mi -Porto Rican noun not understood here-?" was translated as the correct "¿Qué te parece mi -neutral replacement-?".

 

[Olowkow]

I am also a fluent speaker. Just not in German.

What does occur to me now is "Woe is me". I can't parse that in any meaningful way.

Wiktionary says it appeared first in the King James Version of the Old Testament, early 17th century. It might be a neologism that sounded poetic at the time, a dative and interpreted to be "to me" or "unto me" somewhere in the past. Use of "woe" is almost fixed it seems.

I find the following acceptable:

• Woe be unto him/her/you/us/them (i.e. Let there be woe...)
• Woe unto him/her/you/us/them
• Woe is me....
• Woe is he/she/
• But: ??Woe is him/her/us/you/them
• Woe am I (I think???)

But not:

• *?Woe is unto me/him/...etc.
• *Woe was me..
• *Woe will be me....
• *Woe is we...

Along with "un char" (French military tank) used to mean "car", my favorite example of odd borrowings is the Canadian French sign in a cemetery forbidding trespassing which announces:

Défense de Trépasser!

​

To a Parisian, it is pretty strange: No Dieing!

Finally, in another thread a while back with some Canadian French speakers, someone posted a video which to me, as a non native speaker of French, and to them, was hilarious, but I learned after sharing it, as I suspected, that for my European French friends who speak English, it was just not funny at all.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

About "grande como la copa un pino" might be mostly oral (it's exclusive or some regions of Spain), and I don't know any meaning of it like "on the top of the world" but "grand" or "big fat": "una mentira grande como copa un pino" ("a big fat lie"). That sort of condensation is common and many students ask about phrases, idioms and sayings showing that process: "agua pasada no muele molino" ("a mill cannot grind with water that is past").

Yeah, I was fast and loose on that. It speaks to decidedly social things; I had bad experiences in Madrid and sort of don't want to stop and think about stuff from there, just wanted to use it for another point.

About the whole "code-switching or borrowing", we really have to look into what is really "speaking a language". I experienced talking with a lot of folks in the States that were supposed to speak Spanish, because they were born in Mexico or Honduras, or simply because they grew up in "el barrio". My darwiness! Communication was almost impossible and I had to switch to or reinforce it with English, and my English was then a twentieth of what it is today and I avoided using it the most I could. They mostly speak Spanglish, which is a pidgin language: they "vacunan la carpeta" -litterally "they vaccinate the folder" in Spanish, but meant as "they vacuum the carpet". So "no sé so no puedo decir, you know" sounds as born in such kind of context, a context that is mostly subjunctive-blind and even prefer to change vocabulary to use positive commands instead of using subjunctive ("Quédate" -Stay- instead of "no te vayas" -don't leave-).

I have no doubt that any pidgin has sounded horrible to the speakers of languages from which it is derived. I also have no doubt that it is mutually intelligible to its users, making it valid code.

Aesthetically, there are regional variations in English and Spanish I greatly prefer, and gravitate toward them. That has nothing to do with science, though.

A proof of that is the pig Spanish that is talked extensively in all Hollywood productions in a way it almost has replaced the real deal completely. That's why talk in pig Spanish may have translated subtitles in the Spanish speaking world or simply be ignored. Some weeks ago I watched a movie where "¿Cómo te gusta mi -Porto Rican noun not understood here-?" was translated as the correct "¿Qué te parece mi -neutral replacement-?".

Normalmente salgo corriendo.

 

[yomero]

SNIP.....

Examples of single nouns or adjectives sprinkled in the language of code switchers abound for sure. These are not borrowings" per se. Often, although an equivalent might exist in Spanish for instance, the exact English term, pronounced as in English, is preferable as a signal to others in the community that the speaker is referencing shared experience, i.e. American high school:

• El año pasado yo era un (estudiante de primer año) freshman.

(Last year I was a freshman.)

​

Whereas, common words with no real sociological implications or specialized purpose would be odd as code switches:

• ?Voy a comprar un pencil.
• *?Voy a comprar a pencil.
• But:Me voy a comprar un 3D Pen.

Mixing morphemes from two languages at the word level is not permitted. It's not clear, however, whether this is a universal principle. It may depend on the binding strength of the morphological boundary

• */I wreck+é mi carro/ (I wrecked my car), or */yo try+aba a aprender/ (I was trying to learn).

For most of my life, I've lived at the Texas-Mexico border. I went to school on the Texas side for 7 years. One thing I noticed in the speech of my Tejano classmates is that most of the time the Spanish articles and adjectives they used would agree with the gender in Spanish even if they used an English noun,

Una pen roja. Pen is pluma, femenine.
El pencil negro. Pencil is lápiz, masculine.

And they did mix the sounds of English words into Spanish.

Mopear= To mop (Trapear would be the standard North Mexico Spanish.)

My all time favorite is sanavabich .(ch at the end is pronounced tch)If you separate the word into its original components, you'll understand what it means: San av a bich.

 

[angrysoba]

My research was in bilingualism, code switching. We studied and recorded the linguistic behavior of bilingual Mexican-American kids of migrant worker families in various settings, and the analysis of their language was done within the context of the generative theory of the time. I was not in a position, nor smart enough, to invent my own theory of grammar or adopt any competing one for the purposes of the research.

The only iconoclastic claim at the time was that bilinguals, in a community of bilinguals, can develop a grammar of code switching, and that linguistic rules for the use of English and Spanish in the same sentence or syntactic structure (sometimes called code mixing) or across sentences are shared by members of the community. In other words, bilinguals do not simply switch randomly from one language to the other, mid sentence or between sentences in hopeless confusion, without any sociolinguistic or syntactic constraints. There are such things as ill-formed code switches.

A research technique that worked well for us was to read a sentence to the child, containing either a properly formed code switch, an ill formed code switch, or no code switch, and ask him to walk over to another researcher 50 feet away and repeat this sentence. Ill formed code switches were very difficult for them to remember, and they usually performed interesting "corrections" when repeating them.

...
From an interesting paper Code-switching or Borrowing? No sé so no puedo decir, you know:


Mixing morphemes from two languages at the word level is not permitted. It's not clear, however, whether this is a universal principle. It may depend on the binding strength of the morphological boundary.

• */I wreck+é mi carro/ (I wrecked my car), or */yo try+aba a aprender/ (I was trying to learn).

This is really interesting to me Olowkow as someone who is researching code-switching myself.

Some of the papers I have been reading such as by Miwa Nishimura suggest that code-switching may depend upon the linguistic properties of the languages being switched, in some cases, as she identifies some "portmanteau" sentences that can begin in English but be ended in Japanese (sometimes with the verb repeated) - SVOV. Perhaps the same type of sentence would not be possible, or would be jarring, with two SVO languages.

But another interesting paper, which I have just been reading recently seems to have been put out by the same organization, by a researcher called Riehl who talks about words such as proper nouns that could cause a "triggering effect":

http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/151ISB4.PDF

 

[Olowkow]

For most of my life, I've lived at the Texas-Mexico border. I went to school on the Texas side for 7 years. One thing I noticed in the speech of my Tejano classmates is that most of the time the Spanish articles and adjectives they used would agree with the gender in Spanish even if they used an English noun,

Una pen roja. Pen is pluma, femenine.
El pencil negro. Pencil is lápiz, masculine.

We saw a little of this in our data, but we also found counter example utterances like "el highway forty seven", for example, which would be "la carretera 47". I would think that such cases can go either way, depending on subtle influences. Though good examples for discussion, common words like "pen" and "pencil" are not likely to be subject to switching. Having said that, these are good examples of what is not a "borrowing", since the grammatical gender is attached.

And they did mix the sounds of English words into Spanish.

Mopear= To mop (Trapear would be the standard North Mexico Spanish.)

These would be considered to be "borrowings" rather than code switches in the strict sense. There are a huge number of such examples, and they may well begin as code switches which then pass into the Spanish lexicon of a particular community.

I imagine that [mope+ar] "to mop" would have been pronounced as a Spanish word with a stem /mope+/ and not as "mop" /mɑp/ in English with a Spanish suffix /ear/. If it were in fact the latter, it would be a very interesting counterexample.

That is, I would not expect English "to mop" as a code switched element in Spanish as "mopar", giving us:

• Not: *....Yo estaba mopando (pronounced /mɑp/ as in English /+ando/ as in Spanish.
• But rather: Yo estaba mopeando (pronounced /mope+ando/)

Sometimes I use as an analogy the example of a special type of onomatopoeic utterances which are actually imitations of the sounds, unlike "whoosh, boom, varoom, or honk." It is not acceptable to affix tense, number or any other morphological element to an imitation sound:

• The plane whooshed by me.
• *The plane /sound of whooshing+ed/ by me.
• His honks were annoying.
• *His /sound of honking+es/ were annoying.
• He is going to tweet like a bird.
• *?He is going to /tweeting sound/ like a bird.

It may be that separate languages behave the same way.



[/quote]

 

[Olowkow]

This is really interesting to me Olowkow as someone who is researching code-switching myself.

Some of the papers I have been reading such as by Miwa Nishimura suggest that code-switching may depend upon the linguistic properties of the languages being switched, in some cases, as she identifies some "portmanteau" sentences that can begin in English but be ended in Japanese (sometimes with the verb repeated) - SVOV. Perhaps the same type of sentence would not be possible, or would be jarring, with two SVO languages.

But another interesting paper, which I have just been reading recently seems to have been put out by the same organization, by a researcher called Riehl who talks about words such as proper nouns that could cause a "triggering effect":

http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/151ISB4.PDF

Thanks for that paper. It sure does cover a lot of territory. I broadly agree with many of her conclusions, pretty much what I was attempting to point out in previous posts. I think she captures my views in particular concerning what type of community of speakers should be described when making claims about code switching. The notions of "tagging" and "triggering" are very useful as well.

The examples such as those presented above lead to the assumption that different speakers have
different language tagging models for bilingual homophones and loans at their disposal: two lemmas,
one for each language, one shared lemma for both languages with two language tags, or only one
shared lemma without any tagging.
These findings also suggest that psycholinguistic experiments should not be conducted only with
educated people, who have acquired their second language system only later in their lives, because by
then they have also learned how to keep both languages apart. It would be interesting to carry out
lexical decision tasks with early bilingual and less well-educated speakers from minority speech
communities such as the German-speaking community in Russia (see Riehl forthc.).

 

[aleCcowaN]

We saw a little of this in our data, but we also found counter example utterances like "el highway forty seven", for example, which would be "la carretera 47". I would think that such cases can go either way, depending on subtle influences. Though good examples for discussion, common words like "pen" and "pencil" are not likely to be subject to switching. Having said that, these are good examples of what is not a "borrowing", since the grammatical gender is attached.

There's a rule in contemporary Spanish that turns all nouns borrowed from a foreign language into a masculine Spanish noun unless there is a good reason. This rule is even stronger among Mexican Spanish speakers, who make/made the +60% of the Hispanic population in the United States and are an overwhelming presence among the Hispanic communities of every state from Texas to California, where they also constitute in some aspects the historical backbone of their states (New Mexican Spanish has interesting developments as a living language evolving two centuries among la gringada). An example of this is "(la) internet" -perceived as a feminine noun because it's a net and advisably called just "Internet" because it's unique-, that is called "el internet" by many many Mexicans -among others-.

So, it doesn't surprise me they used el highway, particularly if they ignore how it is called in Spanish, what could have been probably the case. Among the dozens of anecdotes regarding speaking "Spanish" during my visit to the States, one of them was when I was been told "el *foceto", and on account of my baffled expression "el *fauceto ... ¿la *fauceta?" to no avail. Years later I learnt the word faucet and suddenly made sense of the story. So, they didn't presumably known the Spanish equivalent, grifo in Mexican Spanish, if I am not mistaken.

So a clear majority of nouns dealt as borrowings must have been turned into masculine nouns. And I can't imagine why this is not a clear startingpoint in the studies you mention.

These would be considered to be "borrowings" rather than code switches in the strict sense. There are a huge number of such examples, and they may well begin as code switches which then pass into the Spanish lexicon of a particular community.

I imagine that [mope+ar] "to mop" would have been pronounced as a Spanish word with a stem /mope+/ and not as "mop" /mɑp/ in English with a Spanish suffix /ear/. If it were in fact the latter, it would be a very interesting counterexample.

That is, I would not expect English "to mop" as a code switched element in Spanish as "mopar", giving us:

• Not: *....Yo estaba mopando (pronounced /mɑp/ as in English /+ando/ as in Spanish.
• But rather: Yo estaba mopeando (pronounced /mope+ando/)

Sometimes I use as an analogy the example of a special type of onomatopoeic utterances which are actually imitations of the sounds, unlike "whoosh, boom, varoom, or honk." It is not acceptable to affix tense, number or any other morphological element to an imitation sound:

• The plane whooshed by me.
• *The plane /sound of whooshing+ed/ by me.
• His honks were annoying.
• *His /sound of honking+es/ were annoying.
• He is going to tweet like a bird.
• *?He is going to /tweeting sound/ like a bird.

It may be that separate languages behave the same way.

Although this is nothing new at all, in contemporary Spanish a vast majority of new verbs deriving from nouns of any origin -including borrowings-, end with -ar, -ear, -izar and -ificar. Particularly, the ending -ear is the most productive as it affects nouns ending with a consonant or even nouns ending with a vowel when that vowel marks the gender of the noun, besides it unmistakably shows the word to be a verb. So, to name a few modern an English speaker can recognize (though it's older than the Quixote), we have cliquear, chatear, googlear and twitear in the Internet arena, or netear -get the net value in finances-, so mopear is one of the Spanish verbs used in Mexico, United States, Honduras, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic -and probably some others- to depict the action of cleaning using un estropajo/una fregona/un lampazo (a mop, depending on the country)

 

[aleCcowaN]

<duplicated>

 

[Olowkow]

..
So a clear majority of nouns dealt as borrowings must have been turned into masculine nouns. And I can't imagine why this is not a clear startingpoint in the studies you mention.

I agree that masculine is the default gender assigned to loanwords in many languages. In German, it appears to be more involved. I don't know very much German.

From the French:
"-té": "-tät" creates a feminine noun (e.g. "die Universität" [university]);"-aire" becomes "-är" and creates a masculine noun (e.g. "der Sekretär" [secretary]);"-eur" becomes "-eur" (or "-ör"]) and creates a masculine noun (e.g. "der Friseur" [hairdresser; barber]); (likewise, the feminine form is "-euse" [or: "-öse"]);"-ant" and "-ment" stay the same in German but become neuter (e.g. "das Restaurant", "das Appartement") The plural is formed with "-s"."-tion" stays feminine but takes an "-en" plural (e.g. "die Nation, die Nationen");"-ique" becomes the feminine "-ik" (e.g."die Politik" [politics]).

Leave it to the Germans.

The only point was, when gender of the source language is retained in code switching, not borrowing, what is going on? Is this a predictable phenomenon? Just an interesting question in bilingual circles.

http://www.enforex.com/language/vocabulary-english-loanwords.html
Note that every one is masculine.

Although this is nothing new at all, in contemporary Spanish a vast majority of new verbs deriving from nouns of any origin -including borrowings-, end with -ar, -ear, -izar and -ificar. Particularly, the ending -ear is the most productive as it affects nouns ending with a consonant or even nouns ending with a vowel when that vowel marks the gender of the noun, besides it unmistakably shows the word to be a verb. So, to name a few modern an English speaker can recognize (though it's older than the Quixote), we have cliquear, chatear, googlear and twitear in the Internet arena, or netear -get the net value in finances-, so mopear is one of the Spanish verbs used in Mexico, United States, Honduras, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic -and probably some others- to depict the action of cleaning using un estropajo/una fregona/un lampazo (a mop, depending on the country)

The default infinitival form for such borrowings is the /+ar/ type. It is hard to imagine a borrowing with /+er/ or /+ir/ infinitive. Similarly, in French, the most common is /+er/ type. /cliquer/, etc.

In order to account for these borrowings for descriptive purposes the underlying morphologial structure is more efficiently posited to be /clique+ar/, /chate+ar/ rather than /cliqu+ear/ or /chat+ear/ etc. Likewise for borrowings with /+izar/, or /+ificar/.

Otherwise, we would need a new set of person, number, and tense suffixes to generate such forms for a new /+ear/ class of verbs: /+eo, +eas, +ea, +eamos, +ean/, for instance. We would have to mark all such verbs as exceptions to the more general rule for /+ar/ verbs which are assigned /+o, +as, +a, +amos, +an/. Linguists prefer generally to invoke Occams' Razor and opt for the simpler description.

The borrowed noun is "una mopa". Compare: "una pala ==> palear" (a shovel, to shovel)

 

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In order to account for these borrowings for descriptive purposes the underlying morphologial structure is more efficiently posited to be /clique+ar/, /chate+ar/ rather than /cliqu+ear/ or /chat+ear/ etc. Likewise for borrowings with /+izar/, or /+ificar/.

Otherwise, we would need a new set of person, number, and tense suffixes to generate such forms for a new /+ear/ class of verbs: /+eo, +eas, +ea, +eamos, +ean/, for instance. We would have to mark all such verbs as exceptions to the more general rule for /+ar/ verbs which are assigned /+o, +as, +a, +amos, +an/. Linguists prefer generally to invoke Occams' Razor and opt for the simpler description.

The borrowed noun is "una mopa". Compare: "una pala ==> palear" (a shovel, to shovel)

This is just becoming intolerable. What I wrote is not my opinion. It is a fact that doesn't need me to be true. Your /clique+ar/ and others are just fantasies of yours. If you want to learn it and not play it by ear, just read Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española, a descriptive grammar, the synthesis -in only four thousand pages- of the collective work of hundreds of linguist of the 22 national academies devoted to the study of the Spanish language, developed during two decades and many international massive congresses, published in 2009 which is available on-line for consultation. You have also the aid of the Manual de la Nueva Gramática with many hundreds pages including footnotes and in-depth details, plus a bibliography that hundredfold that.

To correct what you said:

Nueva Gramática ... 4.6f; and mainly 8.3 Verbos derivados en -ear y sus variantes (I). Sus bases léxicas, 8.4 Verbos derivados en -ear y sus variantes (II). Usos traslaticios, and 8.5 Verbos derivados en -ear y sus variantes (III). Alternancias verbales. (not much, just 15 pages, as the work is a synthesis).

There's no *clique, nor *chate in Spanish. Just clic and chat. Or pinche/pique y charla. "*Mope" doesn't exist either, except as a bad translation or Spanglish in the Spanish versions of sites mainly written in English and intended to serve the Hispanic market in the States. This includes Google trying to "make sense" its way and providing mop-like result when your query contains "mope". "Mope" is likely to be birth in the Usian Spanish lexicon, that like the Filipino, Saharan and the Equatorial Guinean ones, haven't a strong enough -culturally speaking and in relative terms- base of speakers and are under the constant influence of the languages surrounding them. "Mope" is a term that any court translator in the States might need to know, but not at all a concern to any Spanish speaker in the Spanish speaking word, law abiding or not.

In my home "mop" was called "el mop", and not because we had one -no decent Argentine, poor or rich, would have cleaned something other than a freighter, a liner or a yacht using a mop-. And we called it "el mop" when we saw one in a tv-series and she whined remembering her dealing with that filthy instrument that just makes things look clean, because kitchens and bathrooms without floor drainage -and bidet- where the only thing available unless you were rich and my mother was forced to use un mop when living in Boston during the late fifties, while my father participated in the fellowship program at Lahey Clinic, and she and her Hispanic acquaintances called it that way.