ABSTRACT
An unusual kind of word coinage has been noted when speakers of some Australian languages name a concept new to them. I am not aware of any published description of the type, let alone an analysis, and ironically it has not so far been blessed with a name. For now it could be dubbed the dingo ~ bingo type, drawing on an instance in western Cape York Peninsula. That is when elderly speakers of the Yir Yoront language began to call the game of bingo by the local ‘dog’ word kur-marrvm, because one English equivalent of the word is dingo, and that word has sufficient sound similarity with bingo.
Haugen’s 1950 classic provides a framework for understanding the range of processes involved in various kinds of synchronic lexical transmission from one language to another. While he did not recognise the particular combination in the dingo ~ bingo type, we can apply his terminology to recognise it as a type of loanshift he called a loan homonym, where a word acquires a new meaning which ‘has nothing in common with the old’. However, it does so by a different route from those of Haugen’s examples. Similarly, Zuckermann’s detailed case study of lexical enrichment in a contact situation shows how words can have various hybrid origins, though not extending to the dingo ~ bingo kind.
In the common run-of-the-mill type of loanword, there is homology between the phonetic forms of the source and the loan; and also between their denotations. In the dingo ~ bingo type an existing word W of the borrowing language (e.g. kur-marrvm) acquires an additional sense (‘bingo’), driven by the homology between the sound of two English words: the source word (bingo) and an English equivalent of the primary sense of W (dingo, in the chosen example). The process is akin to rhyming slang, although across two languages.
So far only a handful of instances have come to my attention; the others are in adjacent languages of northern central Australia. The instances have several properties in common: 1) there is a repurposing of an established word to denote a newly encountered and unrelated concept; 2) speakers of the borrowing language are to some extent shifting to (a local variety of) English, while retaining competence in the ancestral language; 3) in at least some instances, there is an accompanying playfulness. A parallel is drawn with a phonological aspect of a few handsigns in the alternate sign languages of the region.
