Name: How languages steal words from each other
Uploaded: 2025-03-20T10:25:11.000Z
Duration: 5 min 4 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

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.

様態の副詞

Things like fire or chicken are easier concepts to communicate than, say, awesome or the, and probably more immediately useful for trade in the basics of living.

程度の副詞

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 pecan nut, or pecan nut.

The Arabic word saharaha for deserts became the English word specifically for the Sahara Desert, so the desert, desert.

The La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles are the, the tar, tar pits.

Galaxy comes from the ancient Greek gala, meaning milk, presumably because it looks like milk spilled across the sky.

And that's if the translation stays intact.

There's a Tupi word, mboké, 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, shah, 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.

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 long word itself.

Loads of words in English that start with al come from Arabic.

Albatross comes from al-ghatas, the diver.

Algebra from al-jabr, which originally meant healing and resetting broken bones.

My favourite is admiral, which is said to come from amir al-ma, commander of the water, and amir al-ba, 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 long words 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.

If I suddenly go all Spanish mid-sentence for something like Puerto Rico, 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.

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 20th 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 skyscrapers, 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 skyscraper sails just translated the two parts.

And that leads to my favourite bit of this whole thing.

Lone word is a copy of the German word for the concept, linvort.

It has its two parts separately translated and joined back together.

Directly from French, it means to copy or trace.

Which means that lone word is a calque, and calque is a lone word.

If you want to know more about this, then my co-author Gretchen McCulloch has an entire episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm about it.