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Saturday, October 11, 2008

What does Checkmate, Coffee and Orange have in common?

All three are Arabic in origin

From wikipedia

English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

However, if the frequency of use of words is considered, words from Old and Middle English occupy the vast majority.

The reasons for English's vast borrowing include:

This lack of restrictions makes it comparatively easy for the English language to incorporate new words. However, the English pronunciations of loanwords often differ from the original pronunciations to such a degree that a native speaker of the language it was borrowed from is not able to recognize it as a loanword when spoken.

English has often borrowed words from the cultures and languages of the British Colonies. For example, words borrowed from Hindi include syce/sais, dinghy, chutney, pundit, wallah, pajama/pyjamas, bungalow and jodhpur. Other examples include trek, aardvark, laager, wildebeest and veld from Afrikaans, shirang, amok (Malay) and sjambok (Malay via Afrikaans).

English also acquires loanwords in which foreign sounds are part of the foreign pronunciation. For example, the Hawaiian word ʻaʻā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the usual English pronunciation, [ˈɑ.ɑ], does not contain the glottal stop. In addition, the English spelling usually removes the okina and macron diacritic...

So next time some idiot try to scare you by saying Barack Hussein Obama over and over again point out that.

Barack is a Semitic word meaning "to bless" as a verb or "blessing" as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: "And God blessed (ḇāreḵə ) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth." 

Two.

"Hussein." Is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning "good" or "handsome." Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Three ask if the idiot even know what "His" own name mean before he or she  bitch about somebody else?

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