ENGLISH BORROWINGS
Between 1997 and 2001 I devoted quite a share of my time in
order to master the English language. Indeed I failed, but I was able to dig up
some interesting stuff as the article below, on borrowings...
Stolen from "British phrasebook" by Lonely Planet publications...
I think the author´s name is Stephen Burgen...
you really should buy it at
http://www.lonelyplanet.com , one of my favourite travel sites.
No one has bothered to invade Britain since 1066, so in order to extend their
vocabulary the English had to go out and conquer the world, otherwise they
wouldn´t now be sitting in their pyjamas (Urdu)
smoking hashish (Arabic) - from which, via the
French hachichien, we´ve derived assassin - doing
origami (Japanese). For 800 years, after Strongbow
invaded Ireland in 1171, the English plundered the riches of the world, and
among those riches were words. Some, such as billabong,
have remained where they found them and become part of the English implanted by
the colonisers, while thousands of others - slogan
(Gaelic), thug (Hindi),
potato (Spanish), intelligentsia (Russian),
sauna (Finnish), anorak
(Inuit), tycoon (Japanese),
taboo (Tongan), cosy (Scots) - have entered
the English mainstream. Just as it has borrowed almost the entire French
vocabulary of haute couture, for the finer points of architecture it has turned
to Italian - cupola, capital,
mezzanine, portico, corridor, dome - while sticking to Anglo-Saxon for
the basics (wall, window, door, brick, roof). Italian has also made a sizeable
contribution to the language of war and one, colonel, exemplifies the apparently
random and cavalier approach English takes to the pronunciation of foreign
imports. Colonel came to us somewhat indirectly
from the Italian colonello, meaning a column of troops. So why, when pronouncing
colonel phonetically doesn´t present a problem to the English palate, make it
sound the same as the stone inside a fruit? Why do we give
rendezvous and parquet correct French
pronunciation, but not repartee? And how is that
Americans say repartee correctly (repart-ay) and yet pronounce route like rout?
There is also little discernible pattern in the way English sometimes imports a
word such as guitar or
marijuana (both Spanish) without alteration and pronounces them correctly,
and when it deems it necessary to anglicise, as with
cockroach and crocodile, from the Spanish
cucaracha and cocodrilo. Sometimes we can´t decide. Even on the BBC, the word
junta is pronounced either with the first syllable sounding lik the ju-
in "junk" or correctly as hunta, depending on who´s reading the news. Now in the
global village new words rush in within a matter of weeks, whenever there´s some
upheaval in a foreign land. First they refer only to the place they come from -
samizdat, glasnost, perestroika - but soon they
enter the language in their own right and it isn´t long before you hear someone
say something like "It´s time there was a little more glasnost in the Ministry
of Trade". The recent gifts from Islam - jihad, fatwa and
intifada - are already being adapted for domestic consumption.
To the question, "How many words do you need?, English reply "How many have you
got?". It never seems to have enough. About 50 years ago, linguists produced
Basic English, a stripped down version with a vocabulary of 850 words. There´s
nothing you can´t say in Basic English, but so what, if there´s little that can
be said well. The question is, did we know we suffered from existencial angst
before we had the words, or has the condition been spread by the words? There´s
no Italian word for angst, from which we might conclude that it´s not something
they suffer from. But Italian has no word for womaniser either, and there are
plenty of those. In Spanish, there´s no word that means self-indulgent, and if
you want to say the water is shallow, you say no es profundo, it´s not deep.
That´s fine, it conveys the necessary information. But without shallow you lose
out on metaphor and deprive whoever it was who said it of the chance to say that
President Ford was "so shallow you could wade through his deepest thoughts and
not get your ankles wet".
El artículo me gusta bastante, a pesar de algunas cosas que
diré después. Me voy a permitir recomendar un par de libros de David Crystal que
explican un tanto mejor este proceso de adquisición de palabros por parte de los
anglos, sajones y demás tribus bárbaras. "A History of the English language" y
"The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English language".
Pero entre nosotros, que hablamos roman paladino... ¿alguién
me puede decir que queda "lost in translation" si decimos que Ford era "tan poco
profundo que... bla, bla"? ¿Y en español no podemos traducir "self-indulgent",
(que por cierto, no es una palabra, sino dos unidas por un guión feo) como "caprichoso" o
"autocompasivo" según los casos? Vale que no son exactamente lo mismo, pero
entonces diré que ni siquiera "cat" y "gato" son lo mismo, ya que la palabra
"cat" incluye el significado para el que en español utilizamos "felino" (por
ejemplo, "Tigers and other wild cats"). Y no me vengan conque el español no
tiene una palabra para decir "cat"...
Y eso de que el inglés ha tomado sin alteración "guitar" (¡mi
guitarra!) y "marijuana" (no sé si lo correcto es "marihuana", yo escribo
"mariguana" como lo pronuncio), ya le vale al tío, se podía documentar...
Y casi juraría que hay una palabrita italiana "donnaiolo" que
viene a ser tres cuartos del "womaniser". Que los lectores me escriban si es
cierto...
We must say this text is a nice illustration on the various
origins of the English lexicon, but it seems to us that the author does not know
much about other languages...
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