Jun 6, 2012

"Chorizo words"

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of having lunch with eight very cool colleagues.
At one point, we started talking about all the words that have come into English without being translated.
For example, chorizo. This is a Spanish word, and we don't translate it. It's worth noting that chorizo from Spain is totally different from chorizo from Mexico, but the point is that chorizo is chorizo in English.
It turns out that these words are called loanwords, and we have a lot of them in English. You can find a nice list of loanwords from Spanish here.
Loanwords is the correct way to refer to these words that have been adopted in English, but I may keep calling them chorizo words anyway, at least for a while.
Do you have any favorite loanwords, in English or in another language?

This post is dedicated to every InfoJobber who has ever come to an English lunch... I've enjoyed your company every time!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.