General knowledge · Words & language

Loanwords in English

From the Viking age onwards

Etymology — the borrowed vocabulary of English

English has borrowed from more than three hundred languages, and only about a quarter of its dictionary vocabulary is native Germanic stock. Old Norse gave it the everyday words of the Danelaw and, unusually, a set of pronouns; Norman French and Latin gave it the vocabulary of law, government, cookery and learning; and empire, trade and science brought in the rest, from Arabic algebra to Nahuatl chocolate. The borrowings often arrive in pairs, so that a Germanic animal in the field becomes a French dish on the table.

How to spot them

▸The pig in the sty and the pork on the plate; the cow and the beef
▸Words beginning al- are usually Arabic, carrying the definite article with them
▸The sea and sailing vocabulary is largely Dutch; the law is largely French
▸Only a handful of languages have ever lent English its pronouns — Old Norse did

Key facts

Old Norse supplied they, them and their, along with sky, egg, knife, skin and law

Pronouns are almost never borrowed; the Danelaw is the reason English has these

The Norse compound meaning 'wind-eye' drove out the Old English word meaning 'eye-hole'

Window, from vindauga, replacing eagþyrel

A Czech play of 1920 by Karel Čapek gave the world its word for an artificial worker (1920)

Robot, from R.U.R.; Čapek credited the coinage to his brother Josef

Arabic supplies algebra, alcohol, admiral, sugar, cotton and zero, many still carrying the definite article

Al- is Arabic 'the'; alcohol is al-kuhl, algebra al-jabr, 'the reunion of broken parts'

Hindi and Urdu supply bungalow, shampoo, pyjamas, loot, thug, jungle and veranda

Shampoo is from cāmpo, the imperative of a verb meaning to press or knead

Nahuatl supplies tomato, chocolate, avocado and coyote

Carried into English through Spanish after the conquest of Mexico

Dutch dominates the sailing vocabulary: yacht, skipper, deck, cruise, freight and boss

The legacy of Dutch commercial and naval supremacy in the seventeenth century

A Hungarian village called Kocs gave its name to a kind of wagon, then to a carriage, then to a man who trains athletes

Coach — the tutor sense is Oxbridge slang, one who carries a student through an exam

Key ideas

Borrowing runs in layers, and the layer tells you the history. Norse words are homely and everyday because the borrowing was between neighbours; French words are formal and legal because the borrowing was from rulers.
A word can be borrowed twice by different routes and end up as a pair with different meanings: chief and chef, cattle and chattel, warranty and guarantee, hostel and hotel.

Quick-fire facts

•English has borrowed from over 350 languages; Latin and French between them account for roughly half of its vocabulary
•Old Norse gave English the pronouns they, them and their, displacing the native h-forms
•Robot entered English from Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. of 1920, from the Czech robota, forced labour
•Orange comes from Arabic nāranj, the initial n lost because 'a norange' was reanalysed as 'an orange'
•Assassin derives from Arabic ḥashshāshīn; admiral from amīr al-baḥr, commander of the sea
•Taboo was brought back from Tonga by Captain Cook in 1777; tattoo came from Tahitian on the same voyages
•Geyser is Icelandic, from the hot spring called Geysir; sauna is Finnish; anorak and kayak are Greenlandic
•Tycoon is Japanese taikun, 'great lord', applied to the shogun; honcho is hanchō, squad leader
•Juggernaut comes from Jagannath, a form of Krishna whose temple car was said to crush devotees
•Amok is Malay; ketchup is probably from a Hokkien word for a fish sauce

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

David Crystal — The Stories of English
Melvyn Bragg — The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language