Hacker News Reader

Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Related to that, it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries, especially what I would call "technical" terms.

I was watching the subtitled video of a speech made by a Hungarian minister recently and the few words that I could make sense of were all similar to the their French counter-parts (or how I would think a French technical word loaned into Hungarian would sound like). Ditto for German, even more so, I'd say. Russian, too.

In fact even a word that we've now stopped regarding as "technical", such as bicycle [1], comes in English via modern French (so not via the French spoken by the Normans back in the day):

> Borrowed from French bicycle (modern bicyclette), from bi- (“bi-”) + cycle (“cycle”). First attested in English in 1868, and in French in 1847.

View on HN

Hungarian actually had a language reform in the late 1800s to remove foreign words and replace them with pure Hungarian equivalents. These days though, quite a few loanwords have crept back in. I'm not sure if the Latin-based words actually came via French or via English. And there are very many Slavic loan words in Hungarian too, and some Germanic ones. My favorite loan word in Hungarian is "vásziszdász" from German "Was ist das?", it's used to mean deal, as in "not a big deal", "nem egy nagy vásziszdász".

Interestingly, that German phrase also has its application in French: the word Vasistas [1], used to refer to roof windows. Ended up completely different than both German and Hungarian versions.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasistas

> I'm not sure if the Latin-based words actually came via French or via English

Or via anything else, really. E.g. the word for car "kocsi" seems oddly similar to Spanish "coche" (I think French would be voiture) and "tombola" to mean "bingo" seems Italian (french/english should be raffle, I think).

Coach/coche/kocsi all come from Hungarian. There is a Hungarian town called Kócs. Kócsi literally means "(a thing) from Kócs". Hungary used to sell some horse drawn carriages made in Kócs and from there, the word entered German and then English.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kocs

ah, TIL, thanks!

A related one I like is “vonundzu” which I guess you’d have to spell as “fanencú?” I’ve never seen it spelled, but it’s dismissive slang for aristocrats both real and self-appointed.

It has the same meaning in German.

I would say borrow from latin and greek: bi- from latin bi- meaning twice [0] cycle from greek kyklos meaning wheel [1]

[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bi-?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bicycle

But that’s only because French (but also English) coin words by mixing latin and greek (and making the spelling more French). The modern Greek word is completely different.

Many languages in Europe derive from Latin and ancient Greek, that does not mean that the english bicycle derives from the French word.

Also there were no bicycles in ancient Grece, that's why the word is different in modern Greek, but kyklos is still a greek word with the same meaning.

>Related to that, it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries, especially what I would call "technical" terms.

And in other areas, like the arts (from painting and photography to film and the novel), legal, and political terms. That's because France in those past 2-3 centuries was a huge power in Europe and globally, along with the UK).

For France, this ended with WWI and was a done deal with WWII but there was still some momentum up to the 70s.

So it was kind of like countries today copy US terms, fashion, politics, music, etc.

Yup that's where the term "lingua franca" comes from.

Actually, lingua franca originally refereed to a pidgin bridge language (also called Sabir) in use mostly by sailors and traders in the Mediterranean Basin. While it also borrowed from French, it was mostly based on Italian dialects from what I read. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

The "Franks" in lingua franca refers to all Western Europeans collectively, it's not actually about the French.

Etymologically. In the last 2-3 centuries it was used referring to French.

Sure, but the name of the language (lingua franca) originates much earlier, when it referred to (Western) Europeans in general.

This has been fun to observe in Slovenia.

Old words come from German, because we were part of AustroHungary. Old-but-reformed words come from Czech, because in the 1800's we wanted to stop being so Germanic. Somewhat old words come from Serbo-Croatian, because we were part of Yugoslavia. Modern words come from English, because internet.

So we have a language where words you use around the home are often germanic, jokes and swear words are south slavic, and anything to do with computers is english.

Plus a few French words here and there from the time of Napoleon.

English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your doctor.

... and Old/Ancient Greek. When you see -phth- you know you are in for a right old tongue twister. Not human but fish related: ichthyophthirius. In English it's called "white spot" - both of those words are very Anglo-Saxon.

Spanish is considered a "Romance" language, along with French, Italian int al. English is considered a "Germanic" language along with German, Dutch int al. English alone has at least three major periodic based "versions" - Old, Middle, Modern. There were also events such as a major vowel change where the way we pronounce vowels today differs from before that event.

Spanish seems to have a famed "lisp". However that simplistic approach to a complex language and Spain as a whole ignores rather a lot of history, culture and is frankly an insult! As we say in Britain - "Viva la difference".

English as spoken in Britain and elsewhere should borrow and bother from every language it ever trips over. It should always evolve and mutate and continue to become ever more flexible. It should also continue to enable useful "pidgins" which are amalgams of English bolted on the side of another language and vice versa.

What English seems to have lost compared to the other Germanics is a lot of formal complicated verb conjugations and nounal declensions and noun genders and quite a lot more. Complexity can be bolted on but it is optional. Subject object verb is also quite fluid too in English. I believe German at least insists on a verb dump at the end of a sentence. English still has many of these structures - active, passive, subjunctive verbs (transitive, intrans etc); Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl for your nouns but they are largely implied via other words instead of suffixes.

English is quite literally and vocally French!

(lingua franca - language of the Franks)

> Spanish seems to have a famed "lisp". However that simplistic approach to a complex language and Spain as a whole ignores rather a lot of history, culture and is frankly an insult! As we say in Britain - "Viva la difference".

Spanish does not have a lisp. During the medieval age, in the territory that would be called Spain in the future, there were several dialects (or "norms") of Spanish. One of them pushed for seseo (no /θ/, "th" as in think) and other for a combined approach. The latter was chosen by a king (Alfonso X the wise), and the rest is history.

However, all dialectal varieties are accepted by the RAE (Royal Academy of Spanish) jointly with the Spanish Academies of the American Continent regulates the language (like the Académie française for the French language).

So, in Seville (Spain) most people does not use the /θ/ sound, as in Venezuela, for example.

To sum up, please stop saying "Spanish has a lisp" because it has the same "lisp" than English or other languages with the sound /θ/.

It's quite systematic. Latin was the language of medicine. When they switched to English, or other local languages, they kept a lot of jargon. Religion and government and academic areas are similar.

Some of it is a social division that originates back to the Norman conquest of Britain. The guy in the field would call a cow's heart (the Old English equivalent of) a cow's heart. The lord would call it the (Norman French equivalent) of coeur de beouf. His doctor or priest would probably speak French or English but would write in Latin. Cordis bovem (or something I don't Latin).

From this mishmash modern English has cow, beef, bovine, heart, cardiac (Greek but clearly influenced by Latin cor). The original Anglo-Saxon word for cow, beef from French to refer to the meat of cow, and bovine from Latin, the fancy adjective. So even now a thousand years later, an overwrought academic writes of a cardiac arrest experienced by a bovine (Graeco-Latin), while in normal speech we might say the cow's heart gave out (Anglo-Saxon).

Something like "nephropathology induced by neurofibromatosis" was/is a sort of guild jargon or cant. It just means kidney disease caused by fibrous tumours of the nerves disease. Of course, you then lose the precision. How I put it is not unambiguous like neurofibromatosis is. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.

Cow - said by the Anglo-Saxon serf that would rear it. Beef - said by the Norman noble that would eat it. Same with deer/venison, pig/pork, sheep/mutton.

Same with English, but not only European languages. Just yesterday I was listening to a woman speaking Tagalog and quite a few words almost certainly came from English.

Well, weren't they colonized by the Americans for a while, too?

> it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries

You see this a lot with modern Greek. As an example, appointment is ραντεβού, and elevator is ασανσέρ.

Rome first, the descendants of Charlemagne second, and William the Conqueror. “English” didn’t have a chance.

I mean Rome came first everywhere, William the conqueror came from Norsemen, which means Normandy was where the Vikings settled there. Pretty much all of Europe has had this kind of multiple conquests different language groups percolating everywhere - but English is the one that chose this model of how to handle it.

Which model?

the model laid out in the quote:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34960928

Ah, English is not exclusive in that. It's the language acquisition model of all languages from what I can tell.

What English had and still has, and say, Romanian, doesn't, is the wide exposure.

Romanian was traditionally spoken in the region of Romania, so Eastern Europe, with some interaction with Central Europe, Southern Europe, Even-More-Eastern Europe, the Middle East. So those are the influences, plus some recent additions from international languages such as French or English.

English, on the other hand, was needed to describe and interact with Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Souther Europeans, Native North Americans, Pygmys, Indians, Native Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Incas, Ethiopians, etc and their associated environments and lifestyles.

If you saw curry, you needed to either come up with a word or adopt theirs. Or avocado. Avocado wasn't even a word in Romanian until 2000-something, I'm quite sure.

ok most languages do that, take another language word in, but I think English has the habit of turning things into metaphorical phrases, adjectives, adverbs and the like for the things it imports.

Admit I can't come up with an example at the moment though.

Something like "mesmerizing" coming from the German person named Mesmer?

That also happens in other languages, too, but English has a great affinity.

I think that's just drive by English having, what, 40-50 sounds? Which is quite a lot for a language, and English speakers having a huge aversion towards words with many syllables. 1 is perfect, 2 is okish, 3 is a lot, 4+ is an abomination.

So they tend to import anything they can pronounce and is under 3 syllables.

It’s been known for some time that English started as a pidgin language, but some recent linguistic analysis suggested that it wasn’t a pidgin once, but twice. And that’s why it’s particularly messy.

Despite another responder’s assertion that William the Conquerer was Norse, the fact is that he spoke French. So you had a ruler who didn’t even speak English, and a ruling class that was familiar with French.

Which, by the way, is why English names for animals and their meats are such a mess. For the most part the peasants raised the animals and the aristocracy ate them (still an era when protein deficiency limited the upward mobility of peasants). So animal names are from one linguistic root and meat names from another. Sheep/mutton, cow/beef, pig/pork,ham.

Borrow is an odd word to use here "loan word": even odder, just a bit posher (why is it posher? is loan more posh than borrow? really?)

* when do I have to give it back?

* Is it "by permission"

* do I have a library card limit how many I can borrow?

* can I borrow from the 'enfer' shelves? (there's a loan word...)

I'd say "steal" is a better fit. The word isn't coming back. Capice?

If I steal your bicycle, but you still have it, then is it really stolen?

loan has the explicit give back property. thats what a loan IS:

'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back.

taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words.

the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais to police loanwords, and nobody gets to say loan or borrow words are bad, and that better ones exist: they are what they are.

I'm really just howling at the moon. (I wonder if howl and moon, in some sense are loan words from latin, or anglo saxon)

Well, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it's not that unusual for a loanword to disappear from the language it was borrowed from and then wind up reintroduced in some form to the original language.

Pho would be a good example. Its Viet Nam's adoption of "pot au feu" from the french, then back imported into French as Pho, along with everywhere else when the indochine community brought it along for the world.

And of course, British English has both pot au feu and pho.

I am told that Bistecca in Florentine, is the pre 1871 ununified italy, adopting "beef steak" from the english, and then exporting it as a speciality dish to the world as italian food went global.

howl is so clearly old English it's funny (well Middle English but I call it old because I am not a pedant or professional). Moon is also old English but it is related to other words from other languages and comes from some far off proto language. So moon doesn't give the same feeling of look at that old timey word that howl does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com