![]() For instance, Nikolai Anderson (1879: 125 > Junttila 2005: 16) contested the Baltic loanword etymologies by Ahlqvist (1871) simply by referring to supposed cultural superiority: while the ancestors of the Finns ruled the legendary realm of Biarmia in the Far North, the Balts still "paid their taxes to Russian princes in sauna bathing whisks". ![]() Cases in point can be found in the earlier history of the research of Indo-European loanwords in Finno-Ugric (see e.g. Thus, lexical borrowing may be interpreted as proof of cultural inferiority or dependence, which leads to loanword research being either suppressed or instrumentalised for political goals. This paper will present some examples of how ideologies and (ethno)political preconceptions may influence loanword research: (i) According to the so-called "prestige determinism hypothesis" (based on Adolphe Pictet’s seminal idea that the borrowing of a word indicates the borrowing of the corresponding concept), loanwords should travel from cultures on a "higher" level to their "lower-level" neighbours rather than vice versa. ![]() ![]() However, the same connections also make loanword research susceptible to ideological pressures. Thus, it can provide valuable connections to other historical disciplines and contribute to the chronologies and localisations of linguistic reconstructions. Laakso, Johanna (Universität Wien) Loanword research, alongside historical semantics, connects the history of a language to the ethnocultural reality in which the language users lived.
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