#word borrowing

[the-firefly-herd]

“They weren’t always the most… talkative. Not all the time, and certainly not around me. Honestly, I don’t think they liked me that much. But the one person they would always, always, always talk to was their older brother. It was almost incessant! They’d be so quiet you thought they were a ghost, and then the instant he appeared, boom! They were babbling away for hours.”

From this fanfic I'm (or more so Kit is, but ive been liking it as well) reading (call me if you get lost by LavMana on ao3) and ouch it fits us very well both now and as a foal. With our little brother back then, he was the one we'd talk to the most and would talk to others as well as long as he was there but mostly talking to him. He was the one who we could speak to the most even when we where losing our ability to speak.

And then with big sibling best friend nowadays by text, I'm quite certain it'll be the same in person once we can speak again with them and rest of Pack, just how we are super quiet until we're around our people and then we tend to be more confident and talkative

[transfigurationblues]

The foreign words that seem like English – but aren’t

Pseudo-anglicisms are words in other languages that seem like English but aren’t. Though some people are still concerned about them creeping into use.

Before a special night out, a glamorous Parisienne might treat herself to un brushing, at which her hair will be blow-dried and styled. In Moscow, would-be clubbers must first make it past feyskontrol (‘face control’), to ensure that only the beautiful people come in. And those Berliners who just can’t let the party end can carry on at eine Afterhour until well after the sun comes up.

These words – brushing, feyskontrol, Afterhour – seem odd to English ears. We recognise them, sort of, but we’d never use them ourselves – not in those ways, at least. They are borrowed from English but their meanings are new and different; linguists call them pseudo-anglicisms. Sometimes they are English words used to mean something else, other times they are combinations that native speakers find plain weird. Occasionally they’ve been made up to sound like English, but have nothing to do with the language of Shakespeare at all.

Foreign languages are full of pseudo-anglicisms. The Danish for a carrycot is babylift, Hungarians call jeans farmer pants and the Japanese ofisuredii (‘office lady’) describes a female desk worker. A comment on a blog or a website is called a tokbek (‘talk back’) in Hebrew. Skateboarding and frisbee are Funsports in German.