Interesting Loan Words

Two interesting I stumbled across while looking across my vocabulary lists today: the first was karaoke, which, of course, was familiar to me, while the second one was alcazar. As usual with me, the question "where the heck does karaoke come from?" popped into my mind. The short, sharp syllables left my suspecting Japanese, so I went online to see what I could dig up. Well, this is what I discovered:
カラオケ, which is split up into the two words カラ kara "empty" and オケ oke "orchestra." But that's not the end. Oke sounds suspiciously like orchestra, doesn't it? Hmmmm, well what do you know, Japanese actually borrowed orchestra from English and Japanized it into okesutora, then shortened that to oke and tacked on kara at the beginning (actually, if you've taken any Japanese martial arts, you should know that kara means empty: karate 空手 means "empty hand")! So what we end up having is English borrowing from Japanese, borrowing from English.

The second word, alcazar, struck me as distinctly Spanish. Because Spain was occupied by the Moors for about 750 years, Castilian borrowed many nouns from Arabic, a large majority of which began with al, corresponding to the definite pronoun ال al, akin to the Hebrew ה ha (for a list of noun borrowed from Arabic, click here; some examples are albacora, alcohol, alcoba, alfalfa, etc.).
But anyhow, back to the issue at hand. After removing the "al," and finding its definition in English to be "citadel, fort," I realized that just the previous day, I had learned in my "Teach Yourself Arabic" book (yes, ambitious, I know) that the word for castle was القصر al-qaṣr, (which, by the way, struck me as unusual, because what would be the related root קצר q.ṣ.r. in Hebrew actually means "to cut, shorten." Anyhow, I thought nothing of it until today.) which sounded pretty darned similar. So... yeah, I looked it up. Turns out it's not a Semitic root at all! Arabic actually borrowed it from the Latin castrum, meaning "fort." So we end up having a Romance language borrowing from Arabic, which in turn borrows from the mother of Romance tongues, good old Latin.