10 Words Borrowed From Other Languages - 500 Words Ep. 31

A long, long time ago over on HaggardHawks, this little fact popped up:

Around 30% of the English language is derived from French.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 17 January 2014

In retrospect, that’s a little disingenuous (not least because linguists can’t really decide what actually constitutes a word), but regardless of the parameters involved, studies of etymology tend to agree that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the English language has been borrowed directly into English from French.

Elsewhere in the dictionary, things get increasingly far-flung: besides the likes of German, Spanish and Italian, English has adopted words from practically every major European language, including Norwegian (slalom), Finnish (sauna), and Czech (robot), as well as a number of global big-hitters like Russian (vodka), Arabic (almanac), the Chinese (lychee) and Japanese (karate) languages, and Hindi (juggernaut), Bengali (jute), Urdu (cummerbund) and all the other languages of the Indian subcontinent.

And it’s borrowed words and the languages we have taken them from that are up for discussion in this week’s HH video:

We might owe the humble word tattoo to (SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen the video) one of the furthest of the far-flung languages of the south Pacific, but it is by no means alone. 

Other somewhat surprising languages to have provided words to English include Tamil, another Indian language and the official language of both Sri Lanka and Singapore, which is the origin of the likes of catamaran, cheroot and pariah. Javanese, the most widely spoken language in Indonesia, is the origin of batik and lahar, another name for a volcanic mudflow. 

The native Aboriginal languages of Australia have given us billabong, budgerigar and dingo. When you run amok, you’re using a Malay word (borrowed into English via Portuguese) meaning “attacking frenziedly”. The boondocks take their name from a Tagalog word meaning “remote place”. And over in the Caribbean, the Taíno language is responsible for a number of very familiar words adopted into English via Spanish Caribbean colonists, including tobacco, hurricane, potato, canoe and even Caribbean itself. But these words, and several others like them, are almost all that remains of the Taíno civilization.

An indigenous Arawak people, the Taíno were once the most numerous people in the entire Caribbean. As such were the first Native Americans that Christopher Columbus came into contact with when he arrived in the Americas in the late 1400s; Columbus’s misinterpretation of the Carib people’s word for themselves, Caniba (as well his misapprehension that they were anthropophagous) even gave us the word cannibalism.

But as more Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, the Taíno population collapsed as its people contracted diseases for which they had no natural immunity, most notably smallpox. Within three decades, their numbers had dwindled by as much as 90%; according to some accounts, by the mid 1500s there were fewer than 500 individual Taíno people alive in the world. 

Although the population understandably never recovered, pockets of Taíno people survive across North America today. But their culture and language suffered so terrifically in the aftermath of Columbus’s arrival that the handful of Taíno words to have survived in English offer an extraordinary and tantalizingly rare glimpse of a long-lost civilization... 
  

Admiral

Last week HaggardHawks tweeted this screenshot, taken from a brilliantly-titled dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, published in 1890:

  

And, well, it probably all needs a bit more explaining.

Admiral is one of those deceptively straightforward words behind which lies the kind of history that keeps etymologists awake at night. They should really cut down on the caffeine after 5pm. It’s all a bit of a bewildering hodgepodge—the OED’s etymology alone comprises a 1300-word essay—but the basic theory is that, at its root, admiral derives from the old Arabic title amir, as in emir and emirates. This ancient title was then borrowed into and reshaped by the vocabularies of various Mediterranean countries and cultures around 1000 years ago, and via the all-conquering Normans eventually began to appear in English texts in the early thirteenth century.

Initially, admiral was used as a fairly general title for a ruler, a leader, or a military commander; things get confusing when we try to find out how it came to be used exclusively of a naval leader.

The first person we know to have held a naval title along the lines of admiral was the not-all-that-impressive-sounding George of Antioch in the early 1100s. George, who had already worked in several similar naval positions in Arabic-speaking North Africa, was put in charge of the fleet of the even-less-impressive-sounding Roger II, a twelfth-century King of Sicily, who gave him the Latin title ammiratus ammiratorum. 

It’s around this time that (etymologically, at least) things become a little hazy: it could be that George’s title ammiratus is a Mediaeval Latin spin on the Arabic title amir, which George would certainly have known of having served in North Africa. Alternatively, it could be a purely Latin title, with no connection to Arabic at all—on its own, ammiratus ammiratorum literally means “the most admired of the admired”.

Wherever the word’s ancient history might lead us from there, however, the fact is that by the time of George’s appointment Sicily too had been conquered by the Norman French—and it was the Normans who were responsible for transplanting the title from the sunny southern Mediterranean to the rainy European northwest. 

So. If that’s the story of admiral, what about the admiral of the narrow seas?

Well, in eighteenth century slang—long after admiral had established itself as a naval title in England—a curious trend emerged for applying fictitious “titles” to various people and characters. So a Captain Queernabs was “a shabby, ill-dressed fellow”, and a Captain Cork was a man who was “slow in passing the bottle”. A boatswain-captain was the naval equivalent of a swot: an overly competent seaman who never seemed to put a foot wrong. An admiral of the red was a wine-drinker. An admiral of the white was a coward. An admiral of the blue was a drunkard, or a publican (who would typically wear a blue tabard). An admiral of the red, white and blue was a ludicrously or ostentatiously dressed person. And an admiral of the narrow seas was the queasy, mulvathered seafarer mentioned above.

A vice admiral of the narrow seas, meanwhile, was an even worse drinking companion: