Social:Wanderwort

Short description: Linguistic term for a widely dispersed word

A Wanderwort (German: [ˈvandɐˌvɔɐt], 'migrant word', sometimes pluralized as Wanderwörter, usually capitalized following German practice) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another. As such, Wanderwörter are a curiosity in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics within a wider study of language contact. At a sufficient time depth, it can be very difficult to establish in which language or language family a Wanderwort originated and into which it was borrowed.

Frequently, they are spread through trade networks, sometimes to describe a previously unfamiliar plant, animal or food.

Examples

Typical examples of Wanderwörter are cannabis, sugar, ginger, copper, silver, cumin, mint, wine, and honey, some of which can be traced back to Bronze Age trade.

Four Wanderwörter with the meaning 'camel'. Extensive loaning has carried Semitic, Turkic, Indo-Iranian, and Chinese words for 'camel' throughout Africa and Eurasia.

Tea, with its Eurasian continental variant chai (both have entered English), is an example whose spread occurred relatively late in human history and is therefore fairly well understood: tea is from Hokkien 茶 tê, specifically Amoy dialect, from the Fujianese port of Xiamen, hence maritime; while 茶 chá (whence chai) is used in Cantonese and Mandarin. (See etymology of tea for further details.)

Chocolate and tomato were both taken from Classical Nahuatl via Spanish into many different languages, although the specific origin of chocolate is obscure.

Farang, a term derived from the ethnonym Frank through Arabic and Persian, refers to (typically white, European) foreigners. From the above two languages, the word has been loaned into many languages spoken on or near the Indian Ocean, including Hindi, Thai, and Amharic, among others.

Kangaroo was taken from the Guugu Yimithirr word for the eastern grey kangaroo; it entered English through the records of James Cook's expedition of 1770 and through English to languages around the world.

Orange originated in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam), and whose likely path to English included, in order, Sanskrit, Persian, possibly Armenian, Arabic, Italian, and Old French. (See Orange (word) § Etymology for further details.)

The words for 'horse' across many Eurasian languages seem to be related such as Mongolian морь (mor), Manchu ᠮᠣᡵᡳᠨ (morin), Korean 말 (mal), Japanese 馬 (uma), and Thai ม้า (máː), as well as Sino-Tibetan languages leading to Mandarin 馬 (mǎ), and Tibetan རྨང (rmang). It is present in several Celtic and Germanic languages, whence Irish marc and English mare.