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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