I really like studying etymology and the origins of words, and I’m interested in the fairly omnivorous nature of English, which has a huge “borrowed” vocabulary. (Random fact: “bugger” is related to “Bulgaria”.) So I thought every now and then I’d put up random lists of words English borrows from various languages - well, besides French, German, and Spanish, or I’ll exhaust myself from typing.
I thought I’d start with Malay, national language of Singapore. Wikipedia already has a partial list, but I thought I’d come up with a list that also included a few other loan words. The obvious ones are words for things that are indigenous to the region - plants (durian, rambutan, bamboo, sago, camphor), animals (orang-utan, pangolin, cassowary), and cloth (gingham, sarong). But there’s a whole bunch that’re less obvious, even to native English speakers from this region:
- amok. If you asked me to name one English loan word that’s Malay in origin, this would be the first to come to mind.
- cockatoo. From kakak tua “oldest elder brother sister”. (I know this is an animal, but I wanted to comment more on the etymology.) This reminds me of that Malay folk song we were taught as kids, “Burong Kakak Tua” (“burong” = “bird”). The street next to mine is Jalan Pari Burong, “bird-stingray street”. I presume that refers to a kind of leaping/‘flying’ stingray.
- compound (in the sense of a fenced-in area). From kampung. Presumably this was folk etymology, turning the borrowing into an existing English word.
- cooties. From kutu, “louse/lice”. Always think this one’s funny, since the concept of boys/girls “having cooties” seems so American to me. But apparently it’s British slang.
- gecko. Apparently from gekok, which apparently is Javanese. The Bahasa Melayu word for “lizard” is cicak.
- gong. From gong. Funny that an onomatopoeic word is a borrowing.
- ketchup. From kichap, which itself is a loan from koechiap, which is apparently Teochew. Clearly the interplay of languages in South-East Asia can be seen.
- launch (in the sense of a boat carried on a ship). Apparently from Malay lancharan, from lanchar “quick, agile”. Via Portuguese.
- mandarin (in the sense of a high-ranking official; as well as Mandarin the name of the dialect). Via Portuguese mandarim and/or Dutch mandorijn, from Malay mantri, from Hindi mantri “councilor, minister of state”. Compare the modern-day Malay term mentri besar, “Chief Minister”.
- tea. From the Hokkien/Teochew teh, via Malay teh, to the Dutch East Indies company (aka the VOC, which I spent a good portion of my history lessons learning about) and thereafter to Europe. Which is why we say “tea”, and not something more influenced by the Mandarin cha, such as “chai”. (Saying “chai tea” thus probably means “tea tea”… ah well, I’ll file that with the Department of Redundancy Department, along with “ATM machine”.)
It’s really interesting to see this region’s been a rojak for ages, so much that it’s seeped into all the languages we speak. Some were direct borrowings by the Brits in their period as colonials here; others like “launch” wended their way through Dutch and Portuguese before settling into the English language. And I really like that “Mandarin” as a name for a language is a word borrowed from Hindi via Malay and Dutch. The history of this region in the history of one word.