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loanword

A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken in by one language from another. The word loanword itself is a calque of the German Lehnwort. A calque or loan translation is a related process whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather the lexical item itself.

Although loanwords are typically far less numerous than the "native" words of most languages (creoles being an obvious exception), they are often widely known and used, since their borrowing served a certain purpose.

Loanwords in English
English has many loanwords, due to England coming in contacts with numerous invaders in the Middle Ages, and English becoming a trade language in the 18th century. The table below lists languages (with examples) from which English borrowed more than 1000 words:

Romance Languages - agenda, exit, beauty, champion, chase, parliament
Ancient Greek - anonymous, catastrophe, parabola, skeleton, tonic
Norman - catch, guardian, judge, pork, wicket
Old Norse (Scandinavian) -are, call, gill(fish), leg, skin, sky, take, they, window
Goidelic - claymore, bard, galore, slogan
Brythonic - coracle, crowd (musical instrument), corgi, gunnies
Dravidian language , Tamil- Catamaran, Mango, Orange ,Cash

Germanic loanwords
The Norse loanwords amount to about 2% of all significant vocabulary. However, the Norse words are used more often than the rest of the loanwords put together. Some Norse words form, with English ones, vocabulary couplets. In each case below, the Norse word is first. Often, if the Norse word starts with an /sk/ sound, the English one will start with /S/.

egg (on) - edge
scatter - shatter
skirt - shirt
dike - ditch
skull - shell
In addition, some words like think are of shared English-Norse origin. The modern word descends from one, or more likely, both forms.

The Norse loanwords are actually part of the grammatical skeleton of English. It is possible to spend a whole day without using a Latin, French, or Greek borrowing, but the only way to never use a Norse borrowing (or an Old English descendant) is not to speak. The classicist C.W.E. Peckett recommended (in "How to write good English") using Anglo-Saxon words whereever possible if the purpose is direct and simple communication.

Romance loanwords
The Latin and French words together make up about 40% of English vocabulary. Norman is also common. Greek is almost exclusively found in scientific terms and is the source of about 50% of these words.

A significant part of the technical vocabulary used by musicians and artists comes from Italian: chiaroscuro, soprano, crescendo, gesso, tondo, cameo, stanza.

Other languages
Less commonly cited source languages include Algonquian, Arabic, Persian, Quechua, and Russian. Many words for foods, animals, and plants not found in Britain are borrowed from other languages

What is Loanword?
A loanword is a word directly taken into by one language from another with little or no translation. A calque or loan translation is a related process whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word "loanword" is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort.

Although loanwords are typically far less numerous than the "native" words of most languages (creoles and pidgins being an obvious exception), they are often widely known and used, since their borrowing served a certain purpose, for example to provide a name for a new invention.

Loanwords in English

English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English: 25%
Greek: 5.32%
No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%
Derived from proper names: 3.28%
All other languages contributed less than 1%
This survey shows no information about the frequency of words, however. If the frequency of words is considered, words from Old and Middle English occupy the vast majority.

The reasons for English's vast borrowing include:

its modern importance;
its being a scientific language;
England being invaded by the Vikings and the Normans;
English becoming a trade language in the 18th century;
the fact that English is fairly free of phonetic restrictions in its syllable structure.
This lack of restrictions makes it comparatively easy for the English language to incorporate new words. Compare this with Japanese, where the English word "club" (itself originally from Old Norse) was turned into "kurabu" because of Japanese's numerous phonetic restrictions. However, the English pronunciation of a loanword will often differ from the original pronunciation to such a degree that a native speaker of the language it was borrowed from will not be able to recognize it as a loanword when spoken.

The tendency of the English language to borrow extensively is summed up by James D. Nicoll: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." 1