Wanderwort | Hacker News Reader

Wanderwort

en.wikipedia.org

66 pointsbenbreen45 comments

A very recent example is “yogurt” of Turkish origin.

Yogurt was virtually unknown in the world outside of the Ottoman empire.

Even a hundred twenty years ago, there were European travel records about this mysterious yogurt which could be consumed in large quantities without adverse effect and which was so different from the already known sour milk.

During the collapse of the empire, a Jewish Ottoman resettled to Spain and took the yogurt with him. He would administer it to people suffering from gastrointestinal problems. Eventually this yogurt proved extremely popular and he founded a yogurt company named after his son that was born in Spain, Daniel who was known by the pet name of Danone.

The introduction to America happened similarly. Ottoman citizens (Armenians etc) that were fleeing the collapsing empire brought it to America and retained the Turkish name as Turkish was their lingua franca. Also comparable with pastrami from the Yiddish language which derives from Turkish “pastırma”, pressed meat.

Hmmmm...

> Yogurt was virtually unknown in the world outside of the Ottoman empire.

You mean the word “yogurt”, I guess, because this is not true otherwise. Some quotes from the Wikipedia article on yogurt (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yogurt&oldid=1081...):

> [yogurt] is thought to have been invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC. In ancient Indian records, the combination of yogurt and honey is called "the food of the gods". Persian traditions hold that "Abraham […]

> The cuisine of ancient Greece included a dairy product known as oxygala (οξύγαλα) which was a form of yogurt. Galen (AD 129 – c. 200/c. 216) mentioned […] Pliny the Elder […]

> Until the 1900s, yogurt was a staple in diets of people in the Russian Empire (and especially Central Asia and the Caucasus), Western Asia, South Eastern Europe/Balkans, Central Europe, and the Indian subcontinent. […]

> Dahi is a yogurt from the Indian subcontinent […] derived from the Sanskrit word dadhi […] Dadiah or dadih is a traditional West Sumatran yogurt made from water buffalo milk, fermented in bamboo tubes. Yogurt is common in Nepal […]

(And so on; I stopped quoting…) It's pretty universal and ancient; mentioned even in the Vedic literature. And a common food too: as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Curd_rice&oldid=1... says, it is (with rice) consumed ”at the end of almost every South Indian meal”.

> a Jewish Ottoman resettled to Spain

Today I learned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Carasso

Pastrami is Turkish too? Those Ottomans knew how to eat! You know what else is Ottoman and nobody knows? Steamed dumplings (baozi). People think they're Chinese, but there's a clear Ottoman transfer lineage through Central Asia to Tibet and Mongolia as well as China.

"Thank you for the language, horse barbarians, here, have some dumplings as a token of our gratitude"

"Those Ottomans knew how to eat!"

Very important rider - the rich or well-off ones did. Peasants, who were the greatest majority, subsisted on a lot of cheap bread/rice with a very little meat or other protein thrown in, and suffered malnutrition.

Source: experience.

Take away this one point, that when people talk about the food/cuisine of some country, they're likely talking about what the top few percent ate, which was beyond what the plebs had access to. Not always, but something to consider.

The first Wanderwort I learned was when I visited France and someone told me that the windows at the top of a ceiling (from the side) are called "vasistas". The term meanwhile seems to be used only for the round small windows primarily. [1]

So literally at some point a German guy came to France and asked "What's that?" and it made it into being the standard word for it in the language.

There's also a list of German words used in other languages on wikipedia which I found quite interesting. I bet there must be one for all sorts of languages [2]

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_in_an...

The Polish "wihajster" is a similar case. It comes from German "Wie heißt er? [What's his/its name?]" and refers to a nameless thing. https://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung/polnisch-deutsch/wihajs...

>So literally at some point a German guy came to France and asked "What's that?" and it made it into being the standard word for it in the language

Makes me think of the various rivers Avon -- so named because Roman cartographers, labelling rivers, accost Celts about what that there is called. The Roman expects a name, but the Celt replies with the word for river in his language: "avon". Is there a term for this? Or better still, a curated list on Wikipedia?

While on rivers... Ribble, Ouse, Humber and probably others all apparently mean river as well

Salsa is similar in the sense that it just means sauce in Spanish but it was borrowed into English as the word for a very specific condiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...

Might be what you're looking for.

Obligatory Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

As a German myself, reading "vasistas" an then seeing where it comes from (Was ist das) is acutally hilarious

Oida! Vasistas! Leiwand!

Reminds me on the (incorrect) origin story of kangaroo. https://www.woot.com/blog/post/the-debunker-where-does-the-w...

Which reminds me of the gavagai thought experiment illustrating the inscrutability of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscrutability_of_reference#Ga...

But why is this a Wanderwort? The article describes it as "a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade". What you say is just a word that was taken up from German by a couple of neighbouring countries. In that case virtually all words would be like that. This aside, of course it's a fun story...

The cardboard roll inside a roll of toilet paper is called a "der-der"... because when you're a kid you walk around the house saying into it "der-der".

My favourite example: the Latin word musa ‘banana’, which originates from New Guinea of all places. It was passed language by language through Indonesia, India and Arabia to eventually end up in Europe. [Source: https://www.academia.edu/25619010/Things_your_classics_maste...]

That's amusing as I recently had some kind of international French banana expert weigh in to re-identify a wild banana I photographed in Hainan. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/105789401

As a 53y old German living in Germany I had to look up "Wanderwort".

Because in German that's a "Lehnwort" --- a "loanword".

And it means that's a word everybody uses and it came from some other language, like all the examples in this thread and in the post.

When I was a kid we also spoke about the "Fremdwort", "foreign word" which is a word where there also is a "native German word". However as there are so many corner cases, "Fremdwort" came out of fashion, rightfully so, in linguistic circles.

So the difference of "loanword" and "Wanderwort" is that the latter is a loanword in a number of other languages.

TIL...

Edit: oh sweet: the google ngram viewer has NO occurence of "Wanderwort" up to 2019. amazing.

"Another example is orange, which originated in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam), and whose likely path to English included, in order, Sanskrit, Persian, possibly Armenian, Arabic, Late Latin,[citation needed] Italian, and Old French."

Which leaves me with the question of what word was used for the color orange before the current word was imported. Or was there simply no word for the color previously? Does not having a word for a color change one's perception of the color?

I remember hearing in a podcast or reading once (it was a long time ago) that in Homer's Odyssey the word "blue" never occurs. Instead objects we would typically think of as blue are described strangely, like the ocean being "wine" colored. Judging by that, I'd guess the answer to question is "yes" but it'd be interesting to hear more on the subject.

Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black (dark–cool) and white (light–warm). Languages in Stage VII have eight or more basic color terms. This includes English, which has eleven basic color terms. The authors theorize that as languages evolve, they acquire new basic color terms in a strict chronological sequence; if a basic color term is found in a language, then the colors of all earlier stages should also be present. The sequence is as follows:

Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than just English "black" and "white".) Stage II: Red Stage III: Either green or yellow Stage IV: Both green and yellow Stage V: Blue Stage VI: Brown Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange, or gray

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I read the same fact in "through the language glass" by Guy Deutscher.

> what word was used for the color orange

I once answered this question for Polish [0]:

1. Find the Latin word for the color orange: "luteus".

2. Find Polish words corresponding to the Latin word in a scanned Latin-Polish dictionary from 1644.

3. Find Latin words corresponding to the Polish words in the Polish-Latin volume of the dictionary.

4. If new words found, GOTO 2

The main answer was "fawn", the color of deer. Besides "yellow-red" and "red-yellow", other words were based on red pine mushroom [1], fox, honey, fire, saffron, and gold.

[0] https://oslowach.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/jak-sie-przedtem-n...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactarius_deliciosus

At least in Swedish the word "orange" for colour is a recent import. That color was called "fire yellow" (brandgul) when I was a child.

with reference to your second question, you can listen to this podcast:

https://lingthusiasm.com/post/157327666801/lingthusiasm-epis...

There is also this frequently quoted book (I haven't read it yet): Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour your World by Guy Deutscher

About your last questions, I recommmend "through the language glass" by Guy Deutscher

I think "ketchup" (also catsup) is one as well.

Derives from kecap (Malay) or "keh jup" (Cantonese). Or my guess is probably both.

One element of this seems to be a tendency to make explicit words or phrases whose meaning is not immediately apparent. Look at the use of acronyms too: ATM machine (Automatic Teller Machine machine) ISBN number International Standard Book Number number) SCUBA gear (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus gear)

The ISBN example is one where anyone using the acronym knows exactly what it stands for, yet there's still a tendency to add the 'number' at the end.

I think of this as something like a weak force in language.

When I travelled to the Philippines, I was amazed at how sausages were called "longganitsa", which is connected to how they're called not in Italian, but in the half-dying northern Italian dialect my grandparents spoke, "luganega". Turns out it comes from Latin "lucanica", i.e. referring to its origin in the southern Italian region of Lucania. From Latin it went into Spanish, and from Spanish to Filipino during colonization. I also found the same word in Greek.

Would the name for a bovine classify as a "Wanderwort"?:

  Sanskrit: Ghou  
  English: Cow  
  Danish: Ko  
  German: Kuh

Or is it more of an indication of the Indo-European relationship between the languages?

Only if it travelled through the languages afaiu. Sounds more like a common root to me, which wouldn't be a wanderwort.

Thanks, that makes sense.

No, that would be an inherited word (most likely, I didn't look it up).

It can be both. This word is old enough that it was significantly affected by the evolution of languages. But since some non-Indo-European languages have words that sound similar (the Chinese ones, in my uneducated opinion), it could indeed initially have been a Wanderwort.

My sister in law is Thai and it really seemed so wild that the term they use to describe Europeans was probably borrowed 800 years ago and refers to a long gone historic European empire from the Middle ages.

Vauxhall apparently impressed a visiting tsar. So it may be a loan word flying West to East instead of East to West.

(A Russian might have to confirm if this is slang, albeit old fashioned, for a railway station)

Random fact: the name of the Star Trek race Ferengi stems from the Wanderwort "Farang" (=Foreigner).

The word Farang actually derives from the Franks, so it (at least originally) refers to Europeans.

(Added later:) The word "foreigner" is unrelated, it derives from Latin, so from before the emergence of the Franks.

I like how the Manchu word for horse kind of looks like a horse.

That’s actually caused by incorrect rendering: Manchu text should be written vertically, but Wikipedia seems to wrongly render it as horizontal text (at least for me).

On the other hand, the Chinese character 馬 does look very horse-like, and this isn’t a coincidence at all, since the character was designed that way.

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