Putting languages into perspective: A comprehensive database of English words and their Croatian equivalents
Putting languages into perspective: A comprehensive database of English words and their Croatian equivalents

Summary/Abstract: Numerous studies have addressed the issue of English words in the context of their adaptation, butthere still exists the need for a systematic perspective on English words in terms of their number and frequen-cy of appearance. This article will outline the procedure behind the compilation process of unadapted Englishwords in the Croatian language with a comprehensive description of the final product – an open-access databaseof single- (SWE) and multi-word (MWE) English expressions extracted from Croatian web corpora (ENGRI andhrWaC) by means of computational-linguistic tools and manual extraction. The final version of the databasecontains 2,982 English words in their unadapted form (e.g. blockbuster), and 18 words which appear with Englishorthographic properties in combination with Croatian inflectional affixes (e.g. downloadati). Each SWE and MWEentry in the database is accompanied with frequencies of appearance in both corpora as well as its Croatianequivalent where available (29.58% of all entries are listed without an equivalent). The database serves as the firstsystematic representation of English words in Croatian and provides an indispensable tool for further researchinto the phenomenon while at the same time opening the door to a new line of research – cognitive processingof English words in Croatian.

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