2373: Biblical Loan Words Jun 17, 2021

Over the years, a number of collections have been arranged of word in Biblical Hebrew that are from other sources, including non-Semitic ones. Of course, some of these will be obvious, such as פרעה‎ ('pharaoh') from Ancient Egyptian probably or קוף (qof) meaning 'monkey' from either Tamil or Sanskrit, considering that these concepts would not be native. Considering also the timespan of Bible, some of these sources will be found later historically after centuries of contact with other civilizations in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. However, even in the Writings (כתובים‎) which has the greatest percentage, even a inclusive estimate would put total loan words from any language at less than 2% of all vocabulary.

2219: Finnish Borrowing from Itself—Jan 11, 2021

Finnish is known for taking on lots of loan words, but it has even loaned some of its own, sort of. On the water by Finland’s capital lies Iso Huopalahti (felt bay), which was earlier Haapalaksi, with ‘-laksi’ being an older form of ‘lahti’ and ‘haapa’ means ‘aspen’. Note that both ‘huopa’ (felt) and ‘haapa’ (aspen) both borrow from Germanic roots for those words. While changing a name from Huopalahti to Haapalaksi might not seem so crazy, the reason for this comes from the Swedish name ‘Hoplax’—the area is bilingual—which comes from ‘Haapalaksi’. This means that Huopalahti [Finnish] comes from Hoplax [Swedish, a Germanic language], from Haapalaksi [Finnish] ultimately from another Germanic word, though this last point is not strictly related. This does happen in other languages too, such as the French ‘biftèque’, a direct loan of the English ‘beefsteak’, with ‘beef’ once replacing the (Old) English ‘cū‘ (cow).

2141: "Loansounds" in Hebrew: [tʃ] Oct 25, 2020

Hebrew has no letter to represent [tʃ] (like in CHew) but there are two different traditions to draw from to do this. The way that was used for Yiddish, which did have this sound regularly, was to write טש (T-SH) as is used in קטשופ (ketchup). This word is also notable because it doesn't use the for of פ when it appears at the end of the word, ף, where one would be expected. Because the sound only exists in new loanwords, what Hebrew usually does for other foreign sounds instead is to add a sort of apostrophe (׳) known as a 'geresh' to indicate a variant. In this case, 'crunch' is written as קרונצ׳, as a variant of צ normally for /ts/. This is also used for instance for the [dʒ] sound (as in 'Jump'), written as a variant of ג which usually represents [g].