Folk Etymology
International Words
Hebrew Words in English
Borrowings from Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Other Languages
With the beginning of England’s colonial expansion in the XVI th - XVII th centuries many words penetrate into the English vocabulary from the languages of colonial countries.
Indian - bandana, calico, cashmere, chintz, jute, bungalow, jungle, khaki, loot, nirvana, rajah, rupee, shampoo.
Malayan - bamboo, gong, gutta-percha, orang-outang
Chinese - ginseng (life-root), nankeen, kaolin, bonze, serge.
Japanese - geisha, harakiri, riksha, jiu-jitsu, kimono, samurai.
Australian - boomerang, kangaroo
Polynesean - tattoo, taboo
African - baobab, chimpanzee, gnu, gorilla, guinea, negus
Egyptian - pyramid, fustian
The languages of North-American Indians - hickory, moccasin, hominy, oppossum, racoon, skunk, squaw, toboggan, tomahawk, wigwam.
English contains a certain number of Hebrew words; most of then came due to the influence of the Hebrew text of the Old testament, or to the Rabbinical students: “amen”, “behemoth” (this Hebrew word is perhaps of Egyptian origin), “cabala”, “cherub”, “elder” (through French, Latin and Greek), “cinnamon”, “ephod”, “gehenna” (through Greek), “halle lujah”, “hosanna”, “jew”, “jubilee”, “leviathan”, “manna”, “Messiah”, “Pharisee”, “Rabbi”, “Sabacth”, “Sabbath”, “sack”, “Satan”, “seraph”, “shibboleth”, “Talmud”.
Many English and American words are now completely international, not merely understood but spoken and published around the world. Among the most familiar of these, universally employed on every continent, are:
baby-sitter, bar, bridge (the game), boyfriend, best seller, bikini, bulldozer, bus, beefsteak, cafeteria , cocktail, cow-boy, flirt, gangster, goddam, hamburger, hot dog, ice cream, jazz, juice, jeep, knockout, night-club, party, racket, sandwich, scooter, shorts, sex appeal, steak, taxi, whisky, weekend. It goes without saying that for years Okay has been a universal expression of assent. Here and there certain American trade names have achieved international status as generic terms: e.g. public opinion polls are now generally known throughout Europe as gallups; stockings are nylons; and any paper tissue is Kleenex.
Foreign words when adopted into English need to be assimilated. Sounds in foreign speech that are strange to English speech need to be fitted into the English scheme. There is ever present the disposition to fit the strange elements into familiar word molds, involving, in many instances, strange distortions. Thus French words and phrases recast in English form produced strange effect. There were some attempts to connect unfamiliar words with known meanings.
In the earlier history of words evidence of this tendency is everywhere to be found. The influence of buzz is to be seen in the transformation of O.Fr. busart (Latin buteo) into buzzard. Surround goes back, through the French to a late Latin superondare (onda, “Wave”) to overflow, to deluge but is influenced in form by the word round of unrelated origin. Cutlet in origin is not related to cut, cut comes through the French, from the Latin Costa meaning “rib”, and, therefore, means literally “little rib”. The French gentil has been borrowed into English four successive times, and has assumed in English four different forms with four different meanings as: gentle, gentile, genteel, and jaunty. Rosemary goes back, through the French, to Latin Ros Marinus, “sea dew”. Mushroom has nothing to do with room but comes from the O.Fr. mouscheron which is derived from mousse, “moss”. Buckwheat comes from the Dutch boekweit, “beech-wheat”, a name the relation of which to this kind of grain is readily apparent. The cockroach is the Spanish cucaracha cast in an English word mold. Crayfish and crawfish represent two stages in the process of folk-etymologizing. The word comes into English in the Middle English period in the form crevice from the O.Fr. crevice.
The last element is first converted into fish and then the first element is changed to crab in order to associate the form with the familiar mode of locomotion of the animal. The O.Fr. crevice (Mod.Fr. ecrevisse), is of Germanic origin, O.H.G. chrebiz. The Germanic word appears in modern German as Krebs and in English as crab (O.E. crabba).
Salt is a redundant element attached to cellar in saltcellar, since cellar in this case is falsely transformed from earlier seler, which goes back, through the French, to the Latin saliaria, feminine for saliarius, “of salt”, and itself means a “salt receptacle”.
In some instances the misinterpretation involved in folk-etymology provides the basis for further word building. The word lark, in the sense “frolic”, “spree”, probably goes back to the OE lac, meaning “dance”, “play”. The merriment plausibly becomes associated with the glee of the lark, and on the basis of this poetic reading of the word, a superlative form, skylarking, makes its appearance as a name for “frolic”. The words standard is derived through the French estendart from the Latin extendere, “to spread out” and, therefore, applied originally to the meaning “flag” and is still applied as the name for the flag of a cavalry regiment. It became erroneously connected with the meaning “stand”, involving change in meaning as well as in form. There is connection between this meaning mistakenly read into the word standard, and the use of the seemingly synonymous word platform in American politics as the name for the body of principles upon which a party stands. In the same way older samblind (O.K. sam, “half”, cognate with Latin semi) becomes converted into sand-blind. Popular reasoning is that if sand-blind means half blind, complete blindness is expressed by the word stone-blind.
The word rarebit, in the phrase Welsh rarebit, results from the attempt to read meaning into the common phrase Welsh rabbit, which is in reality a product of popular humour having many parallels, such as digby chicken for smoked herring; folkstone beef for shark; deep sea turkey for codfish; Alabama wool for cotton; Irish confetti for bricks, bog orange for potato.
Folk-etymologizing is a process associated, as the name itself indicates, with the unlettered class. In the XVI-th century abominable was often written abhominable from the erroneous idea that the word was composed of Latin ab+homine “from man”. The form of the word corporal rests on false learning. In reality it is derived from a Latin caporalis (Latin caput, head), a form represented by the French caporal, it took its English form through the influence of the word corporal (Latin corpus, “body”), or of the word corps.
In a similar way the forms of many common English words reflect an attempt to show the derivation of English words from Latin originals. Debt and doubt which had come into English through French, and which were dette and doute in Chaucer’s language, were changed in spelling by the insertion of a “b” in order to show the relation to Latin debitom and dubito respectively. Other words which were treated in a similar way were subtle (sotil), arctic (artik), receipt (receit). The “l” in such words as fault, assault, cauldron, which does not appear in the earliest English forms of these words derived from the French, owes its insertion to the effort to make English words conform to supposed Latin originals. The same is true of the “d” in words such as advice and adventure (avis, aventure), the “qu” in liquor (licour, lykor), the -ure in leisure and pleasure (layser, plesur).
Such efforts often lead to mistakes. For instance, in island (M.E. iland, meaning “water land”), the “s” was inserted in order to show the supposed connection with isle (from Latin insula), and rhyme (Chaucer, rime), was re-spelled so as to show the imagined relation to rhythm. Scissors (M.Fr. sisoures, O.Fr. cisoires), gets its initial sc- from its supposed derivation from the Latin verb scindere, “to cut”.
The ending -gue apparently of French origin and belonging to words such as vague, vogue, catalogue was applied inappropriately to several English words: tongue (tonge) and rogue (roge).
The process of folk-etymology is a popular form to attempt to bring about uniformity and system into the language.