Some English words with a foreign origin and how they came to be

used

From time to time, words are always adopted by foreign

countries, though the spellings might be changed, the origins are

still the same. These kinds of words are known as loanwords. In

English, there are a lot of loanwords, some are obvious, yet lots of

common words are borrowed too, but due to the fact that they were

borrowed a long time ago, people forget their origins.

In the Germanic period, Latin words were borrowed, ‘street’

came from ‘straet’, ‘butter’ came from ‘butere’, ‘wall’ came from

‘waell’, and ‘wine’ came from ‘win’.

In Middle-English period, there are more loanwords, from

Scandinavian, hale, ugly, kindle, low, lump, rag, raise, root, skin,

them, they, their, window, wing are all common English nowadays.

For French, words are borrowed in various categories, for church,

abbot, chaplain, chapter, clergy, friar, prayer, preach, priest,

religion, sacrament, saint, sermon are some examples. For cooking,

beef, boil, broil, butcher, dine, fry, mutton, pork, poultry, roast,

salmon, stew, veal are examples.

 Modernly, the word ‘ketchup’ is actually the Chinese

pronunciation of that kind of sauce, because Chinese doesn’t use

alphabet, therefore ‘ketchup’ can be spelled as ‘catsup’ either.

Pajamas, punch, shampoo are examples that are borrowed from

Hindi.

In conclusion, English is a language involve different languages.