Foreignisms and Loanwords

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Francesca from San Diego.

Hi, Francesca.

Hi.

So I teach high school English, and a question arose that, actually my question is in two parts.

So my students read Jane Eyre last year, and in some moments in the novel, a character will start to speak in French, and it’s not translated into English, you just have a direct French translation.

And my students were wondering if there’s a literary term for that.

And so that was the first part of my question, if there’s a term for that transition into a foreign language.

And then my second question was, it got me thinking about foreign languages and how we use certain terms in English.

Sorry, I’m in the middle of class.

Oh, you are?

Yeah.

Is your class listening in?

They are. They’re standing here attentively and excitedly waiting.

They’re standing? You make them stand?

Well, they’re actually waiting to transition into another class.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

I see.

Hi, class.

They said hi.

Whoa.

What do you have, 120 in that class?

Do you teach a stadium?

No.

They’re one of those little microphones?

No.

I teach at the Academy of Our Lady of Peace.

It’s an all-girls school.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah.

What a lot of enthusiasm there.

A lot of enthusiasm indeed.

So the question about Janier and the use of French, what did you tell them?

I said I didn’t know.

So the French isn’t translated at all?

Well, in the edition I have, at the bottom there’s an English translation.

Oh, thank goodness.

But that’s the student version, right, for the people who are studying the book?

Right.

Because there are whole sentences in Janier.

Yeah, and what year was that published?

Ooh, I don’t have it with me.

But even if we don’t have the exact date, we can be pretty sure that this is a period that when any lady of sophistication or any young woman who hoped to better herself in the world had French.

She knew it.

And it was probably pretty standard that the audience for this book understood that French with no question.

And so it wasn’t even really a pretension so much.

I mean, clearly within the book, she’s putting on a little bit of airs, right?

Right.

There’s a little bit of that happening.

But as far as the us, those of us who are reading this book, the author expected that we would get it and that we would understand it.

And it’s only to the modern eye where French isn’t taught as widely that it really is kind of a problem.

Right. Is there a term for that, for inserting another language into a text like that?

Well, if it’s adopted fully, if it’s probably a word or a phrase that’s adopted fully into English, it’s just a foreignism.

Otherwise, it’s just simply a kind of code switching where she’s switching from one language to another because she feels that the purpose is better served by speaking this other language.

Okay.

So you’re saying it’s not dialogue.

It’s her observation, the author’s observation.

Oh, it is dialogue.

It’s dialogue.

Okay.

She feels in the book, the character feels as if she can only express herself fully in this other language.

And so she does.

Okay.

Because there is a French little girl in the novel, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, and so that got me thinking actually about another question that had to do with foreign languages.

We were talking in my class about words that we use in English, but we don’t translate them from the original words like rendezvous or schadenfreude.

And is there a term for doing that?

Is there a reason why we do that, or is there even a term for that practice of using a word, not translating it into English?

Well, I’m going to get the quote wrong, but there’s a famous quote that’s been making the rounds for a couple of years that English is a language that’s a thief.

It rifles through the pockets of other languages and steals their better words.

And English does do that.

And like I said, the word that I used before is the same word for this.

These are foreignisms.

We borrow them into English because we feel that our language is not doing the job.

Right.

And they’ll take on a meaning that’s very close to the original language, but not quite the same.

And it just becomes English.

We stop italicizing it.

We don’t set it apart in any way.

We all just learn it.

And this is the way that English was built.

How about loanwords?

Is that a different term?

Lonewords as well.

Lonewords are when they haven’t been fully anglicized and they haven’t been fully acclimated into English.

And so we’re probably still likely to italicize them or still likely to treat them somehow different, maybe even put them in quotes to show that we’re borrowing them.

Or we’ll explain them in the text.

Okay, so foreignisms and loanwords.

Sounds good.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Well, it’s our pleasure.

Tell your students that we’re glad to have them along, and they should give us a listen sometime.

They’d like you to listen sometime.

Okay.

Okay.

You’re laughing.

Thank you.

They are.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Best of luck to you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Wow.

I love when hardworking teachers putting old heads on young shoulders give us a call.

That’s great.

I love that expression.

I love that.

Yeah.

Miss Jean Brody.

What’s your question about a book that you’re reading or a class that you’re teaching or a class that you’re taking?

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