Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

[Kuchigakatai]

also tea (any sort of boiled drink, whether or not it be made from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, to which it "properly" refers), especially in such phrases as "herbal tea" and "chamomile tea".

Not quite an example: in Chinese, 茶 (Mandarin chá, the etymon of "tea") is used for both the alleged proper sense of "tea" (made of camellia sinensis) and tisane. Bilingual dictionaries list 藥茶 (yàochá "medicine tea") and 草茶 (cǎochá "grass/herb tea") for tisane, for example.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Oh, interesting. I never knew that.

[Kuchigakatai]

Yeah, it's hilarious how in the West some people insist on this tea vs. tisane distinction absent in Chinese itself...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I didn't know the word "tisane" until I was about 23, so I went more than two-thirds of my life (to date, at least) unfamiliar with it. I also thought, the first time I heard it, it and tea were etymologically connected; this was certainly a bit of folk etymology, however, ehhehheh.

[linguistcat]

the semantic stereotype of "sushi" in Japan is sashimi, rice with the meat on top

That's called nigirizushi. Sashimi is the meat itself. (You can also have other things besides meat on top.)

In Japanese, I bet. I was using an English meaning there, in which for some or many speakers, "sashimi" can mean nigirizushi besides the meat itself. Do the little sushi rolls have a name in Japanese?

Those are "makizushi" 巻き寿司. It just means "roll sushi".

[Kuchigakatai]

Those are "makizushi" 巻き寿司. It just means "roll sushi".

Oh! I should've been clearer about what I wanted to ask.

Here in Vancouver, Canada, sushi businesses always (always) make a distinction between "maki" (not makizushi, just "maki") and "rolls". The former are smaller, cheaper and very simple, while the latter larger and highly varied. Are these distinguished in Japanese in any way? What distinctions does Japanese have instead?

[vlad]

Those are "makizushi" 巻き寿司. It just means "roll sushi".

Oh! I should've been clearer about what I wanted to ask.

Here in Vancouver, Canada, sushi businesses always (always) make a distinction between "maki" (not makizushi, just "maki") and "rolls". The former are smaller, cheaper and very simple, while the latter larger and highly varied. Are these distinguished in Japanese in any way? What distinctions does Japanese have instead?

The latter are called Kariforunia rooru "California roll" in Japanese.

[Qwynegold]

Regarding tea, don't forget chai, which in many western languages has been borrowed in to mean "tea with spices".

[Linguoboy]

Do the little sushi rolls have a name in Japanese?

Do you mean maki? The general name for them is makizushi, but they are divided into various subclasses. Tekkamaki and kappamaki, for instance, are both varieties of hosomaki.

American cuisine has a penchant for creating poultry variations of dishes originally made from another kind of meat, thereby broadening their definitions. Fajitas, for instance, were originally beef, so steak fajitas is a retronym, as is shrimp scampi.

[Qwynegold]

I came up with one example in Japanese. Pinch has been borrowed in as pinchi, with the meaning of "a difficult situation".

[Ryusenshi]

Examples from English to French

• EN cookie "small sweet baked stuff" → FR cookie "chocolate chip cookie"
• EN puzzle "all sorts of brain teasers" → FR puzzle "jigsaw puzzle"
• EN clip "video excerpt" → FR clip "music video"
• EN playback "replaying an existing music recording" → FR playback "lip-syncing"

From French to English

• FR auteur the generic word for "author" → EN auteur "a director with a strong artistic vision" (though this connotation can exist in French as well, e.g. in film d'auteur)
• FR épée the generic word for "sword" → EN epee "a particular sword used in fencing" (though the fencing category is indeed "épée" in French)
• FR lance the generic word for "spear" → EN lance "a particular heavy spear used by horsemen"
• FR cuisine "cooking" (also "kitchen") → EN cuisine "refined or regional cooking"
• FR escargot "snail" → EN escargot "snail cooked to be eaten"
• FR douche "shower" → EN douche "device for introducing water into the vagina"

From Latin to English: English uses Latin names for the Zodiac signs, like Aries, Taurus etc, which are not used for anything else (well, apart from cancer also meaning a disease). In Latin, they are common nouns: "ram", "bull" and so on.

About kimono: in French, the word is improperly used to refer to the uniform (gi) used for judo and karate. I don't know which misunderstanding resulted in this.

[Ares Land]

An example that just occured to me, FR → EN: commit, push, pull and merge, only used in the specific context of using version control.

They're borrowed as noun, but not all speakers agree on whether they're verbs or not: I've heard j'ai commité (verb), j'ai commit (what is this i don't even), j'ai fait un commit (noun)

[Ares Land]

Yeah, it's hilarious how in the West some people insist on this tea vs. tisane distinction absent in Chinese itself...

tisane was there before tea! (originally it referred to barley water.)

In French(*) you can't use thé for anything else than Camellia sinensis, and maybe rooibos.


(*) European French. I don't know if it's any different in Québec.

[Ryusenshi]

Well, when you get into programming lingo or gaming lingo, you see lots of similar examples...

• EN ban → FR ban "exclude from a website or online game". The grammar is also weird: je me suis fait ban (in fact it's not unique, slang verbs borrowed from English sometimes aren't conjugated normally: je l'ai destroy, je me suis fait destroy).
• EN joystick → FR joystick "gaming joystick" (for aircraft, we say manche à balai instead, which literally means "broomstick")
• EN pad, paddle → FR pad, paddle "gamepad" (though they're less common than the native manette)

An interesting case is the word librairie. It's famously a false friend between French and English: FR librairie means "bookshop" or "newspaper shop", not "library". Buuuuttt... in the specific case of software libraries, it's common enough to use a calque rather than a translation, and call them librairies — especially since you're always using the English word library in the actual programs anyway. Purists decry this use, but as usual they're fighting a losing battle.

[Jonlang]

The Welsh word hiraeth has been borrowed into English with the meaning of "longing or yearning for a time or place long lost" kind of some sort of super-nostalgia I suppose. I'm pretty sure it's just "longing" in Welsh without the romantic connotations of its English usage - it's made up of hir 'long' + -aeth a suffix for deriving abstract nouns.

[Jonlang]

Examples from English to French

• EN cookie "small sweet baked stuff" → FR cookie "chocolate chip cookie"
• EN puzzle "all sorts of brain teasers" → FR puzzle "jigsaw puzzle"

In British English a "cookie" is almost always a chocolate chip cookie. We use "biscuit" for a catch-all term for all biscuits, including cookies. BE also tends to mean "jigsaw puzzle" for "puzzle", but not always. We tend towards terms like "brain teaser" for a catch-all or just use specific names like "crossword", "word-search", "sudoku", etc. In fact, the word "jigsaw" is also interchangeable with "puzzle" to mean "jigsaw puzzle".

[Kuchigakatai]

The latter are called Kariforunia rooru "California roll" in Japanese.

Hah! That makes so much sense.

tisane was there before tea! (originally it referred to barley water.)

In French(*) you can't use thé for anything else than Camellia sinensis, and maybe rooibos.

Is that a natural distinction everyone makes, or is it something only those supposedly in the Know say? What about the term "infusion"?

An interesting case is the word librairie. It's famously a false friend between French and English: FR librairie means "bookshop" or "newspaper shop", not "library". Buuuuttt... in the specific case of software libraries, it's common enough to use a calque rather than a translation, and call them librairies — especially since you're always using the English word library in the actual programs anyway. Purists decry this use, but as usual they're fighting a losing battle.

I wonder if it may or may not matter that bibliothèque is also a bit of a mouthful. I feel I'd use biblioteca in Spanish if it just wasn't so long, so yeah, librería.

Although I guess French speakers could reduce it to "la biblio", as you often do.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

tisane was there before tea! (originally it referred to barley water.)

In French(*) you can't use thé for anything else than Camellia sinensis, and maybe rooibos.

Is that a natural distinction everyone makes, or is it something only those supposedly in the Know say? What about the term "infusion"?

I've found a few citations contradicting that in the CNRTL site (I'm not sure how good it is as a source — I'm by no means an expert in French linguistics, and my reading knowledge of it I can feel slipping away from disuse), but a lot of them seem quite old (early Nineteenth Century; there's one from 1983, but it appears to be marked as Belgian rather than Metropolitan. My guess would be that it was actually borrowed with this broader meaning, but later narrowed (I'm not sure how powerful the prescriptions of the Académie actually are, so I won't venture to guess whether or not this is a hypercorrection or a natural evolution).

On which note, I find a good description of what is perceived as (prescriptively) correct, elegant, or literary in a language very interesting. Often, it's merely some degree of archaism (written languages seem to be more conservative than the spoken varieties anyway), but sometimes, you get some very interesting diglossia going on.

[Kuchigakatai]

I've found

I don't question its existence, but I'm wondering about how widespread the distinction is among The People.

On which note, I find a good description of what is perceived as (prescriptively) correct, elegant, or literary in a language very interesting. Often, it's merely some degree of archaism (written languages seem to be more conservative than the spoken varieties anyway), but sometimes, you get some very interesting diglossia going on.

Something I've noticed that doesn't get discussed much, both among conlangers and even among linguists, is that diglossia doesn't exactly match elegance or formality... it's really somewhat like two languages. You can speak the low language formally, and write the high language informally, although it's true the ceiling of the low language is not as high, and the bottom of the high language is not as low.

I find that in (my native) Spanish I'm pulled towards what you could call international usage when writing something that may be read (or listened to!) by anyone. I can still be very colloquial and informal in that sort of international Spanish, but it does involve reducing my regionalisms. And yet, to an audience in El Salvador, there would be little problem in me giving a speech while making some use of regionalisms hardly anyone from the outside understands (say, if I insert a little ¡juela! or ¡juelacha! interjection at some point, for rhetorical effect).

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've found

I don't question its existence, but I'm wondering about how widespread the distinction is among The People.

On which note, I find a good description of what is perceived as (prescriptively) correct, elegant, or literary in a language very interesting. Often, it's merely some degree of archaism (written languages seem to be more conservative than the spoken varieties anyway), but sometimes, you get some very interesting diglossia going on.

Something I've noticed that doesn't get discussed much, both among conlangers and even among linguists, is that diglossia doesn't exactly match elegance or formality... it's really somewhat like two languages. You can speak the low language formally, and write the high language informally, although it's true the ceiling of the low language is not as high, and the bottom of the high language is not as low.

This is also true, and something I sometimes use for a sort of literary effect, for lack of a better word (my written language is heavily influenced by the huge amount of Nineteenth Century texts I've consumed over the years), but not everything I write is full of purple formality (though I like with at least a drop or two of lavender). This isn't quite diglossia, however — written and spoken English have never, to my knowledge, been as far apart as spoken and literary French, or even more extreme, the divide between Bungo and modern Japanese.

I find that in (my native) Spanish I'm pulled towards what you could call international usage when writing something that may be read (or listened to!) by anyone. I can still be very colloquial and informal in that sort of international Spanish, but it does involve reducing my regionalisms. And yet, to an audience in El Salvador, there would be little problem in me giving a speech while making some use of regionalisms hardly anyone from the outside understands (say, if I insert a little ¡juela! or ¡juelacha! interjection at some point, for rhetorical effect).

I tend to prefer this, too, at least in writing, to the point that, in fiction, I sometimes simply throw up my hands and invent a new word (usually a compound of already-existing words, like "quickbread cake", since "muffin" can either mean this, or "insipid piece of barely-edible bread-like food product"), when both the American and Commonwealth usages are too different to reconcile (I also simply enjoy doing this sometimes; Pullman probably encouraged the habit). I also do it to avoid references to things that would not exist in world (usually by removing references to real-world place names like "sandwich" and "French fries").