How languages steal words from each other

🤯 going to need to watch that last 15 seconds a few times

Words that start with "al" usually come from Arabic? Who knew the word Alabama was Arabic!

This is why I hate when speakers of other languages condescendingly point out, for example Puerto Rico, isn't pronounced "Pordo Rico" when I use it in an English sentence. I know, but that's the English word for it, so what exactly am I supposed to say?

“That was a British sentence…” XDXDXDXD

Skate is a loanword from Dutch. The Dutch word is "schaats". The English thought that schaats is plural so they left out the ending s. Skates became skate. The Dutch plural of "schaats2 is "schaatsen".

Im from America and went to a trip in Bulgaria and pork hotdogs translated to cranberry sauce for some reason

My favorite weird loanword is "hentai." In Japanese, it just means "pervert," but English speakers assigned that word to an entire genre of comics. Then to make things funnier, English speakers often use "ecchi" to refer to softcore comics. In Japanese, "ecchi" usually refers to sex. So "ecchi" is arguably a better word for "hentai."

In Treasure Island the crew call Long John Silver by the nickname “Barbecue” because he’s the cook. I wonder if Stevenson put that in there on purpose as a subtle hint to his being a buccaneer?

Loanwords

"Ward" and "guard" both came from French, where it was a Germanic loanword, from Proto-Germanic 'wardaz'.

The chicken cooked on fire is awesome.

its a good concept, here in nz we have the marrys still trying to put their own name on everything.its bloody confusing

this was fun

Like a barrrrrrbeque?

is "steal" the best way to state this ?

You mispelled صحراء

I like how "upside down" in russian is вверх ногами meaning "feet up" or, you could say it like "downside up"

It's interesting because "skyscraper" in VNese would be "nhà chọc trời" which actually means "sky piercer/poker" (more so on thr latter) in English.

These videos of Tom's should be included in the Education system. They are far more interesting than boring teachers trying to teach English. Badly....

Skyscraper → ma té N ro o摩天楼

When my father lived in Austria in the 1950s, he would frequently come upon a word he didn't know in German, so he substituted the English word in a strong French accent and he said that most of the time people understood.

hell will break loose when languages start to demand their borrowed words back 😂

Therednttve makes sense tho

I have a funny example of rebracketing when it comes to English and my native Polish, specifically the foods we got from each other. English borrowed our "pierogi" and started to add -s (pierogis) at the end... despite the fact the -i was already the plural suffix. The funny thing is we did sth very similar when we borrowed "chips" (in the American meaning). They're known as "chipsy" in Poland, so we also added a superfluous plural ending. What is interesting that when it comes to computer chips, we went a more standard route (chip - chipy). It's probably because computer chips are more likely to be seen as single items, while potato chips are sold in packagings of several "scraps"; still, it's an interesting tidbit.

gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp

Naan bread is “bread bread”

RIP

I still don’t know how a bbq became a pirate

But what about the barbecue and the pirate?

in slovenia, a skyscraper is translated to nebotičnik (nebo - sky tičnik - toucher /scraper)

Did you know that in Swedish, any word beginning with q, w and z are considered loanwords?

This being the final run genuinely breaks my heart... PLEASE come back soon, Tom.... You've changed so much about how I view the world from infrastructure, to how I perceive the world (your Tightrope walking video) to just mere languages. We all need you.

I haven't read the entire thread so apologies if someone else has mentioned this already.
As I recall Lake Windemere translates back to Lake lake lake.

My favourite loanword is Avon. So many River Avons.

Barbecue*

The German word for roof is dach, the Poles took that word and kept it with the same exact spelling and pronunciation and then it entered Ukrainian with, again, the same pronunciation, but not the same spelling (because it's written in cyrillic, дах)

Some say that english is french spoken with a funny accent.

Uh, the Nahuatl is tomatl. Tip of tongue on palate behind upper incisors.
Spanish adults couldn' t modify, for the usual adult reasons of dendritic pruning - of both ability to distinguish the sound of air passing around sides of tongue, AND, of motor neurons shaping the tongue in that way.
While an attentive conquistador could hear the difference, he was too busy drooling for gold, to learn the language.
Ocelotl, chocolatl, many others. They just dropped the sound.

my favorite is helicopter, coming from Helico and Pter. but people then cut it up as Heli and Copter

Who's coming here after Reverse Trivia and "boucanier"

The final run of the Language Files! It's been years. Three videos, with my usual co-authors Molly and Gretchen, and animator Will; one every few weeks. It's been a while! Have a look in the description for a link to the full playlist.