Language on loan

The British have a long history of importing the finest produce foreign lands have to offer; we are a nation with a taste for the exotic and have historically set up trade routes to facilitate this penchant. There is one import however that we have long been acquiring from every corner of the globe but which has never cost a penny - words.

The English language is enriched with words which we have "borrowed" from other languages. The foreign roots of some words, such as the French term I have snuck in above, are still very evident, others have become so ingrained in our language that we are not at all conscious of their roots as we use them.

Our use of the word penchant dates back to the seventeenth century and to this day it is very much spoken, written, heard and read with the French accent betraying its roots. Generally however, over time, a word becomes absorbed into our language and then adopts the characteristics of our linguistic system.

There are some words we seem to have adopted for their cultural richness or perhaps their phonetic beauty; arguably we have other terms we could use in lieu of penchant (please forgive my deliberately ironic choice of words here), while there are other words we have borrowed which have no synonym in our language. Since "saga" was borrowed from Icelandic in the eighteenth century it has taken on a very fixed meaning in our dictionaries deriving from its use in the native tongue denoting stories of Viking voyages.

We don't always like to be quite so faithful to the original meaning of the words we borrow; "bizarre" is said to originate from the Basque word bizar meaning "beard"! Likewise, the meaning of the word "palaver" has developed from the borrowed Portuguese word palavra, meaning simply "word".

English contains a wealth of borrowed words which have entered the language when English speakers have come into contact with another culture. While this debt cannot nor should not be repaid, what we are paying our linguistic lenders is a great, everlasting compliment.

Perhaps the most fitting example to finish with, and one for our fellow language enthusiasts, is the word "thesaurus" which has its origins in the Greek word thesauros, meaning treasure; we couldn't have put it better ourselves!

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