5. Words with Passports

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 5.

Words with Passports

How words travel between languages

From the Czech robot and the dollar from Jáchymov to Chinese tea and Japanese emoji.

When a word gets a passport

Imagine a perfectly ordinary evening. You make yourself a cup of tea, put on your pajamas, start some karaoke and let a robot vacuum the floor. If you paid for something in dollars earlier and there is chocolate in your fridge, you have just travelled across a good part of the world in a few minutes. And you may not even have got up from the sofa.

Words travel just like people, food, technologies and ideas. They cross borders, change their pronunciation, sometimes their spelling, and often gain a completely new meaning on the way. In this respect English is an unusually welcoming language. It has taken words from traders and sailors, soldiers and scholars, immigrants, colonized societies and writers.

It is important to tell two things apart. Words like English three, German drei and Czech tři are distant relatives inherited from a common ancestor. English robot, on the other hand, was not inherited from an ancient language: English borrowed it from Czech in modern times. A borrowed word like this is called a loanword. And it is these "language travellers" that we are going to follow today.

Robot: a word born in a Czech play

Today most people imagine a machine when they hear the word robot: a factory arm, a vacuum cleaner or a humanoid helper. But just over a hundred years ago this word did not exist in English at all.

In 1920, Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. was published. Its artificial workers are manufactured beings made to work for people. A key detail: in the original story they were not metal machines. They were made from artificial living matter. The word comes from Czech robota – the forced labour of serfs.

According to Karel's own account, the word itself was suggested by his brother Josef Čapek. Karel was thinking of the name "labori", but Josef suggested "roboti". In the 1920s the play quickly reached foreign stages, and the new word spread with it. Today people almost all over the world understand it. So Czech gave English one of the most striking words of the technological age. [1]

And perhaps even more interesting than the word's journey is the change in its meaning: an artificial worker from a drama became the name for mechanical and later even software automation.

Dollar: from Jáchymov to American banknotes

The second Czech trace is much older and much less obvious. If someone told you that the name of the American dollar is connected with a mining town in the Ore Mountains, you might not believe them. Yet this language journey can be followed quite well.

At the beginning of the 16th century, silver coins were minted in today's Jáchymov, then called Joachimsthal. Their long German name Joachimsthaler was gradually shortened to thaler (Czech tolar). Other European languages took over similar names, for example Dutch in the form daalder. In the end English got the word dollar. [2]

Of course, this does not mean that the United States simply brought its coins from Jáchymov. The American dollar has its own history of currency and minting. But its name is a linguistic descendant of the name of the Jáchymov thaler. And that is quite a world success for a small Czech town.

Tea and čaj: two journeys of one Chinese word

Why do the English drink tea, while Czechs drink čaj, Russians chai and Turks çay? It is one of the most beautiful examples of how trade routes influence language.

Both forms are connected with the Chinese character 茶. But in different Chinese languages the word was pronounced differently. Sea traders on the south-eastern coast of China met a form that sounded roughly like tê. Through Dutch thee, this variant spread into English, French and German. Other routes, often over land, carried the form chá. This gave words like Persian chāy, Russian chai and Czech čaj. [3]

It is not a watertight rule of "by sea tea, by land chai". For example, the Portuguese learned the form chá while trading on the Chinese coast. But as an explanation of the main language forms, the story works very well.

And what if you order chai tea in English? From the point of view of etymology, you have just said something like "tea tea". In today's English, however, chai often means a particular spiced drink, so in a café it makes practical sense.

Shampoo, pajamas and bungalow: a legacy of South Asia

Let us move to South Asia. English shampoo did not start as the name of a bottle of hair product. It comes from Hindi champo, an instruction to massage or knead. In English it first meant a body massage; only over time did its meaning shift to washing hair. [4]

The word pajamas (in British English pyjamas) has a similarly surprising history. It came into English from Hindi and Urdu, with Persian roots. Originally it meant loose trousers, not necessarily nightwear. Europeans adopted the garment and gradually shifted the meaning to today's pajamas. [5]

And bungalow? Its name refers to a Bengali style of building houses. English took the word through the languages of the Indian subcontinent. Today we use it for a certain type of low house, but the name still reminds us of where it once came from. [6]

These words did not appear in isolation. Their spread was connected with British trade and colonial rule in India. So language exchange is not always a story of equal partners; sometimes it comes with very unequal power relations.

Safari: when "a journey" began to mean watching animals

When people hear safari, most Europeans imagine African savannahs, jeeps, lions and photographing wild animals. In Swahili, however, safari originally means much more generally "a journey" or "travelling". The Swahili word has roots in an Arabic word connected with travel. [7]

The word came into English through travels and expeditions to East Africa. Gradually it became connected with hunting and later mainly with tourists watching animals. So the meaning narrowed: an ordinary journey became a journey of a particular kind.

Interestingly, in some East African varieties of English, safari can still keep its more general meaning. A borrowed word does not have to mean exactly the same in its new language as in its original home.

Chocolate, tomato and avocado: gifts from the languages of the Americas

Europe brought new foods from the Americas. Together with them, it took over their names. English tomato came through Spanish tomate and goes back to Nahuatl tomatl. In the same way, English avocado developed through Spanish from Nahuatl ahuacatl. [8]

The story of chocolate is even more interesting. The word reached us through Spanish and is connected with the languages of the native peoples of Mesoamerica, especially Nahuatl. People often say it came directly from xocolatl, but the exact etymology is a subject of expert debate. Here it is better to admit uncertainty than to present an attractive legend as an undoubted fact. [9]

Just look at an ordinary menu: chocolate, tomato, avocado, guacamole. The history of American languages hides even in the lunch menu.

Algebra and algorithm: when ideas travel

Not all borrowed words came into English with goods or food. Some were brought by books, scholars and scientific methods.

Algebra goes back to Arabic al-jabr, a word connected with "restoring" or "joining". It was made famous by a 9th-century mathematical book by the Persian scholar al-Khwarizmi, later translated into Latin. And it was from the Latinized form of his name that English algorithm developed. [10]

So every programmer today uses a word that hides the name of a medieval mathematician. It is a reminder that the development of European science also depended on translations and on passing knowledge across cultural and language borders.

Karaoke and emoji: words that return and change the world

The travels of words did not stop in the past. Japanese gave world English the word karaoke. It is made of Japanese kara ("empty") and ōke, which is short for ōkesutora – the Japanese borrowing of English orchestra. So the word went from English into Japanese and came back in a new form. [11]

Emoji has an even younger story. In Japanese, e means "picture" and moji "character". So the name does not come from English emotion, even though it seems to. The fact that emoji often express emotions is just a striking coincidence in the similarity of the words. [12]

Today's technologies create a new word in one part of the world, and within a few years billions of people know it. Trade caravans once needed years; the internet sometimes needs just a weekend.

Don't trust every word's travel diary

Etymology is fascinating precisely because it often turns intuitive ideas upside down. But it also attracts invented stories. People love explanations that are simple, funny and perfectly memorable. The real history of languages is rarely so neat.

For example, polka really is connected with a dance that spread from the Czech lands, but there are several explanations of the name itself. And some words, for example chocolate, have a well-documented journey between languages, but not all the details of their earliest origin. That is why a good etymological dictionary sometimes says "probably" or "uncertain". This is not a weakness. It is honesty.

This gives students a practical rule: when you see a sensational "real origin of a word" on the internet, check it in at least two reliable sources. Sometimes it turns out that reality is even more interesting than the legend.

One language, many stories

English cannot be separated from the history of the people who spoke it and the people they came into contact with. Its vocabulary is a mixture of old Germanic foundations and thousands of later encounters: with French, Latin, Arabic, South Asian languages, African languages and the languages of the native peoples of the Americas.

Every borrowed word is a small message about where goods travelled, where people met and who managed to push through a new idea. So next time you use the words robot, dollar, shampoo or emoji in English, you can imagine how many borders they had to cross before they became part of a perfectly ordinary sentence.

Words do not have passports. Yet they are among the most persistent travellers in human history.

A small word atlas

A selection of words that came into English from other languages or through other go-betweens.