The most common words that languages borrow from each other
are nouns, words for things, probably since it's fairly straightforward
to point at an object, say the word for it,
and have the other person understand that’s what you’re talking about.
Things like "fire" or "chicken" are easier concepts to communicate
than, say, "awesome" or "the",
and probably more immediately useful for trade and the basics of living.
Also, there are so many things that humans give different names to.
So if you go through a list of loanwords into a particular language,
lots of them will be creatures and objects
that speakers of that language would never have encountered at home.
That’s the first of the two main ways that words get moved between languages:
as loanwords.
Through most of history, people would go to a new place,
ask what the name of a local thing is, get a response,
and then start calling the thing that name.
Sometimes, though, the word they were given wasn't a name so much as a
description of what the thing was, or a category.
We don't know the exact derivation, but some North American languages
use a word like "pakan" for any hard nut.
But it became the English word for the "PE-can" nut. Or "pe-CAN" nut.
The Arabic word /sˤaħ.raːʔ/ for "deserts" became the English word
specifically for the Sahara Desert. So the Desert Desert.
Which keeps happening! Matcha tea is "powdered tea tea".
The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are "the ‘the tar’ tar pits".
Timor Leste is East the East.
There’s even the Milky Way Galaxy,
galaxy comes from the Ancient Greek "gala" meaning milk,
presumably because it looks like milk spilled across the sky?
There’s a lot of these!
And that’s if the translation stays intact!
There’s a Tupi word, mbokaʔẽ́,
which describes a way of cooking meat over a fire,
that was borrowed into French as "boucan."
Someone who used that method of cooking meat because they were,
say, on a long voyage, was therefore a "boucanier,"
or in English a "buccaneer".
Or the word for a king in Persian, /ʃɑːh/, was eventually
borrowed over and over again
across multiple languages over centuries of trading
to arrive in English as the words "chess" and "check".
And "shah," of course.
Sometimes we borrow a word that we already have,
it’s just travelled by a different route
and been changed in two different ways!
Those are called doublets.
"Grain" and "corn" both come from the same Proto-Indo-European root,
one directly inherited through English's Germanic roots,
and one through Romance languages.
"Ward" and "guard" both come from French at different times.
And "anime" comes from Japan, which borrowed "animation" from English!
Often, when a word’s being borrowed, the grammar doesn’t quite work out,
the new language keeps the other bits that are clinging on,
called affixes and clitics,
and those get baked into the loanword itself.
Loads of words in English that start with al- come from Arabic.
Albatross comes from al-ġaṭṭās, "the diver".
Algebra from al-jabr, which originally meant healing and resetting broken bones
The term for this is "rebracketing".
My favourite is admiral,
which is said to come from amīr-al-mā "commander of the water"
and amīr-al-bahr "commander of the sea".
So "admiral" is sort of "commander of the",
and then we just lost what they were commander of.
But English received those loanwords from French,
which might have got them from Latin?
So every time they moved language they got… well, remodelled a bit
as speakers adapted them to sound local.
Because of course we do!
Iif I suddenly go all Spanish mid-sentence for something like "Puerrrrto Rrrrrico",
I either sound pretentious or foolish
or claiming to be a lot better at Spanish than I actually am.
I’m also going to use that as an excuse
for all my appalling pronunciations of non-English words in this video.
I’m sorry to the rest of the world.
..there’s a British sentence.
So those are loanwords.
The second way that words get translated across languages is much simpler,
and those words are called "calques".
This is where a word is divided into its component parts,
each of which then gets translated.
The most well-known example is "skyscraper".
In the first half of the twentieth century,
many languages were suddenly in need of a word
to describe buildings that are really, really big.
Now, tall sails on a ship were already called ‘sky scrapers’,
two words, and it’s possible that’s where the word for the buildings came from,
it got hyphenated and then combined over time,
like a lot of words do.
But even languages who never had the concept of ‘sky scraper’ sails
just translated the two parts.
And that leads to my favourite bit of this whole thing:
loanword is a copy of the German word for the concept, Lehnwort.
It has its two parts separately translated and joined back together.
Calque, on the other hand, is borrowed directly from French.
It means "to copy or trace".
Which means that "loanword" is a calque,
and "calque" is a loanword.
If you want to know more about this, then my co-author Gretchen McCulloch
has an entire episode of the podcast "Lingthusiasm" about it,
the link is in the description.