Loanwords from English to Malay in the Field of Mathematics

Four samples of mathematical terms were chosen randomly from the indexes of four tertiary level mathematics textbooks. The mathematical textbooks were selected to cover a wide range of mathematical knowledge. The translations of the terms into the Malay language were found, and by comparing the English terms with their Malay equivalents, the latter were sorted into different categories of loanword type. A chi-squared test was performed to discover if there was a difference between the four samples, in terms of the predominance of different types of loanwords amongst them. No significant difference was found between the four mathematical subject areas in terms of their tendencies towards different types of compound loanwords. This is in contrast with the case for single-word loanwords, where strong evidence was found for a difference. In particular, the language of Calculus and Analysis tends to produce non-loanwords or semantic extensions more often than that of Algebra or Statistics. There was also a difference between Algebra and Statistics in terms of their proportions of orthographically assimilated loanwords. Another test was performed which revealed that mathematical terms generally have different tendencies from those observed in the language as a whole. Mathematical loanwords tend to be more similar to their English equivalents than do general terms. This result has a high degree of statistical significance.