Reborrowings

Words that were borrowed, and then returned

What we call “borrowed words” aren’t really borrowed. When English took the Japanese word “tsunami”, there was no intention to return it. They’re more like “stolen words”. Actually, since the original language keeps them, they might better be labelled “pirated words”. Anyway… in a few cases, the words actually do get taken back, by sheer chance, into the very language they started in. This is called “reborrowing”.

These reborrowed words (or “reborrowings”) usually have a different meaning or spelling to the original word, and in many cases they are so different you might not even realise they are related. A good example of this is “pidgin” (a simplified language that forms when 2 groups of people with different languages need to communicate). It is thought to come from the English word “business”, which was borrowed into the Chinese-English pidgin in the 18th or 19th century as “pidgin”. It was then borrowed back into English in the term “pidgin English”, literally “business English”, which was then shortened to “pidgin”, and finally became a word for any trade languages similar to the Chinese English pidgin it came from.

In some cases, the word was borrowed, and then given back with the same meaning but a new spelling. The word “craic” in Irish and Irish English comes from the Northern English and Scots word “crack”, used for centuries to mean “gossip”, “news”, “chat”. “Crack” with this meaning is first recorded in Ireland as an Ulster Scots word in 1929, and then into the Irish language by 1968, with the Irish spelling “craic”. By the end of the 20th century, the word became so common in Ireland that it was assumed to be of Irish origin, and the original “crack” spelling died out in Ireland. These days, even in Northern England and Scotland (where the word originates), many people spell it “craic” under the mistaken impression that it’s borrowed from Irish.

I think the weirdest reborrowing in that last image has to be “čau”, a Czech word meaning “hello” or “goodbye”. It’s also found in Slovakian. You could argue that it’s not a true reborrowing because Proto-Slavic is the ancestor of Czech, rather than being the same language, but it’s such an interesting case that I just had to include it here.
It’s borrowed from the Italian word “ciao”, which comes from a Venetian greeting “s-ciao vostro”, literally “I am your slave”. Basically this is the same idea as saying “at your service” in English. I missed this step out on my image for simplicity. The word s-ciao comes from the Latin sclavus, which meant “slave”, which in turn is from the word “Sclavus” meaning “Slavic person”. Slavs were so commonly enslaved by the Romans that the word “Slav” literally came to mean “slave”. The Latin word comes from the Proto-Slavic word for themselves, via Medieval Greek.

Another interesting one there is the Dutch word snack. It didn’t all fit on the image, but there is actually more to it than that:
The verb form of Dutch “snack” is “snacken”, which has a cousin, “snakken”, meaning “to yearn”.

Middle English basically formed as a result of a huge French influence, so it is no surprise that a huge portion of English words are from French. Now, with English such a dominant global language, several of these words have been reborrowed back into French. There is even a rare example of a “double reborrowing”, with the word “redingote” being borrowed from French, which borrowed it from English “riding coat”, with the English word “coat” being from Old French “cotte”. You could even trace it further back, since Old French word comes from the Latin “cotto”, which is borrowed from Proto-Germanic (an ancestor of the English language) *kuttô.

Both English and Japanese are hugely influential languages in global media and culture, so it should be no surprise that there have been a bunch of reborrowings between the two. Karaoke actually represents an example of a borrowing being returned “with interest”, as it takes the first part of “orchestra” and adds it to the Japanese word “kara”meaning empty. That’s the same kara in “karate”, which literally means “empty hand”.

There we go, 24 reborrowings. I might add more later, so if you know any good ones please comment them below.