This is of course one of the glories of English—its
willingness to take in words from abroad, rather as if they were refugees. We
take words from almost anywhere— shampoo from India, chaparral from the
Basques, caucus from the Algonquin Indians, ketchup from China, potato from
Haiti, sofa from Arabia, boondocks from the Tagalog language of the
Philippines, slogan from Gaelic. You can't get much more eclectic than that. And
we have been doing it for centuries.
as long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from
more than fifty other languages—a phenomenal number for the age. Sometimes
the route these words take is highly circuitous. Many Greek words became Latin
words, which became French words, which became English words. Garbage,
which has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was
brought to England by the Normans, who had adapted it from an Italian dialectal
word, garbuzo, which in turn had been taken from the Old Italian garbuglio (a
mess), which ultimately had come from the Latin bullire (to boil or bubble).
Sometimes the same word reaches us at different times, having undergone
various degrees of filtering, and thus can exist in English in two or more related
forms, as with canal and channel, regard and reward, poor and pauper, catch and
chase, cave and cage, amiable and amicable. Often these words have been so
modified in their travels that their kinship is all but invisible. Who would guess
that coy and quiet both have the same grandparent in the Latin quietus, or that
sordid and swarthy come jointly from the Latin sordere (to be soiled or dirty), or
that entirety and integrity come from the Latin integritus (complete and pure)?
Occasionally a single root gave birth to triplets, as with cattle, chattel, and
capital, hotel, hostel, and hospital, and strait, straight, and strict. There is at least
one quadruplet—jaunty, gentle, gen-tile, and genteel, all from the Latin gentais—though there may be more. But the record holder is almost certainly the Latin
discus, which has given us disk, disc, dish, desk, dais, and, of course, discus.
(But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon root, bear, has given birth to more
than forty words, from birth to born to burden.)
Often words change meanings dramatically as they pass from one nation to
another. The Latin bestia has become variously biscia (snake) in Italy, bitch
(female dog) in England, biche (female deer) in France, and bicho (insect) in
Portugal.
We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after
our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we've
absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not
use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally
"light of hand"), or R.S.V.P. for repondez s'il vous plait. (Instead they write:
"Priere de repondre.") The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al
fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.
Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can be a surprise
to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our word puny was once the
Anglo-Norman puis ne or that cur-mudgeon may once have been the French
coeur mechant (evil heart), or that breeze, so English-sounding, was taken from
the Spanish briza, or that the distress signal mayday was lifted from the French
cry m'aidez ( meaning "help me") or that poppycock comes from the Dutch
pappekak, meaning "soft dung"? Chowder came directly from the French
chaudiere (cauldron), while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian
expression banca rotta, meaning "broken bench." In the late Middle Ages, when
banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets.
When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up.
Sometimes the foreign words came quietly, but other times they needed a good
pummeling before they assumed anything like a native shape, as when the
Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and the Amerind
raugroughcan became raccoon.
This tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common. In New
York, Flatbush was originally Vlacht Bos and Gramercy Park was originally De
Kromme Zee. British soldiers in World War I called Ypres Wipers and in the1950s, American soldiers in Japan converted the song "Shi-i-Na-Na Ya-Ru" into
" ne Ain't Got No Yo-Yo."
One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon
noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not
fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique
in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other
such pairs are mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/
lunar, son/filial, sun/solar, town/urban. This is yet another perennial source of
puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was
adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say,
earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.
Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues—deriving at least half
of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock—others have been even
more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 percent of the
words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 percent. A
final curious fact is that although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans
clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no
language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German. Among the
very few are kindergarten and hinterland. We have borrowed far more words
from every other European language, and probably as many from several smaller
and more obscure languages such as Inuit. No one has yet come up with a
plausible explanation for why this should be.