Lingthusiasm - A Podcast That's Enthusiastic About Linguistics

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about borrowing and loanwords. There are lots of different trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to language, including words that are associated with particular domains, like tea and books, words that shift meaning when they language hop, like “gymnasium” and “babyfoot”, words that get translated piece by piece, like “gratte-ciel” (skyscraper) and “fernseher” (television), and words that end up duplicating the same meaning (or is it...?) in multiple languages, like “naan bread” and “Pendle hill”. We also talk about the tricky question of how closely to adapt