Examples include the French “déjà vu” and “façade,” the Swedish “smörgåsbord,” and the Vietnamese “phở.”īut a curious thing happens when these words are borrowed into English. Diacritics, which you might know as “accent marks,” are those little symbols that appear above or below one or more letters in a word, indicating how that letter is pronounced.
Of this latter category, there is a sizeable subset whose native spellings include diacritical marks not used in standard English. Often, though, foreign loan words are brought into English more or less intact, either in their original spelling (e.g., the German “schadenfreude,” the French “bistro”) or, if non-Western in origin, transliterated into the Latin alphabet (e.g., the Japanese “karaoke,” the Mandarin “kung fu”).
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Get your free sample back in 3 to 6 hours! Sometimes these “loan words” undergo a process of anglicization, meaning their form is altered to suit English conventions of spelling or pronunciation, as has occurred with words as diverse as “algorithm” (from the Arabic “Al-Khwārizmī”) to “ketchup” (probably from Malay “kecap”). What makes English even more complex is that after assuming its modern form around the fifteenth century, it has continued to incorporate words from foreign sources, adopting new vocabulary along with new ideas. In part, that’s because the former phrase uses Germanic Angle-Saxon vocabulary, whereas the latter uses words that entered English via Norman French. “A hearty meal,” for instance, is precisely cognate with “a cordial repast,” but they feel very different. As a mottled product of Greek, Germanic, and (via French) Latinate influences, English has many pairs of words with approximately the same meaning yet subtle distinctions of mood. Part of that variety can be attributed to the tongue’s very origins. Perhaps the greatest glory of English is its expansive vocabulary, which allows for a breadth and variety of expression unparalleled among world languages.
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