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Words borrowed from other languages and the meaning of Tingo

Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language. A loanword can also be called a borrowing. The abstract noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language. "Loan" and "borrowing" are of course metaphors, because there is no literal lending process. There is no transfer from one language to another, and no "returning" words to the source language. The words simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one these words originated in.

Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities. Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the two languages in contact, but often there is an asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other. In this case the source language community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing language community. For example, the Germanic tribes in the first few centuries A.D. adopted numerous loanwords from Latin as they adopted new products via trade with the Romans. Few Germanic words, on the other hand, passed into Latin. Generally, some speakers of the borrowing language know the source language too, or at least enough of it to utilize the relevant word. They adopt the new word when speaking the borrowing language, because it most exactly fits the idea they are trying to express. If they are bilingual in the source language, which is often the case, they might pronounce the words the same or similar to the way they are pronounced in the source language.

Those who first use the new word might use it at first only with speakers of the source language who know the word, but at some point they come to use the word with those to whom the word was not previously known. To these speakers the word may sound 'foreign'. At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word.

I recently found a book by the writer Adam Jacot de Boinod called The Meaning Of Tingo. As a native speaker of English, I was a bit confused. I had never heard of this word “tingo” and was curious about the title of the book.

As I soon found out, even if you are not a native speaker, then going to your dictionary and looking up the word “tingo” will not help. In fact, you probably won’t find the word “tingo” there at all and not least because of the fact that “tingo” is not an English word. “Tingo”, it seems, is one of very many words which cannot be translated into English – or at least one of those words which are very difficult to try and translate into English or even into your own native language. The book The Meaning of Tingo is a kind of dictionary but perhaps a dictionary you will not find useful in the same way that your usual dictionary is. The Meaning of Tingo is a list of words from languages all over the world which have very specific, not to say very unusual, meanings.

English is a language that has always been omnivorous, taking words from other languages to enrich its own vocabulary. English has taken the words pyjamas from Hindi to describe the loose clothes you may wear when you go to bed, croissant from French to describe a particular kind of sweet bread roll, or catastrophe from Greek to describe a particularly bad event, or angst from German to describe a particular mixture of fear and anger. And these are just a few of the many examples of words that English has made its own.

However, it is interesting to look at words that even a greedy language such as English has not (at least yet) made its own.

Japanese may have given us manga to describe a particular style of comic book, but the English have not yet adopted the useful expression katahara itai - laughing so much that your stomach hurts. The Japanese have many such useful words – another one for example, is bakku-shan - a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front. Have you ever wanted to say that in merely one word? Now you can.

As well as Japanese, it seems that German is also a useful language. German often makes “compound words” – one or more words joined together to make a new word. Putzfimmel, for example, is a mania for cleaning while Backpfeifengesicht apparently describes the kind of face that people want to hit.

Jacot de Boinod’s book is not only amusing, but, he claims, shows that way in which a language is inextricably linked to the culture in which it is spoken. Is it really true, then, that in Germany there are a lot of people who have faces which other people want to punch? Or that Japan has more than its share of of bakku-shan? The reader may not at first be convinced by this, but when you read that Hawaiians have 108 words for sweet potato, 65 for fishing nets and 47 for banana (simply because in Hawaii there are indeed 108 different kinds of sweet potato, 65 fishing nets and 47 different types of banana), it makes more sense. Albanians are famous for their moustaches – and indeed the Albanian language contains 27 different words for “moustache”- madh, for example, is a bushy moustache, posht is a moustache hanging down at the ends while a fshes is a long moustache with short hairs. People from Holland and Belgium appear to be more fun-loving. Dutch has a word uitwaaien - “walking in windy weather for fun”, while people in the Netherlands apparently often go to plimpplampplettere. What are they doing? Just think about the sound – they are skimming stones on water.

More evidence of this link between language and culture can be seen in the words which different languages have for jobs which exist only in their cultures. Some of these jobs are pretty unusual: a koshatnik in Russian is a dealer in stolen cats, while Spanish speakers in central America often have to work with an aviador - a government employee who only shows up on payday.

So, what exactly does “tingo” mean then? Well, to find that out, you’ll just have to find the book. No, not really! It's from the Pascuense language of Easter Island, meaning "to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left".

*** Anna Akhmatova

The muse has left along narrow
And winding street,
And with large drops of dew
Were sprinkled her feet.

For long did I ask of her
To wait for winter with me,
But she said, "The grave is here,
How can you breathe, you see?"

I wanted to give her a dove
That is whiter than all the rest
But the bird herself flew above
After my graceful guest.

Looking at her I was silent,
I loved her alone
And like gates into her country
In the sky stood the dawn.

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