Inlinguistics,semantic loan is a process (or an instance or result) of borrowingsemantic meaning (rather thanlexical items) from anotherlanguage. It is very similar to the formation ofcalques, excepting that in this case the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning isextended to include another meaning that is already possessed by its counterpart in the lending language. Semantic loans are often grouped roughly together with calques andloanwords under the phraseborrowing.
Semantic loans often occur when two languages are in close contact, and they take various forms. The source and target word may becognates, which may or may not share any contemporary meaning in common; they may be an existing loan translation or parallel construction (compound of corresponding words); or they may be unrelated words that share an existing meaning.
A typical example is the French wordsouris, which means "mouse" (the animal). After the English wordmouse acquired the additional sense of "computer mouse", when French speakers began speaking of computer mice, they did so by extending the meaning of their own wordsouris by analogy with how English speakers had extended the meaning ofmouse. (Had French speakers started using the wordmouse, that would have been a borrowing; had they created a new lexeme out of multiple French morphemes, as withdisque dur for "hard disk", that would have been a calque.)
Another example, in this case propelled by speakers of the source language, is the English wordalready. TheYiddish word for the literal senses of "already" isשויןshoyn, which is also used as a tag to express impatience. Yiddish speakers who also spoke English began using the English wordalready to express this additional sense in English, and this usage came to be adopted in the larger English-speaking community (as inEnough already orWould you hurry up already?) This sense ofalready is therefore a semantic borrowing of that sense ofshoyn.
Some examples arise fromreborrowing. For example, Englishpioneer was borrowed fromMiddle French in the sense of "digger, foot soldier, pedestrian", then acquired the sense of "early colonist, innovator" in English, which was reborrowed into French, adding to the senses of the wordpionnier.[1]
Typical semantic loans also include the Germanrealisieren. The English verb "to realise" has more than one meaning: it means both "to make something happen/come true" and "to become aware of something". TheGerman verbrealisieren originally only meant the former: to make something real. However, German later borrowed the other meaning of "to realise" from English, and today, according toDuden,[2]realisieren also means "to become aware of something" (this meaning is still considered by many to be anAnglicism). The wordrealisieren itself already existed before the borrowing took place; the only thing borrowed was this second meaning. (Compare this with a calque, such asantibody, from the GermanAntikörper, where the word "antibody" did not exist in English before it was borrowed.)
A similar example is the German verbüberziehen, which meant only to draw something across, before it took on the additional borrowed meaning of its literal English translationoverdraw in the financial sense.[2] Note that the first halves of the terms are cognate (über/over), but the second halves are not (ziehen/draw).
Semantic loans may be adopted by many different languages, as [computer]mouse has been. As another example, each ofHebrewכוכבkokháv,Russianзвездаzvezdá,Polishgwiazda,Finnishtähti,Chinese明星míngxīng, andVietnamesesao originally meant "star" in the astronomical sense but have acquired from English thesememe "star", as in a famous entertainer.[3] In this case the words are unrelated (save for the Russian and Polish words), but share a base meaning, here extended metaphorically.