In Bierma's linguistics column this week, he talks of a linguistics professor at the U. of Chicago who went to France, with her tape recorder, on the mission to record authentic, non-scripted French conversation. She found several examples of slang, idioms and loanwords that you'd never find in a French-English Dictionary. One such word was yupé, which is yuppie that has been 'franctified.' Another English loanword is brunch or brunche. See, those French need us more than they realize!

The French use many English words in their everyday speech, although L'Academie Francais try vigourously to stop them.

For example, L'Academie Francais devised the word L'Aeroglisseur for the Hovercraft - but the Frenchman in the street called it Le 'Overcraft nonetheless. And as for "Le T shirt" - that is truly ubiquitous.

Not just French.
When I was teaching Japanese children last year we had a really entertaining lesson trying to find English loan words in Japanese. When Japanese borrows words they are usually "japanised" to use a Japanese pronunciation or to add or remove syllables or sometimes to shift the meaning. I don't have the sheet of examples here at the moment but there were some surprising and entertaining ones and I'll look them up later. (I seem to remember that "Goal" as in football was one of them).

Japanese borrowings from English have a few interesting peculiarities. Because Japanese has mainly open syllables, and English is rich in consonant clusters, Japanese has to insert lots of epenthetic vowels to make them pronounceable, so '[labour] strike' would come in as sutoraiku. However, this word is not used, just a truncation of it: suto. Likewise biru 'building' and demo 'demonstration [against something]', rather than the theoretically closest forms birujingu and demonsutoreeshon.

Another thing they do is invent English expressions. The word for 'businessman' is sarariiman, as if from an English 'salaryman'. An example of changed meaning is waishatsu, which means just 'shirt', of any colour, though it's from English 'white shirt'.

English has a few of these from French: so 'nom de plume' is a made-up term in English. It's not the French for 'pen-name', which is nom de guerre.

MacDonald's in Japan is Makudonarudo. Each consonant has to be followed by a vowel, with one exception that I know of. A "syllabic n" can stand alone.

I've got a Japanese friend who once wanted to send something to "Bajania." It took me a little while to realize she meant "Virginia." But we mispronounce their words too, such as "karaoke", "bonsai," and "sukiyaki."

Tinman

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But we mispronounce their words too, such as "karaoke", "bonsai," and "sukiyaki."

Tinman, how should they be pronounced?

As I was reading LanguageHat about "sublate," 2 words came up that you might know about. First, LanguageHat talks about the German word, aufheben. He says it's a "many-splendored word" with the basic meaning being "'pick up' (heb es auf 'pick it up!'), but it also means 'keep, put aside,' 'abolish, do away with,' 'raise, lift' (eg, a blockade), and 'offset, make up for.'" Isn't that a lot of meanings for a word? Is there a main meaning? Someone in the comments suggested "lift."

Another reader mentioned the French word imbuvable. What does that mean?

I think most, maybe all, languages have Humpty Dumpty's attitude towards making words do a lot of work. In your definition of aufheben you use the word raise.

Raise can mean
lift up (an object)
increase (salary)
construct or build (a new office block)
get louder (your voice)
promote (through the ranks)
agitate (a rebellion)
cause (a smile)
bring up (children)
grow (crops)
put forward (a question)
gather together (an army)
to make a bet in Poker
to establish communications with (we managed to raise them after hours on the radio)
to obtain funds
to cause a blister or welts

I expect there are others I haven't thought of.

We just never think about the variety of meanings that words can have when we are using them.
Coincidentally the word "raise" came up in class yesterday in the context of a student wanting to know why we "raise money" and "raise cattle" when when "raise" means lift.

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I've got a Japanese friend who once wanted to send something to "Bajania." It took me a little while to realize she meant "Virginia." But we mispronounce their words too, such as "karaoke", "bonsai," and "sukiyaki."

During my first stint in college back in the 1960s I had a "right off the boat" Japanese roommate. I came home from a writing class, threw my assignment on the couch, and said to Tetsuo, "The professor says my paper stinks!" He replied, "Werr, pahaps roo shud ruse splay." I didn't understand him, so he went into the bathroom, picked up a can of deodorant spray, and proceeded to douse my "stinky" paper!

According to Guinness,the word "set" or "sett" has 176 meanings.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:

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But we mispronounce their words too, such as "karaoke", "bonsai," and "sukiyaki."

Tinman, how should they be pronounced?

Ka.ra.o.ke; a as in father, o as in hope, e as in hey
Bo.n.sa.i; sounds like bone sigh. The way most Americans pronounce it is banzai , which is a Japanese war cry.
Su.ki.ya.ki; we generally pronounce it correctly, except the u should be silent; thus, ski yaki.

Now these are Japanese pronunciations. When we incorporate a word from another language we adapt the pronunciation to suit ourselves, and often the meaning as well. The new pronunciation becomes the correct American pronunciation. Likewise, when the Japanese borrow a word from English, they adapt the pronunciation and meaning to suit them, and that becomes the correct Japanese pronunciation.

This may sound trivial or self-evident, but it's not. People, including me, often become very irate at the way people "mispronounce" things, when the people are really pronouncing them correctly in their language. A good example is our recent discussion of tsunami/tunami. Some people pronounce it as if the t were silent; others pronounce the t but omit the s. That seems strange until you realize that two separate systems of romantization give two different spellings, and we tend to pronounce words by the way they are spelled. In Japanese, ts represents one sound. Someone pointed out earlier it was like the ts in cats. Few Americans pronounce it that way. But all the pronunciations are "correct."

Many words have crept into our language and have become so thoroughly American that we often don't realize they had a foreign beginning. I'm sure you can think of many examples.

Of those three Japanese words - karaoke, bonsai, and sukiyaki, - bonsai, is the only one that really bugs me.

Tinman

Well, you are right, Tinman. I have been mispronouncing all three ("karaoke", "bonsai," and "sukiyaki") wrong. Sheesh!

Remember our previous discussion here about "err?" I had the occasion to say it today (someone used the word "error," instead of "err" in a document), and I pronounced it correctly as "ir." My colleague looked at me like I was crazy. Sometimes you can't win for losing with pronunciations!

Funny - I've never heard 'bonsai' promounced 'banzai'. I tend to pronounce it with a slightly shorter 'o' than I should, but now I've learnt I'll try to lengthen it a bit.

Other loan words in France (which I think are in the dictionary) are 'top-model' and 'le hit-parade'. I was told by a French IT teacher several years ago that 'computer' had taken over from the more French 'ordinateur', too. 'E-mail' is another that the purists don't like - they tried calling it 'courrier électronique' 'courriel' and an acronym that I've forgotten (and couldn't find in a Google search), but I think 'e-mail' has stuck.

You would only be pronouncing sukiyaki "wrong" if you were speaking Japanese and used the English word 'sukiyaki' instead of the Japanese one. So also for the others: these are common English words.

I see what you mean, I think, aput. In the same way that we anglophones pronounce Paris with the final 's', or 'Seine' as 'Sane'? (I don't, although I do pronounce Paris the anglicised way - the French way sounds pretentious, sadly).

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Originally posted by aput:
You would only be pronouncing sukiyaki "wrong" if you were speaking Japanese and used the English word 'sukiyaki' instead of the Japanese one. So also for the others: these are common English words.

Yes, that's right. If you reread my post you will see that is what I said.

Tinman