Spanish loanwords from English, Part 6: sándwich

sándwich (masculine noun, pl. sándwiches)

This is a fully accepted word in Spanish despite its odd spelling and sound structure from the point of view of Spanish. Actually, from the perspective of the Academia, it is probably better to say that this word is tolerated given its popular acceptance (see below). In Spanish like in English, this is a common word for food between two slices of sliced bread, even though eating sandwiches is not as common or popular a thing in the Spanish-speaking word as in the English-speaking world.[i] The term for an open or open-faced sandwich, which only has one slice of bread, is sándwich abierto, an obvious clone.

The term sliced bread in English refers to a type of bread with cuboid shape (or pan de molde in Spanish) that is typically sold already cut into slices. This type of bread has become available quite recently in Spanish-speaking countries and it is still not very common. Sliced-bread sandwiches, however, are quite a common novelty, especially in eating establishments, if not home-made. In many Spanish-speaking countries bread is not a common staple and tortillas are preferred. In Spain, sandwiches have not come anywhere close to replacing the ubiquitous bocadillo, which is made with sliced baguette type bread (Sp. pan de barra or barra de pan) and corresponds more closely to a roll or sub in English (in colloquial British English, butty or sarnie). The noun bocadillo is a diminutive from the noun bocado that means ‘bite’ and ‘snack’ (as in ‘bite to eat’). The noun bocado obviously comes from the noun boca ‘mouth’. The bocadillo sandwich is only found in Spain, however. In Colombia and Venezuela, bocadillo is the name for guava jelly. In recent decades, Spaniards have taken to changing the word bocadillo to bocata in colloquial speech.

The English word sandwich [ˈsænd.wɪʧ] comes from the 18th century presumed inventor of (or big aficionado to) this type of food, John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (a town in Kent, England). Presumably, eating his food this way allowed him to continue playing cards, his favorite pastime, while he ate. It is quite likely, however, that the Spanish word sándwich did not come directly into Spanish from English but indirectly through French, which borrowed this word first, in the early 19th century (it is first attested in 1802).

The Spanish loan sándwich is fairly recent and has kept its foreign spelling, with the only addition of accent mark, which is required in a word with penultimate stress that ends in a consonant. In addition to its foreign spelling, the word has three sound clues that tells us that it is a foreign word. Let us start by saying that this word is typically pronounced [ˈsaŋ.ɡu̯iʧ] or [ˈsan.du̯iʧ], as if it was written sángüich or sánduich, though, strangely enough, no attempt has been made to change its spelling and in that sense this word is like whisky (see above).[1] These typical pronunciations contain the expected adaptations of a foreign word to Spanish phonology since in Spanish, syllables do not end in the consonant cluster ‑nd and, thus, the d is dropped or moved to the following syllable, and they do not start with w- either, a sound that in that position is typically reinforced with a [ɡ] sound in that position.

Spanish also does not have native words that end in ch (the sound [ʧ]) and thus sandwich, another feature that begs to be nativized. (Actually, no syllables end in the sound [ʧ] in Spanish, not just word-final ones.) Thus, it is not surprising that in some South American countries, a final vowel is added to the word, a phenomenon known as paragoge. This change is reflected in the spelling in the form of an added final e, cf. sandwiche. (For more on Spanish phonology and sound combination preferences, see Chapter 7.)

The native word emparedado has been often promoted as an alternative to sándwich, but it has not been able to replace this innovation. The noun emparedado is derived by conversion from the past participle of the verb emparedar ‘to wall in, put between walls, to imprison’, an old Spanish word derived from pared ‘wall’. Its use as a replacement for the word sándwich dates from the end of the 19th century. According to the DPD, it is preferable to use this native word than the Anglicism sándwich. In Spain, the word bocadillo (see above), has also been proposed as an alternative to sándwich, but that did not catch on either.

Finally, English has turned the noun sandwich into a verb to sandwich, which first appears in the mid-19th century, about 80 years after the noun. Its primary meaning is ‘to insert (one thing) tightly between two other things of differing character or quality’ (AHD). This verb can be translated into Spanish as encajonar, meter, or apretujar. The most common form of the verb to sandwich is the past participle, used as an adjective. On the other hand, Spanish has created the derived noun sandwichera for a sandwich toaster or toasted sandwich maker.

---

[1] Actually, the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (DPD) tells us that “in some American countries, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and Peru, adaptations of this word are sometimes used in writing, such as sánduche o sánguche, which are typical of colloquial registers and that we advise against in favor of a standard form”.

---

[i] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1ndwich

Spanish loanwords from English, Part 5: gay

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

gay (pl. gais): an adjective that comes from Eng. gay, but only with the sense of ‘homosexual’, as in the phrase orgullo gay ‘gay pride’ (a calque from English). Used as a masculine noun, as in the phrase un gay, it refers exclusively to a homosexual man. Although many pronounce the word [ˈɡei̯], the closest in Spanish to Eng. [ˈɡeɪ̯], the Academy and the DPD recommend the spelling pronunciation [ˈɡai̯], which is also common. The Academy also recommends using the plural gais, as in discotecas gais ‘gay clubs’, although many speakers use an invariable gay, e.g. discotecas gay, probably under the influence of the English source word.

The English word gay comes from Old French gai ‘joyful, happy, pleasant’ (cf. Sp. alegre), which is of uncertain origin. Old Spanish used to have a cognate of this word, namely the word gayo, which was a loanword from Occitan, but it is now archaic, if not obsolete. (This Sp. gayo should not be confused with the homonymous gayo ‘magpie’, an obsolete alternative for urraca, or with gallo ‘rooster’, which is homophonous with gayo in most dialects of Spanish.)

Dubious Germanic etymologies have been proposed for this word, but it is likely related to the Latin word gaudĭum ‘joy, delight’, the source of patrimonial Sp. gozo and its English cognate joy (same meaning), an 11th century loanword from Old French joie (cf. Corominas). The Latin noun gaudĭum was derived from the root gaud‑ of the verb gaudēre ‘to rejoice, take pleasure in’ (principal parts: gaudeō, gaudēre, gāvīsus sum). The related verb in Spanish is gozar ‘to enjoy (oneself)’, which was derived, in Spanish, from the noun gozo, and thus does not descend from Lat. gaudēre. Also derived from the noun gozo in Spanish is its synonym regocijo ‘delight, joy; merriment, rejoicing’, formed with the prefix re‑ and an odd suffix ‑ij‑ (re-goc‑ij‑o). This noun, which first appeared in the mid-16th century, is derived from the verb regocijar, ‘to delight, amuse’, typically used intransitive (reflexively) as regocijarse ‘to rejoice’, which appeared a few decades earlier. Sp. regocijar was probably a calque from Old French rejoir (Mod.Fr. réjouir), a verb derived in this language from the verb jouir that descended from Vulgar Lat. gaudire, from Lat. gaudēre. A lengthened stem of the verb rejoir, namely rejoiss‑, is the source of English rejoice.

The meaning ‘homosexual’ for Eng. gay dates from the mid-20th century and it obviously started as a euphemism (cf. Chapter 6, §6.4.2). This loanword started as an informal (colloquial) word in Spanish, but it has become a regular alternative to the adjective cum noun homosexual, which was a New Latin creation that first appeared in German in the late 19th century. (The parts of this word are Greek homo ‘same’ and Lat. sexual(is) ‘relating to sex’, the adjective derived from Lat. sexus ‘sex, gender’.)

Words for male homosexuals invariantly have acquired pejorative and derogatory connotations throughout history, which is what happened to Sp. maricón, marica, and mariquita, for instance. This is, no doubt, a major reason why the neutral word gay was borrowed from English, where the word does not have negative connotations either (though the English word gay did have the meaning ‘wanton, lewd, lascivious’ (OED) in the 15th century, a meaning that is now obsolete). French, Japanese, and many other languages have borrowed this English word too.

Spanish loanwords from English, Part 4: esmoquin

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

esmoquin (also found earlier as smoking; pl. esmóquines)

This word comes from Eng. smoking and it translates as tuxedo in North American English and as dinner jacket or dinner suit in British English. Originally the term referred just to the jacket, which was a semi-formal evening jacket without a tail made fashionable by Prince Edward of the United Kingdom (1840-1910), later King Edward VII (1901-10).

This type of jacket first appeared in England around 1887 and in the US a couple of years later. For the upper classes, it was an alternative to the more formal evening tailcoat jacket. The tuxedo evolved from the also tail-less smoking jacket, an informal, comfortable, soft jacket of mid-thigh length and made of velvet or silk, with shawl lapel, worn by upper-class men who retired after dinner to smoke pipes and cigars in smoke-rooms since the mid-19th century. The smoking jacket itself developed from an earlier silk robe that came from India used also for this purpose. As we said, the tuxedo came to be used as an alternative to the more formal evening tailcoat jacket.

Many European languages borrowed the term smoking, an ellipsis from the phrase smoking jacket, for this type of jacket that developed out of a smoking jacket, not just Spanish (for the concept of ellipsis, see Chapter 5, §5.10.5). Thus, for instance, French, German, Italian and Portuguese have the word too, spelled smoking in these languages, just like the original English word. Only Spanish has changed the word’s spelling to its pronunciation spelling, namely esmoquin.

As for the origin of the word tuxedo in North American English, it comes from Tuxedo Park, the name of a village in Orange County, New York, which was a private hunting-and-fishing reserve in the early 19th century. Tuxedo Park became a resort for New York’s social elite in the 19th century, centered around the famous Tuxedo Club, where men and women would wear the latest fashions. Originally the term tuxedo, which was capitalized until 1920, referred to just the jacket, but in the early 20th century it came to be used to refer to the whole outfit, including the pants and other accessories. Slang terms for the tuxedo include penguin suit, monkey suit, and soup and fish. The place name Tuxedo is thought to come from Native American Lenape language, where it was a compound that meant ‘crooked water’ or ‘crooked river’.

The tuxedo has become a well-known attire throughout the world due in part to world-famous ceremonies such as the Oscars, though it is fair to say that most men may go through their lives without ever wearing one. As in the laste 19th century, the dinner suit or tuxedo is not the fanciest or most formal of men’s attires today either. Even fancier is the tailcoat, which is ‘a man’s jacket which is short at the front and divided into two long pieces at the back, worn to very formal events’ (DOCE). The tailcoat originally had this shape to made it easier to ride a horse when wearing it. There have been different types of tailcoats at different times and for different purposes, such as the dress coat (also known as swallow-tail or claw-hammer coat), worn only in the evening, and the morning coat or cutaway, which as the name says, was originally only for morning use.

In Spanish there isn’t a single word for all tailcoat jackets and, a distinction is made between a frac, which is for evening use, and a chaqué, which is for day use. Both of these names come from French. Fr. frac means ‘tailcoat’ and is an 18th century loan from English frock, a name for different types of clothing through the ages, from the long habit of a monk to ‘a loose outer garment worn by peasants and workmen’, among others. Curiously, English seems to have borrowed this word frock in the mid-14th century from… Old French froc, first attested in the 12th century. The ultimate source of this word is not known but it is thought to be of Germanic origin. The Spanish loanword frac has also at some point been adapted as fraque [ˈfɾa.ke], by adding a final e, a phenomenon known as paragoge, which is understandable since no native Spanish words end in the sound [k]. The form frac [ˈfɾak]is the one recommended by the Academy, however.

The word chaqué comes from French jaquette [ʒa.ˈkɛt], just like Eng. jacket and Sp. chaqueta ‘jacket’ do. (English borrowed jacket in the mid-15th century and Spanish chaqueta is first attested in the early 19th century, though the form jaco had been used earlier for this type of garment.) Ultimately, Fr. jaquette is the diminutive feminine form of Old French jaque [ˈʒak], which was the name a type of long coat or jacket worn by peasants in earlier times (cf. Sp. jubón; Eng. doublet). This jaque is supposedly derived from the French man’s name Jacques [ˈʒak] ‘James’ (cf. Eng. Jack), which was also used as a generic name for peasant men.

Spanish loanwords from English, Part 3: club

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

club (pl. clubs or clubes)

As we saw earlier in this chapter, this word was borrowed from English club in the late 19th century and it is fully assimilated into the language, despite it being very unusual for a Spanish word (or syllable for that matter) to end with the final consonant /b/ (cf. Chapter 7, §7.12.3). Because of the time of adoption, it undoubtedly came from British English, not American English. It was originally used to refer only to political organizations, typically clandestine ones. Today, Sp. club means primarily ‘a group of people organized for a common purpose, especially a group that meets regularly’ as well as ‘the building, room, or other facility used for the meetings of an organized group’ (AHD).

The main meaning of Eng. club is also ‘an association dedicated to a particular interest or activity’ (COED). This word is a loanword from Old Norse klubba ‘cudgel’ (‘club with rounded head used as a weapon’), which was the original meaning of the word in English. That sense is still used in playing cards and is equivalent to Sp. basto, an archaic word related to bastón ‘walking cane’.

The origin of the sense ‘association of people’ for the English word club is not very well understood, though it is thought to have derived from the verbal use of the word club, namely to club ‘to beat with a club’ and a later derived sense for this verb, ‘to gather or form into a club-like mass; specially to dress the hair into a club’ (OED), as in to club together, an expression that is much more common in the UK than in North America.

The word club has become quite common in Spanish. However, because no native Spanish words end in the consonant b, the word is typically pronounced clu ([ˈklu]). To the extent that the word is felt to be foreign, the plural is made as clubs. However, since the word is so common, one also finds the plural clubes, with the plural ending ‑es that is common to all native words that end in a consonant. Both plurals are accepted by the Academy.

Perhaps the most common or primary sense for Eng. club among young people today is not the one given above but rather the sense ‘nightclub with dance music’ (COED). This sense of Eng. club does not typically translate into most varieties of Spanish as club, however. This sense that for most Spanish speakers translates as discoteca or even sala de baile. Although ‘nightclub’ is the main sense for some English speakers, this word still has other senses in different contexts, such as ‘university club’, ‘athletic club’, etc. Those senses of Eng. club are the ones that translate as club in Spanish.

Spanish loanwords from English, Part 2: chance

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

chance (pl. chances)

The English noun chance [ˈʧæns] is polysemous (it has more than one sense, cf. Chapter 6, §6.5). The DOCE gives us five major senses for it, which can be paraphrased as possibility, opportunity, risk, likelihood to succeed, and fate. Some dialects of Spanish in the Americas have borrowed the English noun chance, as chance, typically with the spelling pronunciation [ˈʧan.se], but also sometimes pronounced [ˈʧans]. This loanword, however, only has one of the senses of Eng. chance, namely ‘opportunity’ (‘oportunidad para intervenir en una actividad’, DUE). It is typically found as the object of the verb dar ‘to give’ (dar chance ‘to give a chance or an opportunity’).

The Spanish word chance is very common in colloquial speech in many countries, such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay. In the first four of these countries chance is masculine and in the latter four, feminine. It is interesting, however, that the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas discourages the use of this word and recommends using one of its synonyms, namely oportunidad, ocasión, or posibilidad. One wonders if this would be the recommendation if chance was common in Spain, where it is not used at all.

The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas suggests that this Spanish loanword may have come into the language not from English chance but from French chance. The DLE says that Sp. chance definitely came from French, not even mentioning the possibility that it may have come from English, the way DPD does.[1] Although French chance is indeed the source of English chance, but there is little or no chance that Sp. chance came directly from French.

English chance is a loanword from Old French cheance ‘accident, chance, fortune, etc.’, borrowed around the year 1300 (cf. Mod.Fr. chance). This patrimonial French word comes from Vulgar Latin cadentia ‘a falling’, a word used in dice games, as in ‘falling of the dice’.[2] Lat. cadentia (cad-ent‑ia) is derived from the present participle (candens-cadentem, root: cad‑ent‑) of the verb cadĕre ‘to fall’, which is the source of patrimonial Sp. caer ‘to fall’. Note that English and Spanish both have learned cognates (doublets), namely Eng. cadence (late 14th c.) ~ Sp. cadencia (17th c.), both of which mean primarily ‘balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory’ (AHD). Eng. cadence came ultimately from Old Italian cadenza, through O.Fr. cadence, and Sp. cadencia is doubtlessly also a calque from French or Italian.

---

[1] This is the DPD has to say about this word: “Voz tomada del francés o del inglés chance, que significa ‘oportunidad’. Su uso, esporádico en España, está muy extendido en América, donde se emplea en ambos géneros… En Colombia se usa también para designar un tipo de lotería… Es extranjerismo adaptado, que debe pronunciarse a la española: [chánse, chánze]. Aunque admisible, dada su amplia extensión en América, se recomienda usar con preferencia las voces españolas oportunidad, ocasión o posibilidad, perfectamente equivalentes”.

[2] Dice [ˈdaɪ̯s] (also dies [ˈdaɪ̯z]) are typically thrown in pairs, which is why Eng. dice is a plural noun, whose singular die is quite rare. These words are cognates of their Spanish equivalents, dado and dados. They all come from Lat. datum ‘thing given or decreed’, a noun derived from the passive participle datus ‘given’ (Sp. dado) of the verb dāre ‘to give’ (cf. Sp. dar). to give. It is assumed that the name datum came to have this meaning in Late Vulgar Latin from the idea of ‘what is given or determined by luck’. English borrowed die from French first as a plural in the early 14th century and then as a singular in the late 14th century. This word die is unrelated to the homonym that means ‘to cease living, become dead’ (AHD). This other die seems to be a borrowing from Old Norse deyja, since a cognate of this verb is not found in Old English literature.

Spanish loanwords from English, Part 1: bar

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

bar (pl. bares). The traditional name for drinking houses in Spanish used to be taberna, which is a cognate of Eng. tavern, a 13th century French loan, originally from Lat. taberna ‘shop, inn, tavern’. English borrowed the word bar from Old French barre in the 12th century with the meaning ‘a straight piece of wood, metal, or other rigid material, long in proportion to its thickness’ (OED). Such bars were typically used then to fasten doors and gates. This word came from Vulgar Latin was *barra ‘bar’ or ‘barrier’, a word of obscure pre-Roman origin shared by all the Romance languages except Romanian.

The equivalent of Eng. bar in Spanish for a long, usually rounded pole, not for the drinking place, is barra, a patrimonial word that comes from the same original Vulgar Latin term. Not many of the non-literal senses of Eng. bar correspond to Sp. barra, however. Thus, a gold bar is lingote de oro ‘gold bar’, a chocolate bar is a tableta de chocolate in Spanish and a soap bar is a pastilla de jabón. The Spanish word barra, on the other hand, is used for long loaves (baguettes) of bread in Spain, as in barra de pan, and for lipstick, as in barra the labios. The word barra is used in Spanish in the context of drinking establishments in Spanish, but only to refer to the counter where drinks are served. So ir a la barra means ‘go to the (bar) counter’, for instance.

In English, the word bar came to be used for taverns in the late 16th century, presumably because of the bar that typically runs along the counters in such establishments. A little bit earlier, in the mid-16th century, the word bar had also come to refer in England to the legal profession or the body of lawyers. The source of this term is also the railing or barrier that separated the part of the courtroom for the public and that for the trial participants, such as the lawyers. The cognate terms Eng. barrier and Sp. barrera come from Late Latin barrāria, derived from Lat. barra. The word barrister was developed around the same time and it is still used in Britain for ‘a person called to the bar and entitled to practice as an advocate, particularly in the higher courts’ (COED).

Then, in the late 19th century, Spanish (primarily in Spain) borrowed the English word bar (from British English) for drinking establishments where one typically drinks while standing up at the counter as opposed to sitting at a table. This word has become very common in Spain, where bars are extremely common, since there is one for about every 130 inhabitants. The word bar has pretty much replaced the word taberna in Spain, which is quite dated nowadays. (For a related term, see pub below.) Since r is one of the few consonants that are commonly found in Spanish at the end of words and all such words make their plural by adding ‑es, it is not surprising that this word too also forms its plural that way, resulting in bares ‘bars’.

The Spanish word bar is not used the same way in all Spanish-speaking countries, however. Whereas in Spain it is almost a family place where children are welcome, in places such as Guatemala this word has negative connotations, especially outside the capital, where a bar is a tavern where besides alcoholic beverages, one may also find prostitutes. Curiously, in Guatemala, a bar like those found in the US is known as a barra.[1]

Another sense that Eng. bar and Sp. barra share is the ‘sandbar’ sense. The sense seems to have derived from the analogy of the sand deposit typically in an estuary or river mouth to an obstacle to navigation. In English, the compound sandbar is typically used instead of the plain word bar and common Spanish alternatives to barra are banco de arena (cf. Eng. sandbank) and bajío ‘shallows, sandbank’, a word derived from bajo ‘low’.[2]

---

[1] The word barra show is used in Guatemalan Spanish is used as an equivalent of Eng. strip club.

The word cantina can also be used as equivalent of bar in many Spanish-American countries. In Guatemala, however, this word also has negative connotations since it is seen as a place where unsavory characters may gather. The Spanish word cantina is also used in some contexts in the Spanish-speaking world for eating places, such as in a factory, a university, or in the military, equivalent to Eng. cafeteria, mess hall, etc. This word seems to come from Italian, where it meant ‘wine cellar, vault’, but its final origin is not known, though it may ultimately come from Lat. canto ‘corner’ (cf. Sp. canto ‘edge; stone, pebble; corner’). It is a cognate of Eng. canteen, an early 18th century loanword from Fr. cantine, also borrowed from It. cantina.

[2] The opposite of bajío would be hondura, a noun derived from the adjective hondo ‘deep’, after which comes the name of the country Honduras.