Lehnwort
Lehnwort
German
“A loanword is a word borrowed from another language — German Lehnwort (loan-word) was the 19th-century linguistic coinage for the phenomenon of languages adopting words from their neighbors, with no expectation of returning them.”
German Lehn (loan) and Wort (word) combined in 19th-century Germanic linguistics to name the phenomenon of borrowing words from another language. The loan metaphor is both apt and slightly wrong: loanwords are not returned. English borrowed tobacco from Spanish (which borrowed it from Arawak/Taíno via Haiti), sofa from Arabic, algebra from Arabic, chocolate from Nahuatl. None of these words were 'lent' in any meaningful sense — they were adopted permanently.
The history of English is substantially the history of its loanwords. Old English was largely Germanic; the Norman Conquest of 1066 flooded English with Old French vocabulary; the Renaissance added Latin and Greek learned vocabulary; colonial expansion added words from dozens of languages worldwide. English has approximately 200,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the majority are of non-Germanic origin. The language is, in a real sense, a collection of loanwords.
Different languages borrow in different ways. Some languages (like English) borrow freely, adopting foreign words with minimal adaptation. Others (like French, with its Académie française) actively resist borrowing and create calques (literal translations) instead: English weekend becomes French fin de semaine (end of week), English software becomes French logiciel (from logique and matériel). The calque borrows the meaning but translates the form.
Today English loanwords are spreading globally as the world's primary language of international communication. Wifi, internet, email, selfie, blog: originally English words that have entered dozens of languages as loanwords. The language that is itself largely made of loanwords is now lending words to others — though the metaphor remains precisely wrong in both directions.
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Today
English is the world's greatest borrower and currently its greatest lender. The historical irony is that a language so thoroughly constituted by borrowing — from French, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Nahuatl, Yoruba, and hundreds of others — is now spreading its own words across all those same languages. The loanword relationship is never symmetrical.
Purists in many languages resist English loanwords as cultural contamination, passing laws (as France does) to require native formations instead. But languages have always borrowed from their neighbors, and the borrowed words often fill genuine lexical gaps. The word for the borrowed thing often comes with the thing itself.
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