Zompist Bboard Again

Sorry if this post is a bit newbie-ish; I don't know if this has been discussed before, or if it's seen as so well-known that there's no need to discuss it.

I've got the impression that some English loan words in German got a more specific meaning when they got borrowed than they originally had in English:

The English word "Ticket", in German, usually means a plane ticket - a train or bus or ferry ticket is called a "Fahrkarte", while a ticket for an event is called an "Eintrittskarte".

The English word "Band", in German, means only a band in jazz or one of the music styles that came after jazz - a band in an older, more traditional music style is called a "Kapelle".

The English word "Dumpling", in German, means only an East Asian dumpling (and even that perhaps only among people who are into East Asian food; others might not have heard of the word at all) - a dumpling in the cuisine of Germany or another Central European nation is called a "Kloß".

So, is there a linguistic term for that kind of thing? And can you think of other examples?

Semantic narrowing during loaning? Loaning just a particular meaning, instead of all the meanings?

English has a few that are very old (and which are now largely nativised):

Both cloak and clock are loans from a variety of Norman, originally meaning "bell" (Parisian cloche).

Some words for meats, pork, beef, mutton, and I believe also poultry come from the Norman names of animals (Parisian porc, boeuf, mouton, poule(t)).

Also sauce, which is now distinguished from gravy, salsa, and curry, most of them also loanwords from other languages. A few more specific words, like juice and roux were loaned from French at different times.

It seems to be the strategy English has used to expand its vocabulary to have so many words for very specific things that aren't distinguished in many other languages.

Some classicalisms like the flor(i) in floral, florist, floriography only borrow part of a morpheme, and not the base word (though flower is a loan of the Norman French descendant), which is... not quite the same, but perhaps adjacent to the original question.

yeah i'd think that cultural loans at least would tend to have more specific meanings in the receiving language than in the donor language. food might be an exception, since its easier for people to keep track of one new food term than fifteen different words for very similar new foods.

i dont think there's a linguistic term for the narrowing process or the phenomenon of its distribution.

the same word "ticket" ended up reaching English as etiquette, meaning we borrowed only one sense of it. and then French even borrowed it back from us, so that word has really gotten around.

to most English speakers, a tampon can only be one thing, but in French it can also be a sponge or ink stamp. i wonder, though, if the etymologies of two different words got crossed in French since stamp ~ tamp- is pretty close.

I know this happens with loans from Japanese.

Katana in Japanese just means sword; In English, it means specifically the single bladed, curved sword from Japan. Anime, itself a loan from English, means any animation in Japan, but in English, anime of course means Japanese animation, or maybe animation with a similar style.

I might be wrong but I think it's common for a word for a general thing in one language to get borrowed by another language to mean "thing from/in the style of country X".

linguistcat wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 3:54 pmI might be wrong but I think it's common for a word for a general thing in one language to get borrowed by another language to mean "thing from/in the style of country X".

"Carne asada" just means "steak" in Spanish, and can be of any thickness, usually just beef but it could also be some pieces of beef and some chicken or else on the side (as a separate accompanying plate), but I find in US English it seems to mean a particularly very thin beef cut, popular among Mexican-Americans...

The ones I find fun are the ones that are so changed in the second language that they could hardly be called with that word in the source language... In US English, a lot of people seem to understand "taco" as primarily the things Taco Bell says. Hard tortilla, very rolled, thin in volume, with lettuce, with cheese, with sauce/mayo, a little spicy. Which is unspeakably weird if you grow up only knowing actual Mexican tacos, which have soft tortillas, are half open (no rolling), a bit fat in volume more often than not, no lettuce, no cheese, no sauce, no mayo, not spicy, just a lot of little meat cubes (although taco stands generally have cut-up onion and pico de gallo tomato salad (US English: "salsa") for you to add if you want, for free, optionally). Well, your mother might make you eat them with lettuce/pepper, but if you're buying them... In Mexico City, you find yourself eating them while standing on the street, too...

Food items seem to be quite given to doing that, I think. The word tarte in French seems to have a much broader application than tart in English (in which torte has the German, rather than Italian, meaning, so it can be passed along, too); I've also noticed on some international food packaging, the word Keks on what in English would be called "cookies" or "(sweet) biscuits", depending on where you learnt it. The latter one seems to have originated with foreign branding — we seem to inherently think foreign things are interesting to eat; foreign-language words that sound especially euphonous to speakers of another language (Midori, a kind of melon liqueur, and gros Michel, a kind of banana once popular but now critically endangered) also both come to mind, though apparently the former also sounds elegant to the one native Japanese speaker I've asked.

I also find it interesting when two different varieties of a language have different words for the same thing (English is notorious for this, but I shouldn't be surprised if many of the varieties of Spanish, which to my understanding are actually quite divergent from each-other these days, also do this), or when a word can have a more narrow meaning in one variety than another (cf. English biscuit).

Edit - Addendum: I think the variability in the meaning of food-words is at least in part owing to the fact that cuisine can evolve very rapidly, especially as new ingredients emerge, and the materials to which you have access will certainly influence how you might change a certain dish to suit your preferences or environment (like the proverbial "Americans add lots of cheese to everything").

Another fun one is that the semantic stereotype of "sushi" in Japan is sashimi, rice with the meat on top, but in much of the US and Canada it's the little rolls.

I thought it was a given that loanwords are more likely to narrow in meaning. The classic example in English is the word "igloo." In Inuit, it means "shelter" or "building," but nobody in the English speaking world cares what the Inuit call a normal apartment, so the English word igloo refers to a special kind of shelter only found in the high Artic: a dome of ice and snow. Korean has done the exact same thing to English. The word "biru" comes from the English word building. But nobody in Korea cares what word a Brit or American would use to describe a temple or traditional Korean house, as Koreans have perfectly good words for those things that predate regular contact with the West. Instead "biru" was borrowed in the context of modern construction, and so it mainly refers to large apartment buildings (maybe sometimes office buildings, but mainly apartments). It would be incorrect to use the word "biru" in reference to anything traditional. In both cases the common thread is that a word is borrowed in a specific context to fill a specific need. Anything outside that context and need is irrelevant.

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 5:50 pmI've also noticed on some international food packaging, the word Keks on what in English would be called "cookies" or "(sweet) biscuits", depending on where you learnt it.

Swedish kex and Finnish keksi do come from English "cakes", and mean cookie. In Swedish it can also mean wafer.

Yeah, I also tend to think of semantic narrowing as a given, and I see this all the time with food. E.g.:

IT prosciutto “ham” > EN “Italian-style ham cured without smoking” (IT prosciutto di Parma)
IT latte “milk” > EN “coffee drink made with milk” (IT caffè latte)
ES queso “cheese” > EN “spicy cheese dip” (ES queso fundido)
FRC gumbo “okra” > EN “meat and seafood stew thickened with okra”
ZH 包 “to wrap, bag, package, bun, bread” > EN “Chinese-style filled bun”

Some non-food examples in English:
FR couture “culture”
DE Angst “fear, anxiety”
ES mesa “table”

In Irish, Gaeilge means any Goidelic language (e.g. Gaeilge na hAlban “Scottish Gaelic”), but in English it refers only to Irish (and generally Standard Irish at that). Same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the Scottish-Gaelic spelling. Other language names famously mean only “clear speech” or “speech” in their languages of origin and many demonyms simply mean “person” or “people”.

French chef "chief, head of anything" → English chef "head cook"
French coup "hit" → English coup "achievement; a combat feat in Plains Indian culture"
Japanese sake "alcohol" → English sake "Japanese rice wine"
Japanese Gokuu "Wukong, a character from Journey to the West, known in English as Monkey" → English Goku "a character from Dragon Ball"
English dragon → Japanese doragon "western-style dragon" (as opposed to ryuu "eastern-style dragon")
Mandarin báibǎn "white board" → Japanese paipan "blank mahjong tile" (doublet of hakuban "whiteboard")
Spanish dios "god (Christian or pagan)" → Nahuatl Tiyox "the name of the Christian god" (the general word for "god" is teotl, e.g. icel teotl Tiyox "the one god, Dios")

An interdialectal example: In Australian English (and I think British English as well), busted is used to mean "caught/arrested" (also expressions like drug bust), and go bust is used to mean "go bankrupt", but bust in its original American meaning of "break" is not used. Non-Americans never say e.g. "My car is busted".

Moose-tache wrote: I thought it was a given that loanwords are more likely to narrow in meaning.

I would think so.

Moose-tache wrote: Korean has done the exact same thing to English. The word "biru" comes from the English word building.

That has to be via Japanese, right? If it was directly from English it would be bil, wouldn't it?

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 6:58 pm 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.)

Thank you for your contributions, everyone!

Pardon my ignorance, Kuchigakatai, but how does an actual Mexican taco differ from a burrito?

It's a common pattern that a word meaning 'X' from the language of people Y borrowed into English or some other European language acquires the meaning 'the kind of X that is traditional among the people Y'. See, for instance, moccassin or igloo which simply mean 'shoe' and 'house' in the indigenous languages they came from.

I've also been trying to think of a few examples of the reverse happening — a loanword comes to mean more than it did in the original language — but the ones that come to mind in English are among those very old Norman ones that nobody thinks of as not English: flower/flour (the showy attractive part of a plant, and white baking powder — presumably from a Norman phrase something like flour de farine; has also most of the same figurative senses as in French), lance (not merely the weapon, but something you do to a boil), 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".

Adjacently, words that simply mean something different from what they do in the source language — English actual comes most readily to mind, also French le footing, le jogging.

the classic example of a loanword growing far beyond its original sense is check, though that too is so old that I was surprised to find out it where it came from.

I didn't know every sense derived from the Chess one; I had thought it was a coincidence of two separate words being conflated: I had imagined the sense "examine" was some sort of dialect form derived from Old or Middle French cercher, chercher, a doublet of search, but never actually investigated that; I had also thought the banking sense was from something else entirely, especially since it has both check and cheque orthographically, and that it was connected to exchequer (which is apparently also from a chess-related term). My, that morpheme has really gotten around!

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:44 am I've also been trying to think of a few examples of the reverse happening — a loanword comes to mean more than it did in the original language

A recent example is "hummus", which is now used for things not made of garbanzos.

Back to narrowing, another example is "sombrero", which is just "hat" in Spanish.

"Kimono" is an interesting case. Etymologically it just means "garment"— literally, "thing to wear". But the narrowing to a one type of traditional attire seems to have happened in Japanese, not English.

I believe "katana" is another example— it just means "sword" in Japanese. (What do Japanese call the straight European sword?)

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 12:47 pm

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:44 am I've also been trying to think of a few examples of the reverse happening — a loanword comes to mean more than it did in the original language

A recent example is "hummus", which is now used for things not made of garbanzos.

Back to narrowing, another example is "sombrero", which is just "hat" in Spanish.

"Kimono" is an interesting case. Etymologically it just means "garment"— literally, "thing to wear". But the narrowing to a one type of traditional attire seems to have happened in Japanese, not English.

I believe "katana" is another example— it just means "sword" in Japanese. (What do Japanese call the straight European sword?)

A few attestations:

ファイアーエムブレム 烈火の剣 (Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken — the sword in question is called the "Durandal" in game, and numerous in-game words seem to have been taken from the Chanson de Roland in the way Japanese fantasy media seems to name things after characters or objects from various European mythologies; it is portrayed as comically oversized).

ファイアーエムブレム　封印の剣 (Fire Emblem: Fūin no Tsurugi — the sword in question is variously translated as "Sword of Seals" or "Binding Blade"; in sprites, it is portrayed as a largeish one-handed sword).

Note that the above both use the Kanji 剣 with different readings, "tsurugi" — etymologically possibly "side-fang", but this is uncertain; and "ken" — the borrowed Sinitic reading — both seem to be used as standalone words, but "ken" is most common in compounds; it's also sometimes used in fantasy martial technique wordplay: cf. 魔神剣 (majinken - "demon god sword") v. 魔神拳 (majinken - "demon god fist") v. a one-off from the same franchise where a dog uses it, 魔神犬 (majinken - "demon god dog).

Some media also transcribe (usually English) European words for specific types of swords into Katakana: ロングソード (Longsword), サーベル (Sabre, with apparently the French pronunciation), レイピア (Rapier); also some more obscure ones, like ワルーンソード (Walloon Sword) — these taken from Tales of Phantasia.

Wiktionary gives all of 剣 ("tsurugi/ken") and 刀 ("katana", the on'yomi of this one is, I think "tō" or "dō" depending on the word);"katana" is apparently etymologically "single edge".

Edit - Addendum: Of course, take this all with a pinch of salt; I understand entertainment Japanese to be a bit different from the regular language (the proverbial masses of pronouns seem to be literary and artistic conventions more than things you encounter a great deal in daily life, unless you're being facetious), and these are all from fantasy series. I do find these conventions in themselves very interesting, however.

vlad wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 6:26 am

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 6:58 pm 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?