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Barbarisms

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Barbarisms 

foreign words and expressions used in speech to describe realia, customs, and so forth of other peoples. Barbarisms may be incompletely assimilated by a language (semantically and sometimes even morphologically and syntactically). As a rule, they are used to express local color in designations of proper nouns (Jean, José), money (dollar, centime), posts and types of people (curé, mayor, gangster), details of everyday life, clothing, decoration, food, or titles (castanets, siuzane, redingote, sherbet, sir), and so on. They are also used to achieve a comic effect (“Avoue, don’t you have a connaissance with some sort of Frenchman?”—D. I. Fonvizin) and, in cases of foreign words, in the hope of displaying one’s education. Among barbarisms, exoticisms—descriptions of realia, usually taken from non-Indo-European languages such as giaour, aul, shalwar—are sometimes distinguished.

V. V. RASKIN



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And in the good days coming, when John Barleycorn will have been banished out of existence along with the other barbarisms, some other institution than the saloon will have to obtain, some other congregating place of men where strange men and stranger men may get in touch, and meet, and know.
And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand barbarisms of every sort,--what has become of that charming little bell tower, which rested upon the point of intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work.
 
 
 
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