Chereads / Super English / Chapter 13 - 13. Words are Adopted

Chapter 13 - 13. Words are Adopted

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.