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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I think the point of the parent comment is that, although English is full of borrowed words and phrases, you're not switching to speaking French/German/Latin while saying them. You're still speaking English, it's just a subset of English which was borrowed from somewhere.

You can define it that way, and sure, there's a certain difference when we borrow phrase bits from languages we don't actually understand and use them as an expression (inter alia, et cetera) and when we do. But the latter also happens when bilingualism is common.

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.

The people who originally used these words were switching. It only became accepted by English speakers much later.

> 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.

As made famous by "the trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur", attributed to GWB.

I had a conversation with a colleague last week, he's a native French speaker, I'm a native German speaker. We switched between French, German and English, every time we had a problem expressing what we wanted to say in a language and then continuing the conversation a little in another language before switching again. That's a form of code-switching.

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.

I'm bilingual in English and German, but when I use "Kindergarten" or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English, while when I use "Sorry" in a German sentence, that's still German.

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.

I notice this as well working with my Dutch colleagues as an American. They’ll be discussing some bit of code and all of a sudden need to reference a programming concept or a class name that is English in origin and they will use their own accent. If I then come back to talk to them later about the same thing, it will have a different accent when we are speaking English together.

Words are assimilated to greater or lesser degrees. I'd say that au revoir is now English, as I'd expect any competent English speaker to understand it, but it's still commonly written in italics and pronounced in a noticeably French accent. Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised and not really registered as foreign at all, but that pesky accent remains in the written form, giving a clue to its soupçon of French (the truly English form of the word is probably caff).

> Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised

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".

> or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English

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.

So there's three pronunciations I'd use.

In German, the german word "über": [ˈyːbɐ]

In German, the company "Uber": ['uːbə]

In English, the company "Uber": [ˈjuːbə]

But at one time Kindergarten was code switching and was still firmly German. It only became common English after first being used as a German word dropped into English sentences. It still remains a German word no matter how familiar that German word is to English speakers.

Yeah this is an interesting one. We don't really have a good English equivalent for "guten apetit" or "dobrou chuť" but bon appétit feels like the most well-known loan phrase that could stand in. "Enjoy your meal" appears to be sort of popular in restaurants (i.e. the server will say it to you) but it sounds so cold and weird to me. I really wish we just leaned into bon appétit instead.

I think "bon appétit" has more of a "tuck in" flavour than "Enjoy your meal".

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