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.

Namesake

No, not the amazing book or movie. I have yet to see it.

I don't think people realize how many words in English are derived from proper nouns. Studying for the National Vocabulary Competition, I stumbled across a bunch of words that I never would have guessed are from names of people or places:

bedlam: a state of confusion, from the Hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem in London, which served as an insane asylum.

maudlin: another corruption of, yes, Magdalene; the word, meaning tearful or sentimental, evokes an image of Mary crying.

procrustean: ignoring individual difference. Online Etymology Dictionary says it comes from Procrustes (1583), mythical robber of Attica who seized travelers, tied them to his bed, and either stretched their limbs or lopped of their legs to make them fit it. The name in Greek is Προκρούστης Prokroustes "one who stretches," from προκρούειν prokrouein "to beat out, stretch out," from προ pro- "before" + κρούειν krouein "to strike."

κρούειν is actually a cognate with Russian крусить krusit, Lithuanian kruszù "to smash, crush," Latvian krausīt "to trample," and Old Slavic kruchŭ "crumb." I would assume, therefore that procrustean shares its root with the Yiddish word קרישקע krishke, meaning a crumb or a bit of food, comes from this root as well. (If you were wondering, crust comes from a similar, but unrelated Germanic root - see here on page 62)
In the context of a well-known Yiddish folksong:

לאָמיר אַלע זינגען אַ זמרל,
לחם איז ברױט, בשׂר ודגים וכל מטעמים.
זאָג זשע מיר רבניו, לחם איז װאָס?
בײַ די נגידים , איז לחם אַ פֿרישינקע בילקעלע!
אָבער בײַ אונדז קבצנים, אױ, דלפֿנים, אױ, אבֿיונים
.איז לחם אַ דאַרינקע קרישקעלע, נעבעך

Lomir ale zingen a zemerl,
Lekhem iz broyt, boser v'dogim v'khol matamim.
Zog zhe mir rebenyu, lekhem iz vos?
Bay di n'gidim, iz lekhem a frishinke bilkele!
Ober bay undz kabtsonim, oy delfonim, oy evyoynim
Iz lekhem a darinke krishkele, nebekh.

Let's a sing a song,
Bread, meat, fish and delicacies.
Tell me, what is bread?
The elite eat fresh rolls.
But for us poor beggars,
Bread is a exiguous crumb.

Latkes

All you Ashkenazi Jews out there are surely familiar with latkes, or potato pancakes. Known as a traditional Chanukkah food, it was only brought to my attention recently, although it should have been obvious, that the Jews in Palestine couldn't possibly have eaten latkes: they had no potatoes! In fact, this food only gained popularity, because they are fried in oil, commemorating the oil that miraculously provided light for eight days.
According to this website, the word came into the English language from the Yiddish לאַטקע (latke) came from the Ukrainian оладка (oldka), which is, in turn, the diminutive of the Old Russian оладья (oladya). But wait: it gets better. This comes from the Greek ελαδια (eladia), plural of ελαδιον (eladion), meaning "a little oily thing", "a little oil", or "a young olive tree". ελαδιον (eladion), of course, is naturally the diminute of elaion, "olive oil", which comes from elaia, the (Ancient) Greek for "olive". Whew.

What's funny is that, like everybody knows, latkes are used as a Hanukkah food because they are fried in oil. But who knew that the word for "oil" is actually etymologically related to latke?? Watch this. According to the English Etymology Dictionary: oil, c.1175, from Anglo-Fr. and O.N.Fr. olie, from O.Fr. oile (12c., Mod.Fr. huile), from L. oleum "oil, olive oil" (cf. Sp., It. olio), from Gk. elaion "olive tree," from elaia. Who woulda thunk it?

To put it this way, if the Romans and Slavs hadn't decided to be copycats and steal Greek words, we would not have the word for latke, oil, olive, petroleum, nor Vaseline (gasp!).

So what did those Maccabees eat? To quote The Forward:
The distance from the Yiddish latke to the Greek elaion is about as vast as Diaspora itself, but the relationship is interesting because the first latkes were little cakes made from curd cheese and fried in butter or olive oil. (Eating cheese on Chanukah is said to refer to the Apocryphal story of Judith, who fed salty cheesecakes to the Syrian general Holofornes to make him thirsty, and then plied him with wine until he was so inebriated she could chop off his head with a sword; this symbolic connection, though, was not made until many centuries after the first cheese latkes.) As Jews began to migrate eastward into Eastern Europe, butter and oil grew increasingly precious and expensive, and poultry fat became the chief frying agent; this made the use of cheese off-limits, and so by the Middle Ages latkes were most often made not from dairy ingredients but rather with a simple batter made from buckwheat flour (recall the original Russian meaning of "a flat cake made from unleavened wheat flour").

In any case, bon appétit. Who cares about the etymology? Not me.