How languages steal words from each other
1,460,064
Published 2023-09-18
Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen's podcast has an episode all about this: lingthusiasm.com/post/684727483493384192/episode-6… •
More Language Files: • Tom's Language Files
Gretchen's book BECAUSE INTERNET, all about the evolution of internet language, is available:
🇺🇸 US: amzn.to/30tLpjT
🇨🇦 CA: amzn.to/2JsTYWH
🇬🇧 UK: amzn.to/31K8eRD
(Those are affiliate links that give a commission to me or Gretchen, depending on country!)
Graphics by William Marler: wmad.co.uk/
Audio mix by Graham Haerther and Manuel Simon at Standard Studios: haerther.net/
REFERENCES:
[etymologies from OED and M-W]
Sanchez, T. (2005). Constraints on structural borrowing in a multilingual contact situation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. ScholarlyCommons.
repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1…
John Hewson. 1993. A computer-generated dictionary of proto-Algonquian. Gatineau – Quebec : National Museums of Canada. protoalgonquian.atlas-ling.ca/
🟥 MORE FROM TOM: www.tomscott.com/
(you can find contact details and social links there too)
📰 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER with good stuff from the rest of the internet: www.tomscott.com/newsletter/
❓ LATERAL, free weekly podcast: lateralcast.com/ youtube.com/lateralcast/
➕ TOM SCOTT PLUS: youtube.com/tomscottplus
👥 THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: youtube.com/techdif
All Comments (21)
-
The final run of the Language Files! It's been years. Three videos, with my usual co-authors Molly and Gretchen, and animator Will; one every few weeks. It's been a while! Have a look in the description for a link to the full playlist.
-
I missed these old style language videos
-
Fun fact... In Vietnamese, the word "club," as in a football club, is abbreviated as "CLB." But this abbreviation didn't come directly from the English word "club" as one would assume. It came from the Vietnamese term for "club", which is "Câu Lạc Bộ." This "Câu Lạc Bộ" is borrowed from the Chinese "俱樂部." This "俱樂部" is borrowed from the Japanese "クラブ." This "クラブ" is the one that came from the English word "club"... A long-convoluted road but ended up at the SAME THING: CLB!
-
Calque and Loanword each being an example of the other is so perfect for puns it almost seems calculated.
-
"I'm sorry to the rest of the world. There's a British sentence..." got me 😂
-
What's so great with Tom Scott videos is that you could watch a video from 6 years ago and think it was posted an hour ago, and vice-versa. Every video is timeless, and it's awesome
-
One of my favourite instances of rebracketing relates to the word 'helicopter', split helico-pter from the Greek 'helix' for spiral and 'pteron' for wing (which is where the pterodactyl comes from). A helicopter is literally a spiral wing, because that's how it flies. However, in new words it gets split heli-copter, which is where you get words like 'helipad' and 'roflcopter'.
-
Acorn is pronounced almost identically as the dutch word "eekhoorn" (squirrel). I always imagine that this must have been a misunderstanding where someone was pointing at the animal, but the other person thought they meant the nut.
-
I love the fact that the word "Kaiser", which is a german loanword from latin is actually closer to the original pronounciation than "Caesar" is, even in german ("Cäsar").
-
"Loanword is a calque and calque is a loanword" That might just be the most Tom Scott sentence that ever Tom Scotted!
-
As a language nerd, especially a fan of loanwords, this video had me smiling the ENTIRE WAY THROUGH.
-
In French, casse-tête means "puzzle", but its literal meaning is something like head-breaker. Portuguese borrowed this word, but took the literal meaning instead: cassetete in Portuguese means "nightstick", that is, something that could literally break your head 🤕
-
My favorite example of a loan word is "Canada" which originated from the Huron-Iroquois word "kanata" which just means "village". This means the settlers probably asked what they called this land (meaning everything that wasnt Europe) and the natives assumed they were talking about a specific village that they were currently at.
-
My favourite English loanword is tungsten. It is comprised of the Swedish words ‘tung’ meaning ‘heavy’ and ‘sten’ which means ‘rock’. This makes perfect sense as tungsten is a very heavy element. In Swedish, we call it ‘wolfram’.
-
I always liked the Finnish word for skyscraper, pilvenpiirtäjä. It literally means cloud drawer. Like a big pencil drawing clouds.
-
One funny thing about the noun meaning the whole thing is when picking languages "Bahasa Indonesia" Literal translation is "Indonesia Language". Always hear people saying they can speak the "bahasa" language. Its like saying you can speak the "language language"
-
The word “checkmate” was originally in iran pronouced as “shah mat” which means “the shah is dead” which got changed over the centuries into checkmate Edit : turns out shah is the word from persian and mat is a word in arabic which means died
-
Wieheister is used in western parts of Poalnd to describe weird systems and machines you don't know the purpose of. This is what Germans called things they did not knew when they invaded. A simple question "Wie heißt er" ("What is it called") has been baked into the language as the locals have mostly not understood German
-
"Skyscraper" in Vietnamese is "Nhà chọc trời", "Nhà" means a house, "chọc" means poking and "trời" means sky. So literally a house that poke the sky. Also, a common Vietnamese expression is "trời ơi!", which means "oh sky!", but they usually got translated to "oh my god" or "oh dear"
-
As a large language model I'm really happy Tom makes these kinds of videos.
