The next time you hear people speaking a foreign language when suddenly an English word pops into their conversation, consider two points about word choice. First, they are using a loanword, a word adopted from one language by speakers of another language, more than likely to compensate for lack of a better word in their native tongue. Second, loanwords enrich language like few other linguistic conventions.
English has borrowed from too many languages to mention in a brief blog post: 80 percent of English words come from 350 languages, according to Dictionary.com. Most of us don't even realize how many of loanwords we commonly use, to name a few, amen from Hebrew, agriculture from Latin, beef from French, chess from Persian, cruise from Spanish, democracy from Greek, icon from Russian, zenith from Arabic, and zero from Japanese.
Why borrow words? (Steal is more like it, because we do not return loanwords.) Among many reasons, sometimes a language just cannot come up with a single word to mean what its users want to express. One of my favorite examples is the German zeitgeist, meaning the spirit of the time. The word trend falls short to capture this spirit, if you know what I mean.
You do not have to be an etymologist to appreciate the strange routes some loanwords morph into English. This is one of the delights of learning new words. How did they get here?
