Our language sucks up foreign words like a vacuum. For example, English took over 1,700 loanwords from French. Loanwords are words adopted from one language and incorporated into another without translation; they simply become part of that vocabulary as-is. English has given words to other languages too, especially in the modern technological era, with things like “email,” “computer,” and “mobile.” That’s not a new phenomenon, and it’s not just tech. After Friday, the French enjoy le weekend. In an ironic twist, the word “loanword” itself is borrowed from German, but it’s not a loanword. It’s a “calque,” or loan translation: a word or phrase that borrows its meaning from another language by translating into existing words in the target language. For example, “commonplace” is a calque of Latin locus commūnis.
The examples of words in English borrowed from French, German, Spanish, and Italian are ridiculously numerous. This is hardly surprising due to the close geographic ties that the countries and, therefore the languages, traditionally share. These cousin countries are by no means the only languages that have contributed words. Ombudsman, ski, and smorgasbord arrived from Scandinavia. Icon and vodka arrived from Russia. Avatar, karma, and yoga are Sanskrit words.
German
German has given us words of many types, but food words are by far the largest category: knackwurst, liverwurst, noodle, pumpernickel, sauerkraut, pretzel, and lager. There are also science-y words, like feldspar, quartz, and hex. It has even lent us the names of some dogs, not only the obvious dachshund, but also poodle, which I would have laid money was French. A great deal more German words came over during the last century, on account of those pesky world wars. That’s when we got blitzkrieg, zeppelin, strafe, and U-boat, but also another round of food words, like delicatessen, hamburger, frankfurter and wiener, bundt as in the cake, spritz as in cookie, and strudel. And let’s not forget about kindergarten for the children and Oktoberfest (which is actually September) for the adults.
Thanks, Germany!
German used to be the second most common language in the US. It was so prevalent that entire city governments operated in and school systems taught exclusively in German. That was prior to WWI. When the war started, official use of German was phased out in a hurry.
Dutch
We have the Dutch to thank for many familiar nautical terms. Avast, boom, buoy, commodore, cruise, dock, keel, reef, skipper, smuggle, tackle, and yacht are all Dutch words, as are freight, scoop, leak, scour, splice, and pump. If you work with fabric, you have certainly had your spool run out at a bad time. The mother tongue of Van Gogh also gave us easel, etching, landscape, and sketch. War pops up yet again in the form of holster, furlough, onslaught, and others. Let’s go back to food, where Dutch gave English the words booze, brandy, coleslaw, cookie, cranberry, crullers, gin, hops, and, of course, waffle. (An aside, not only are terms like “Dutch treat” and “Dutch courage” not loan phrases, they are old-timey, sarcastic insults, so let’s try to stop using them.)
Hindi
How much Hindi do you know? A lot more than you think. You wake up in your bungalow with its chintz curtains, change out of your pajamas, and into your dungarees and fetching bandana, because you are all about that thug life, until you realize you forgot to shampoo your hair and no one put away punch from the party last night. But you are fierce, you are a juggernaut. You hop on your train to the city for your day in the concrete jungle.
African Languages
Speaking to African languages as a broad group, which they are, English has taken the words banana, banjo, boogie-woogie, chigger (nasty, little tick-like things), goober (a.k.a. peanuts), gorilla, gumbo, jazz, jitterbug, jitters, juke (as in -box), voodoo, yam, zebra, and zombie.
Native American Languages
Lumping another vast and diverse group of people’s languages into one paragraph are the loanwords from North American natives. There are hundreds or even thousands of place names that use the words of the people that were driven out of them: Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatchewan (which boasts a town called Moosejaw), and the names of more than half the states of the US, including Michigan, Texas, Nebraska, and Illinois, even though it looks French. (The city of Detroit is French; it means “the narrows.”) Native American languages also gave us the food words avocado, chocolate, squash, pecan, potato, tomato, chili, and cannibal. There are animal names like chipmunk, woodchuck, possum, moose, and skunk. Plus canoe, toboggan, moccasin, hammock, hurricane, tobacco, tomahawk, and the turtles known as terrapins.
And now I’m hungry.
A brief detour for the word, squaw. You may have cringed when you read it. “ ‘Oh no,’ you say to yourself, ‘Squaw is a slur, like calling a Roma person a G*psy.’ ” That’s not wholly true, though. First and foremost, regardless of what a word is, where it came from, or what it meant originally, if that word is being used as an insult, then it is an insult. There are those who use the word squaw to demean Native women. That aside, people believe that squaw is inherently insulting because they have been told it comes from the Mohawk ojiskwa, a vulgar word for female genitalia. This etymology is highly unlikely, since in the Algonquin language family, squaw simply means “woman” or “young woman.” It was in no way pejorative and was even used in missionary translations of the Bible. It can be seen in that context in writings dating back to the 1600s. There is a movement in some Native American communities to reclaim the word and remove the stigma. As one Abenaki woman writes, “When our languages are perceived as dirty words, we and our grandchildren are in grave danger of losing our self-respect.”
Oy Vey!
Arguably, the best language to season the stew of English is Yiddish. Let’s start the explanation of what Yiddish is by telling you what it is not. Yiddish is not Hebrew. Though they are both historically used by Jews, share an alphabet that contains no capital letters, and are read from right to left, they are not the same language. One reason the two get mixed up in people’s minds is that Yiddish speakers usually learn to read Hebrew in childhood, since holy texts and prayers are written in classical Hebrew. However, this form of Hebrew is markedly different from the modern Hebrew spoken in Israel. You can think of Yiddish as the international language of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, who typically spoke it in addition to the dominant language in their area. Yiddish is referred to as mame loshn, or “mother tongue.” The word “Yiddish” is the Yiddish word for Jewish, so while it is technically correct to refer to speaking Yiddish as “speaking Jewish,” it is inadvisable to do so. At its height less than a century ago, Yiddish was understood by an estimated eleven million of the world’s eighteen million Jews. Now, due largely to WWII, three times more people speak Hebrew than Yiddish. Fewer than a quarter-million people in the United States speak Yiddish, about half of them are living in Texas. Just kidding, they are in New York. Where else was it going to be? In recent years, Yiddish has experienced a resurgence and is now being taught at universities, and there are Yiddish Studies departments at Columbia and Oxford.
Now, let’s get to the Yiddish you are speaking without even knowing it. To quote Bill Murray in the holiday classic Scrooged, “The Jews have a great word—schmuck. I was a schmuck. Now, I’m not a schmuck.” Schmuck is a word for the male member, as are putz, schvantz, and schlong. You use one of those to schtup. If you think I am being too bold, you might give me a slap on the tuchis. What can I say? I’ve got a lot of chutzpah. And it kills me to hear people say “chootspah.” Oy vey. When you see the ch, give it a hhhh sound. We should go out for a drink and a nosh, maybe a bagel and a schmear. Can you pay? I’ve got no money, bupkes. And can we drive? The coffee shop is a bit of a schlep. Nice place, I had a meeting there when I was trying to schmooze a new client. I go through my whole spiel and I am super nervous, feeling like a yutz. Finally, he says “Yeah, I like your shtick.” I don’t think I could work at a coffee shop, though.