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Eating lunch in a working man's restaurant in Hong Kong I hear mostly Cantonese but with occassional English words, "passion," for example. Borrowed words or loanwords surely tell us something important about ideas or concepts that the first language lacks. Most loanwords are for things (e.g. mouse for a computer device), it's pretty easy to explain the adoption of such words. But what about words for which the thing has always existed but not the word? Chinese speakers tell me that there is a word for love but passion is more difficult to translate.

What are some of the major conceptual loanwords? What do loanwords tell us about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? What loanwords does English need? There appears to be a large literature in linguistics on the adoption and evolution of loanwords but less on the cultural significance of loanwords.

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babblers are a pretty polyglot lot. Suggestions?

[ 28 June 2008: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

[ 28 June 2008: Message edited by: melovesproles ]

"She has a certain 'je-ne-sais-quoi'..."

"Nice" or "likable" etc. just don't quite cut it. We need a word to describe people who are, well, sympa.

ETA: Of course, there's tingo, a word from the Pascuense language of Easter Island meaning "to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left". How many times have you wanted to use that one?

From The Meaning of Tingo, by Jacot de Boinod.

[ 28 June 2008: Message edited by: unionist ]

Another French word is "complicité" or "complice" - it has nothing to do with complicity with war or fascism, or accomplices in crime. It is like being "thick as thieves"....

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Originally posted by lagatta:
There are many German compound words I love, and in a related language, a lot of incredible Yiddish words...

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Yeah, like the classic:

Nu?

It has one or two main meanings, similar (but not equivalent) to:

So? Cat got your tongue? What do we do now? What's happening?

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I heard one today: "butiner," which means "to gather nectar" as bees do.

Mme. Bong and I were checking out the flowers and bees in the yard when she asked me what word we anglos have for this. I said, "I dunno, go from flower to flower picking up pollen, I guess."

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Yeah, I've been teaching English in Spain and I've gained an appreciation for how instead of using specific verbs, we use a verb plus a preposition and an adverb. It doesn't bother native speakers at all but its a pain in the ass to teach.

It helps you teach them efficiently, and is a handy way of making your students' speech and writing sound "more English". I had an ESL/ELT student who was a truck-driver and he used such formal French verbs that he would have seemed a snob to colleagues in the RoC and the US. We had a lot of fun in that group.

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So the perfidious English took all their words, stripping their language bare, or are you referring to something else?

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Even the study of Anglo-Saxon is a study of how the Germans and Vikings were influencing the language. Along came the Norman conquest, and presto! French starts influencing the language in a big way (see: Chaucer).

Development of Latin as the Lingua Franca meant that English became peppered with some Latin-based words, and some people tried applying Latin grammar rules to English (can't split an infinitive; can't end a sentence with a preposition).

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Even the study of Anglo-Saxon is a study of how the Germans and Vikings were influencing the language. Along came the Norman conquest, and presto! French starts influencing the language in a big way (see: Chaucer).

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I once did a study of the first few stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and found that many of the words used originated in Old Norse, Old German or Frisian. English has always borrowed words.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
Just to bring back the point of the OP. English indeed has many, many loanwords that were borrowed to represent concepts/ideas that couldn't be expressed using the existing English vocabulary.

The question is: can anyone suggest words from other languages that represent ideas/concepts that the existing English vocabulary cannot?

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El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.

Amandla Nga Whetu!

__________________________

In Spanish there is a word that Ernest Hemingway made use of in The Old Man and the Sea. I have never heard of such a word in English.

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He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad ...

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Why doesn't English have such a word?

[ 03 August 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

[ 29 August 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
In French, we have two words for the time before noon each day: "matin" and "avant-midi." It seems your loss that you only have the word "morning" to cover both. (Or am I mistaken in thinking this?)

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
Hmmm... suggests yet another thread, one about words which we are sorry to see falling from grace...

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And then there is schmiergelder ... we need schmiergelder in our language.

Provacateur as short for Agents Provacateur (hope I spelled that one right)

I would also like to suggest that the word "flip-flop" not be used outside politics - the footwear was called THONGS! I think that we should reclaim the term.

Sorry, pet peeve.

Anyone know the German term for Backbencher? Oh yes - Hinterbankler - as in "hinterlands."

My Best German Dictionary

[ 29 August 2008: Message edited by: vaudree ]

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And then there is schmiergelder ... we need schmiergelder in our language.

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There is a word used in Dutch to describe a small gift that is given for no particular reason -- and I would be very impressed with myself if I could remember it -- that a friend of mine used to use when we were in high school. The closest English expression would be somewhere between "a little something" and "I thought you might like this". Does this ring a bell with any Dutch speakers? ...

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Inclusive: "We should do lunch" (you and I).

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Originally posted by pebbles:
I've always been impressed by languages such as the Alonguian family which distinguish between two "we"s: the inclusive and exclusive. (I.e., of the person being addressed.)

Inclusive: "We should do lunch" (you and I).

Exclusive: "No thanks, we don't want any" (of your vacuum cleaners).

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Originally posted by unionist:

Yeah, like the classic:

Nu?

It has one or two main meanings, similar (but not equivalent) to:

So? Cat got your tongue? What do we do now? What's happening?

... plus many other less related ones.

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