You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English.
Challenge accepted: "The stoic young man bid us au revoir and left"
The thing is, English borrows so much from other languages that it's not apparent to English speakers that the words are from other languages.
...
et cetera (etc)
id est (i.e.)
videlicet (viz)
sic
and that's just Latin.
Think about Schadenfreud, Bon appétit, Au revoir, Macho, Amigo, Kindergarten, Uber, Gesundheit, Smorgasbord, Apartheid, Trek...
Honestly, the list goes on and on and on. English speakers use more "borrowed" phrases and words than any other language I can think of.
I won't actually consider these wholesale expression borrowings part of English until they spread to English speakers who don't speak the borrowed language.
It's really noticeable for me because when speaking English I've subconsciously adopted a British accent, but when using English loan words in German I'll automatically pronounce them in a very German way.
Oh, I'm not sure about that. I say "Kaffay", that is I anglicise the French pronunciation, even though I have a reasonable French accent. But many English people pronounce it as "Kaff".
That should be "Über", really, shouldn't it?
I don't know, I've never used the service, but the vowel-sound "Ü" doesn't occur in native English. I guess most people just say "Oober" and be done with it. To me, "Über" looks like a foreign word, not an import. In English, I think it's used only as a brand-name, and as part of the word "Übermensch", a term associated with a particular philosophy book.
In German, the german word "über": [ˈyːbɐ]
In German, the company "Uber": ['uːbə]
In English, the company "Uber": [ˈjuːbə]
As made famous by "the trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur", attributed to GWB.
What you do is using phrases and words that you learned without speaking the language they're borrowed from. Sometimes borrowing words even limits the meaning, when you say "Gesundheit" you don't mean the general concept of health, you mean "bless you". If I asked you to translate et cetera you would probably not be able to unless you spoke Latin.
Edit: That was such an eureka moment I feel like it should be something of a cliché.
QED (Quod erat demonstrandum)
Your point about "genetically french" is also wrong in almost exactly the same way so it provides an illustrative comparison. There's no single french ethnicity, just people who are french and some observable trends. Someone is french who has french citizenship, a word is english when it is widely spoken by native english speakers.
I also need to point out that this is not a matter of opinion. Linguistics is an established field and consensus is clear on this. You are confidently asserting things that are well outside the mainstream of the science.
There are absolutely genetic groupings of people. Any geneticist will tell you so. You can learn more here. https://medium.com/nautilus-magazine/what-both-the-left-and-...
Adiós amigo.
However this word is part of the English lexicon today and require no knowledge of French, and as such isn't an example of code switching
Imported vocabulary/borrowed words simply describes loanwords that make it into the common lexicon of speakers of the receiving language but not necessarily speakers of the donor language.
There is a distinction, however, that not all words that are used via code-switching are going to become part of common enough vernacular that it would become accepted within a language, and likewise, there may be cases where loanwords do not enter a language via speakers that code-switch it into their daily vocabulary.
But kindergarten is imported the whole world over. You can't say you know German based on that. Code-switchers understand the grammar of both languages, not just a few words.
I do think the Normans entering England, or Germanic peoples mixing with Celts, or Celts being conquered by Romans for a brief time -- all of that probably produced code switchers in their moment in time, with lasting impact to our vocabular and grammar. But it's not code switching anymore. It's modern English now.
Similar things happened in Spain with Celts, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Basques... Not to mention all the regional Romance languages that survive today (Galician, Catalan). They conquered the Americas and got some infusion of that vocabulary too. Castilian borrows vocabulary from all of these. But monolingual Castilian speakers do not "code switch".
You also know a little bit of Indian language you yogurt guru.
You don't have to be aware you're using words from other languages to be speaking words from other languages.
Adiós amigo.
When the first person used "hotel" in an English sentence, they were struggling to find a suitable word and failed, and fell back to another language for it. Or possibly they thought it was a better word than the English equivalent for some reason. They thought of it as a French word, with all the implications of it in French, rather than English.
When I use "hotel" in a sentence, it's just part of the language I grew up with. To me, it's an English word, not something I fell back on in another language.
That said, the "Spanglish" referenced here is being learned from birth by people, so they aren't context switching either. They're just speaking how they learned to speak. Older people are probably still context switching, but younger people likely aren't.
Borrowing might have started out as code switching, or something else, but when you use words borrowed a long time ago from Y in language X, people who know X but not necessarily Y will probably understand you. There are of course technical terms that you might use which not everyone will understand. Some of these will have been borrowed from another language, like electron or perigee or perihelion, while others might be words made up and not borrowed, like quark or boson or fermion. The fact that some were borrowed, and others not, does not make the one code switching and the other something else.
And if you're code switching, you'll probably be pronouncing the words from language Y with the expected pronunciation of Y, whereas if you're using words borrowed from Y into X, they will probably be pronounced differently from how they would be pronounced if you were code switching into Y (or just speaking Y), and the semantics may have changed. Take the word 'mesa' in English, describing a flat-topped hill in the southwest. If you're a non-Spanish speaker, you'll probably pronounce that last vowel as a schwa, and only have the flat-topped hill meaning in mind. Whereas if you code switched into Spanish, that last vowel would probably sound like the /a/ in 'father', and you might be talking about a table.
"Alpha and Omega" as used in English is a biblical reference, does not really have much to do with practical knowledge of Greek.
Du jour would be understood on a restaurant menu for soup more than anything else.
The alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. It's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a Biblical reference to the Almighty. And then du jour means "of the day".