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.

Modern Hebrew in Yiddish

When Hebrew was revived by Eliezer ben-Yehuda at the end of the 19th century, he intended to recreate the biblical language that governed the lives of the Jews for thousands of years. He attempted to reject the shtetl lifestyle and start where ancient times had left off. However, the fact remains that his native language was Yiddish and this was the language he spoke for a significant portion of his life. As a result, much of the grammar, phonology, vocabulary, and idioms present in Modern Hebrew came from Yiddish.

Take, for example, the Hebrew לפרגן l'fargen: to celebrate in the success of others. Like many other super-modern verbs in Hebrew, this verb clearly does not have a 3-letter root like Ancient Hebrew verbs. Similar to להשתכנז l'hishtaknez, taken from the word אשכנזי Ashkenazi and meaning "to become Ashkenazi," this word was taken and forced into a Hebrew conjugation. In our case, לפרגן took the Yiddish verb פֿאַרגינען farginen and put it into בנין פיעל binyan pi'el, a common verb structure in Hebrew. Two more examples are להשפריץ l'hashpritz and להשװיץ l'hashvitz, which came from שפּריצן shpritsn and שװיצן shvitsn, respectively. And before you know it, it sounds like a natural Hebrew word. Amazing. I don't know if too many other languages exhibit this phenomenon of so easily assimilating and, yes, even conjugating words of foreign origin.

And how about this: שם קבור הכלב sham kavur hakelev, literally meaning "that's where the dog is buried," but carrying the idiomatic meaning of "that's where the problem is." This, too, was, consciously or otherwise, brought into Hebrew through native Yiddish-speakers and ultimately became accepted as a natural Hebrew idiom. In Yiddish, it is דאָ ליגט דער הונט באַגראָבן do ligt der hunt bagrobn. Actually, the classic Yiddish translation of Hamlet's famous "to-be-or-not-to-be" soliloquy starts with the lines זײַן אָדער נישט זײַן? דאָ ליגט דער הונט באַגראָבן zayn oder nisht zayn? Do ligt der hunt bagrobn.