Phono-Semantic Matching
Phono-Semantic Matching (henceforth, PSM) is a camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign lexical item is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root. The neologism resulting from this source of lexical expansion preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the reproduced expression in the Source Language (SL) with the help of pre-existent Target Language (TL) elements. (Neologism is used here in its broader meaning, i.e. either an entirely new lexical item or a TL pre-existent word whose meaning has been altered, resulting in a new sense.) The following figure is a general illustration of this process:
Such multisourced neologization is common inter alia in two key language groups:
(1) languages using a phono-logographic script that … ↪