This is a guest post written by a Gengo translator.

All living languages are constantly changing, and lexical borrowing—the transferral of words from one language into another—is a major area where this evolution is taking place. Globalization has opened new avenues of contact between languages that previously had no interaction, with some interesting results.

Loanwords, adopted as is into the target language, and calques, directly translating the word into the receiving language, are examples of these adaptations. Ironically, “loanword” is a calque of the German Lehnwort, while “calque” is a loanword from French.

While working as a greengrocer, a French customer asked me to be directed to the “champignons”. I sent him towards the mushrooms without hesitation. I had unwittingly experienced an echo of the earliest linguistic borrowing into English: the introduction of Norman French words into Anglo-Saxon through the choice of words used by the lesser Norman officials—the bilinguals of the day. Even today, these borrowings account for nearly half of the English lexicon.

On another occasion, a Japanese customer asked for pīman—a Japanese word borrowed from French piment. With as many as 80% of all borrowed words in Japanese coming from English, this customer was making a fairly safe (yet incorrect) bet that the borrowed word in question was an English one. The Japanese are acutely aware of borrowed words—they even use a special script called katakana to write them—and also make up their own words.

Lexical borrowing probably shouldn’t be called borrowing at all, since the words are never actually returned, at least, not in the same way they left. English borrowed bougette and tounelle from French, turned them into “budget” and “tunnel” and gave them back again. Japanese borrowed “animation” from English, and English took it back again as “anime”. Japanese borrowed (or perhaps made up) “pocke[t] mon[ster]” from English, and English took it back as “pokemon”.

My favorite lexical borrowing is the Chinese word for concrete. Chinese has a sneaky way of borrowing words—it absorbs them until they are indistinguishable from vernacular terms. The Chinese word for concrete is 混凝土 (hùnníngtŭ). The characters used here mean “earth that is mixed and set” and, to all appearances, is a native Chinese word.

Many Chinese speakers are unaware that when China modernized its lexicon in the mid 20th century, it borrowed a large number of words from Japan, which had begun its path to modernization in the late 19th century. The characters were the same, so the work had already been done. The difference is that the Japanese reading of 混凝土 was “konkurīto”, 100% borrowed from the English “concrete”. The deception has been made complete by the fact that Japanese no longer uses these characters to write this word, preferring to write it in katakana.

Borrowed from English into Japanese, “concrete” lost its English spelling but retained some semblance of its original pronunciation. Subsequently borrowed from Japanese into Chinese, it retained its (now obsolete) Japanese spelling, but lost its Anglic pronunciation. Today, neither the Chinese, the Japanese nor the Anglophones are aware of this sneakily “borrowed borrowed” word.

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