Description
‘Proteus’ is an episode of edge cases. Today’s dilemma: loanwords.
As the cockle pickers pass Stephen on their way from the shore-line, he thinks to himself:
She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. (U 3.392–93; my emphasis)
How would we encode this multilingual description in which translations for the verb ‘to drag’ from Yiddish / German (shlepn / schleppen), French (traîner), and Italian (trascinare) have been ‘Englished’ or anglicized†in Stephen’s interior monologue?
†OED has intr. to coin an English word by borrowing from another language (rare).
None of these non-standard words is italicized in the reading text so we’d put an @rend="none"
attribute on our tag. But what element does the Guidelines suggest for loanwords? <foreign>
is clearly out of place, since Stephen is borrowing from non-English languages into English (he applies English verb conjugation to his borrowed verb forms). Cf., in this vein:
Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag (U 3.32; my emphasis)
I’m sure this phenomenon is not limited to ‘Proteus’ or to Stephen’s interior monologue. If we start to encounter it all over the corpus, it might be worth marking up.