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68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
🕑 Added 2022-05-20 00:44:57 +0000 UTCWhen societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about borrowing and loanwords. There are lots of different trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to language, including words that are associated with particular domains, like tea and books, words that shift meaning when they language hop, like “gymnasium” and “babyfoot”, words that get translated piece by piece, like “gratte-ciel” (skyscraper) and “fernseher” (television), and words that end up duplicating the same meaning (or is it...?) in multiple languages, like “naan bread” and “Pendle hill”. We also talk about the tricky question of how closely to adapt or preserve a borrowed word, depending on your goals and the circumstances.
Announcements:
The LingComm grants have been announced! Thank you so much to everyone who made this possible, and congratulations to all our grantees. Go check out their projects as they keep rolling out over the rest of this year for a little more fun linguistics content in your life.
In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded live through the Lingthusiasm Discord, we get enthusiastic about your sweary questions! We talk about why it's so hard to translate swears in a way that feels satisfying, how swears and other taboo words participate in the Euphemism Cycle, a very ambitious idea for cataloging swear words in various languages, and more.
For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/684727483493384192/episode-68-tea-and-skyscrapers-when-words-get
Comments
So my colleague, a Spanish L1 speaker, would always says. "Calle te" when I related a story about some outlandish behavior. I wondered if this, "shut up," was an English borrowing or did people all across Mexico use "calle te" in the same way? Was this Spanish that only a bilingual could speak?
I'm thinking about the language only bilinguals speak. I've lived most of my adult life in bilingual contexts, first in Germany, then and Canada, and for the last 25 years in Arizona. I notice that when I speak a mixed code "Spanglish" with bilingual colleagues, I'm often using English syntax with lots of Spanish lexical items. Whole phrases or clauses get borrowed too, but fundamentally I'm speaking a weird sort of English.
