68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages (Patreon)

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up  words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of  multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long  before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called  etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.

In  this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get  enthusiastic about borrowing and loanwords. There are lots of different  trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to  language, including words that are associated with particular domains,  like tea and books, words that shift meaning when they language hop,  like “gymnasium” and “babyfoot”, words that get translated piece by  piece, like “gratte-ciel” (skyscraper) and “fernseher” (television), and  words that end up duplicating the same meaning (or is it...?) in  multiple languages, like “naan bread” and “Pendle hill”. We also talk  about the tricky question of how closely to adapt or preserve a borrowed  word, depending on your goals and the circumstances.

Announcements:

The LingComm grants have been announced!  Thank you so much to everyone who made this possible, and  congratulations to all our grantees. Go check out their projects as they  keep rolling out over the rest of this year for a little more fun  linguistics content in your life.  

In this month’s bonus episode,  originally recorded live through the Lingthusiasm Discord, we get  enthusiastic about your sweary questions! We talk about why it's so hard  to translate swears in a way that feels satisfying, how swears and  other taboo words participate in the Euphemism Cycle, a very ambitious  idea for cataloging swear words in various languages, and more.

For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/684727483493384192/episode-68-tea-and-skyscrapers-when-words-get