I would say schadenfreude, angst, cri de coeur, paparazzi, proviso, and auteur are useful loanwords that have no simple or direct equivalent in English (btw my spellchecker demands a German capital for schadenfreude as with realtor). There must be others.

Grey areas would be zeitgeist (spirit of the age works just as well? (and the spellchecker lets that through!)); et al (and others); sui generis (unique); &c.

Some have specific applications such as legal pro bono, philosophical a priori, a posteriori, and these have stuck after prolonged usage.

Cul de sac (dead end) and entre nous (between you and me) are unnecessary and pretentious I would say and there must be many more of these. Part of it must be that writers (or speakers) feel they are erudite and eloquent if they go for the foreign over the homegrown.

Finally, are there any English loanwords in other languages that have no equivalent as in my first para? ‘Le dirty weekend’ in French is the only, er, conceptual one I can think of.

Hope this hasn’t been covered before, possibly by me - I found it in my old notes after being reminded by the slip in in last post

angst = apprehension, anxiety
proviso = stipulation
auteur = artist

And if you allow phrasal equivalents (like spirit of the age), then you can come up with native equivalents for all of these, e.g., paparazzo = freelance celebrity photographer.

Sure you can argue that the loanwords carry slightly different connotations, but that’s true for almost all synonyms, borrowed or native. Rarely, if ever, are two words completely interchangeable in all contexts.

Nor would I say cul de sac is pretentious and unnecessary. In English it is usually used in a different context than dead end. Cul de sac is used for a road that is deliberately planned to have no outlet and includes a wide area for turning around, usually in a residential neighborhood. Dead end refers to a road that simply stops. The sentences “the house is on a cul de sac” and “the house is on a dead-end street” or “he came to a cul de sac” and “he came to a dead end” carry very different connotations.

I just want to say that I think this topic is very sui generis!

venomousbede - 07 May 2008 09:23 AM

‘Le dirty weekend’ in French is the only, er, conceptual one I can think of.

Isn’t just “weekend” for “fin de semaine” an example?

Is “cul de sac” really a French phrase, i.e. do they say it in France and if so does it mean a dead end?  Are there “loan phrases” that don’t actually exist in the country they are supposedly borrowed from (as was said about “vorsprung durch technik")?

It’s in the Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé (link)with citations and glossed as literally ‘espace sans issue’, ‘rue sans issue’, and figuratively as ‘situation, entreprise, réflexion qui n’aboutissent à rien, qui ne permettent aucun avancement ou progrès’. Seems legit to me.

I have hanging on my office wall a headline/subhead from an Austrian newspaper:

Sind Sie Up2date?

10 Fragen zum Zeitgeschehen. Der wöchentliche Check-up.

(Are you up2date? 10 questions about current events. The weekly checkup.)

But I don’t think you’re asking about trendy borrowings like my headline. I’d suggest that in modern business German there are some terms that are simply left as English words that almost everyone understands, rather than being translated and then having to be explained as “so ungefähr wie WORD auf englisch.” I’ve run into manager, business, business plan, marketing, and plenty of others. There’s certainly a German near-equivalent for each of those terms, but they don’t necessarily carry the same flavor as the English.

"sui generis”

Pig making?

My French teacher at school (who was a Norman) told us that the French don’t say “cul de sac” for a dead end; they say ”impasse”. Which of course is also used in English, but an [English] impasse is subtly different from a dead end.

I would have thought that “cul de sac” would be a bit slangy for official French (road sign) use.  I can’t really see the British highway authorities putting up signs saying “BAG’S BOTTOM” (unless it were the name of a village, which is not that improbable!).

On a fairly irrelevant note, there was a farmer near where I grew up who put a sign on the edge of the road outside the village saying “POTATOES” whenever he had any for sale.  One year the sign appeared in exactly the same style as a village place-name sign, with a smaller sign below that read “Twinned with Pommes de Terre”.

Folklore is translated into many languages, neutrally; in English its use usually evokes sniggers.

Dave, I would say the English sense of auteur is arty film director not just artist. I could be betraying my ignorance here. I’d agree with you about angst (though it too has arty existentialist connotations) and proviso.

‘Freelance celebrity photographer’ is a bit unwieldy (and I recognize you are not proposing it as an alternative) which was one of my points - all of these loanwords can be defined, sometimes tortuously, but a snappy single word is useful. Using zeitgeist might be a badge of learning though ‘spirit of the age’ doesn’t sound like a phrasal equivalent or a dictionary definition to me, just an equivalent and reasonable English alternative. If you tried this with schadenfreude I believe it would be very clumsy.

So which words get through and have no equivalents? How about non sequiter (useful) and per se (unnecessary)?

Street signs in urban areas in the UK say ‘dead end’ though middle-class folk living in one would probably call it a cul de sac. I had no idea the French didn’t use it and I can see why it is a bit of a linguistic fox’s paw (faux pas) in the French bottom-of-bag sense, bayard, entre nous! French truckers would say, My satnav has brought me to an impasse.

I too had heard that “cul de sac” was not actually used for a dead-end street in French, but this notion was rebutted in old thread (which the yuku search engine is unable to find) and by a French-speaking co-worker.

venomousbede - 08 May 2008 09:04 AM

D
Street signs in urban areas in the UK say ‘dead end’ though middle-class folk living in one would probably call it a cul de sac.

I was thinking of those road names that say e.g. “Park Close (Cul de Sac)” to discourage people from driving up them and, presumably, to avoid having one of those brightly-coloured dead-end signs at the entrance.  Mind you, having lived down a lane that was a dead-end, I have the impression that many people take no notice of either sign.

I can think of scores of “indoeuropean” words, including physics, metaphysics, trigonometry, just about any word eding in -ology, tragedy, comedy etc etc ad infinitum…

(Taking cover from imminent forthcoming flack by my friend Languagehat).

This poses the question as to when a word stops being a loan word and becomes “English”. Are there agreed criteria?