## Borrowings

Lexical borrowings or loanwords provide an interesting object of study by themselves
(see for example [The World Loanword Database](http://wold.clld.org/)), but they
also play a role for cognate detection algorithms, where it is typically important
to distinguish between cognates due to borrowing and cognates due to inheritance.

Conceptually, borrowings are the 
[associative entity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_entity) 
linking two rows in the `FormTable` of a [wordlist](../../modules/Wordlist).
Thus, CLDF provides a borrowing table, with the default description
[`BorrowingTable-metadata.json`](BorrowingTable-metadata.json).

A `null` value for the `sourceFormReference` marks missing knowledge about the source word
(or donor language). In this case, a `Comment` should be used to describe the available
knowledge.

Often datasets will add a column specifying reliability levels of the loan assessment
(e.g. WOLD's ["borrowed score"](http://wold.clld.org/terms#borrowed_score)),
but no common encoding scheme for such levels has been conventionalized yet.

## Borrowings

Lexical borrowings or loanwords provide an interesting object of study by themselves
(see for example [The World Loanword Database](http://wold.clld.org/)), but they
are of great important for historical linguistics and computational approaches 
where it is important to distinguish between cognates due to borrowing and cognates due to inheritance.

Conceptually, borrowings are the 
[associative entity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_entity) 
linking two rows in the `FormTable` of a [wordlist](../../modules/Wordlist).
Thus, CLDF provides a borrowing table, with the default description
[`BorrowingTable-metadata.json`](BorrowingTable-metadata.json).

A `null` value for the `sourceFormReference` marks missing knowledge about the source word
(or donor language). In this case, a `Comment` should be used to describe the available
knowledge.

Often datasets will add a column specifying reliability levels of the loan assessment
(e.g. WOLD's ["borrowed score"](http://wold.clld.org/terms#borrowed_score)),
but no common encoding scheme for such levels has been conventionalized yet.

Make the spec broader here -- not just for computer geeks.
Make the spec broader here -- not just for computer geeks.