Department of English
Recent Submissions
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Cannon, Garland; Kaye, Alan S. (March 5, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: The Arabic lexical contributions to the English language (2nd ed.) contains extensive additions to the main entries and their data from the original 1994 edition by Harrassowitz Verlag of Wiesbaden. It continues Cannon’s series on loans into English, refining the principles and procedures developed in the preceding German, Arabic, and Japanese books, and comprehensive articles on Mandarin Chinese, Malaysian, Spanish Turkish, and Welsh loans in English. The chief purpose is to advance the historical study of comprehensive, mainly lexical borrowing between languages in contact. The ancillary purpose is to show how a collected corpus of loans can shed light on multiple disciplines and the cultures represented therein. This wide-ranging 2007 book is the largest, most up-to-date collection of English words and multiword lexical units borrowed from Arabic, directly or sometimes through a mediating language such as Hindi or Urdu, Persian, or Turkish. All general English dictionaries were searched, particularly relying on electronic retrieval from the second edition of the Oxford English dictionary, Random House Webster’s unabridged dictionary, New shorter Oxford English dictionary, and Webster’s third international dictionary of the English language (W3’s two earlier editions were manually searched, as were smaller general collections, new-word collections, and college editions). Each dictionary entry gives its first known recorded date in written English, its semantic field, any modern variant forms and labels, etymology including ‘native’ and English meaning(s) in historical order when determinable, derivative forms including functional shifts and compounds, sometimes a grammatical note, the principal symbolized sources where the loan is recorded, and the degree of naturalization based on the procedure developed by Cannon. The Introduction and an essay that analyzes the loans by history and semantics are mainly reproduced from the 1994 edition, treating the 35 semantic fields so as to throw light on the individual field and make the book useful for specialists in religion, cloth(ing), the military, politics, rugs, botany, language, and linguistics, ethnology, etc. So is the final essay, which analyzes the data linguistically, with special attention to language sources, grammar, and variant forms, in order to cast more light on how languages interact and ultimately influence each other’s culture. URI: http://handle.tamu.edu/1969.1/4510 Files in this item: 0
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Cannon, Garland (December 7, 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: Sax Rohmer (the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959) was one of the most widely read pop authors in the English-speaking world in the 20th century. His Fu Manchu first appeared in "The Zayat Kiss," in the British magazine Story-Teller (October 1912), followed by the novel The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in 1913. After World War II Rohmer changed this sinister Chinese arch-criminal into a heroic anti-Communist. Further thrilled by radio versions, feature films, stage plays, television series, and even a Marvel comic book, millions of readers have shuddered in Rohmer's auras of tomb robbers, ancient Egyptian demons haunting asp-infested tunnels beneath the pyramids, voodoo rites and zombies, and vampires, communicated by carefully selected eastern lexical borrowings. In 1951 he introduced the glamorous witch Sumuru as a female Fu Manchu in five well-received novels. URI: http://handle.tamu.edu/1969.1/2820 Files in this item: 0
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