(by Lorie Codispoti)
English is my first & only language. I know how complicated it can be for others to learn English so I’m very grateful.
I understand that language is inherently dynamic, with words that are always evolving. We see that when we compare dictionary versions. But did you know that up to 80% of our English words are made up of words borrowed from other languages? They are called loanwords & some of them feel like they snuck across the border & invaded our lexicon without even consulting Noah Webster.
The ones that I’ve had the most difficulty with are those we’ve borrowed from the French language. (We’ve adopted approximately 80,000 loanwords from them.) Without the benefit of translation or context I am at a loss to decipher.
“I do not think it means what you think it means.” (Inigo Montoya)
Perhaps your iocaine powder is different than mine & comes from another continent, but my guess is that everyone has had a loanword deficiency they’ve had to contend with at some point.
What's fascinating is some of the loanwords we get wrong on a regular basis.
Starting with the French word, “duvet.” It means “cover.” Most of the time we hear “duvet cover” used, as if duvet were an adjective to describe the kind of cover we are talking about. In reality we are saying, “I found a nice ‘cover cover’ for my bed.”
That’s not the only one that we misuse either.
We say, “I enjoyed a nice cup of ‘chi tea’.” Well, “chi” means tea in Chinese, so we just talked about having a cup of “tea tea.”
Have you ever eaten or made Naan bread? Since “naan” means bread, you just repeated yourself again.
These redundancies can be embarrassing (Don’t ask me how I know that.) when we realize what we’ve actually said. We sometimes add the word we are familiar with to clarify and/or emphasize what we mean. We might tell our friend, “I am going to the cafe’ for coffee.” You guessed it... cafe’ means coffee.
In our attempt to sound all sophisticated we end up demonstrating a linguistic side effect by repeating ourselves in two different languages.
One has to laugh when one discovers they are more like a talking parrot than a walking dictionary when they say things like “Sahara Desert,” “Lake Tahoe,” and “ahi tuna.”
Perhaps I’m more bi-lingual than I thought I was.
If you want to talk about more loanwords you can find me under my duvet sipping on a cup of chi.
Bring a dictionary!
