The current threads about loanwords make me wonder about words that appear to be loanwords from English,
but mean something entirely different in the adopting language.

An example is the Spanish “footing”.  It was borrowed from French, which took it from the English word meaning “position”.
In Spanish, however, it has come to mean jogging.

footing.

(Voz francesa, y esta con cambio de sentido del ingl. footing ‘posición’ ).

1. m. Paseo higiénico que se hace corriendo con velocidad moderada al aire libre.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

Roughly translated:  French word with a change in meaning from the English ‘footing’, meaning position.
1. masculine noun. Healthful movement [exercise] done by running outdoors at a moderate pace.

Are there other English words that have come to mean something different from the original when adopted by
another language?  Smoking, in Brazilian Portuguese, means tuxedo, but that’s not too far from its source, smoking jacket.

A relax (n) in modern Greek is a seat for an baby; a toast is a toasted sandwich; a UFO is an unintelligent person.

In older threads I have brought up;

- smoking, as you pointed out, is not a smoking jacket but really a tuxedo. Actually the word was borrowed from French together with the garment.
- dumpstore, an army surplus store. A word that became popular here after WW2. I think we established that the word doesn’t even exist in English.
- pocket or pocketboek (Van Dale knows only ‘pocket’). Not a purse but what you call a ‘paperback’. I believe that ‘pocket book’ does exist but has a rather limited use in publishers circles. I must add that ‘paperback’ is gradually replacing ‘pocket’.

cuchuflete - 10 May 2008 03:49 PM

Are there other English words that have come to mean something different from the original when adopted by
another language?  Smoking, in Brazilian Portuguese, means tuxedo, but that’s not too far from its source, smoking jacket.

A smoking jacket is different from a “dinner jacket”, or tuxedo, so it may be further away than you think.

Edit: pipped by Dutchtoo

Edit 2:  The Wikipedia article on the smoking jacket gives a link to an article on False Friends which give examples of such words.

Edit 3: Extraneous .htmls removed from links, thanks Faldage

bayard - 11 May 2008 01:52 AM

cuchuflete - 10 May 2008 03:49 PM

Edit 2:  The Wikipedia article on the smoking jacket gives a link to an article on False Friends which give examples of such words.

You’ll want to chop the .html off that false friends link.  I have done so in the quote.

One thing I’ve noted about English as spoken by Indonesians is that quite often when they shorten a two word English phrase, they will omit what, to me, seems the most important word.

“Plastic bag” becomes “plastic”. “Corned beef” becomes “corned”. “Traffic jam” becomes “traffic” etc.

I must add that ‘paperback’ is gradually replacing ‘pocket’.

Not in Swedish. Pocket is standard for paperback - it even gets assimilated into composite words like ‘storpocket’ [=big pocket] for larger format paperbacks.

Apologies if this one has been mentioned before, but one of the best-known examples of an “English” word being used in another language is das Handy, now the common German expression for a mobile phone/cellphone. Many Germans are convinced “Handy” is the genuine English word for the device, apparently. I see this site says that das Handy is

the result of German marketing executives giving the new phone a trendy American-sounding name in an attempt to help it sell in the Federal Republic.

a claim I would like to see some hard evidence for before I believed it.

das Handy

Beamer is the German made-up English for video projector.

jheem - 12 May 2008 10:53 AM

Beamer is the German made-up English for video projector.

Cue much international linguistic confusion when a native English speaker asks a German if he/she would like a ride on his Beemer.

For a huge store of these, check out A Dictionary of European Anglicisms, edted by Manfred Görlach.

From today’s copy of Der Standard, a Viennese newspaper, from a column called “Winders Wörterbuch zur Gegenwart” [Winder’s Dictionary of the Present], a weekly compilation of observations about Austrian language use, by Christoph Winder. Two of the three entries today seem to be dealing with the German equivalent of this thread.

Im schönen Niederösterreich gibt es momentan eine Aktion namens “Stopp Littering”, die der Verschmutzung der Umwelt durch das achtlose Wegwerfen von Abfällen auf Straßen, Plätzen und in der Natur Einhalt gebieten will. Es entzieht sich meiner Kenntnis, warum die Landesregierung zum prächtigen englischen “to litter” ("wegwerfen", “verstreuen") gegriffen hat, um den Sachverhalt in Worte zu kleiden, aber womöglich wollte man ganz besonders die im Land lebenden Briten, Amerikaner und Australier zur Ordnung rufen.

Die definitive linguistische Einbürgerung von Litter und verwandtem Müll dürfte somit nur noch eine Frage der Zeit sein, ebenso wie die Umbenennung der Abfallwirtschaft in “Litterwirtschaft”. Litteratur wiederum ist die neue Bezeichnung für weggeworfenen Unrat, ein Litterer (oder auch: Litterat) jemand, der Litter in die Gegend schmeißt. An lauen Frühlingsabenden in Laa, Pillichsdorf, Ernstbrunn und sonstigen niederösterreichischen Dörfern hört man aber, wie die Passanten einander zurufen: “Heans, is des a Schweinerei! Do hot wieder aner mittn auf die Stroßn glittert!”

Lovely Lower Austria is currently sponsoring a campaign called “Stopp Littering,” which means to put an end to pollution of the environment caused by careless disposal of trash on streets, city squares, and in nature. I can’t understand why the provincial government chose the imposing English word “to litter”…to give a name to the matter, but maybe it wanted to instill order among the British, Americans, and Australians living there.

The definitive assimilation of litter and related rubbish is therefore merely a matter of time, along with the rechristening of waste management as litter management; Litterature is the new name for discarded trash, and a litterer (or perhaps a litterat) is someone who tosses litter around. On warm spring evenings in…Lower Austrian villages, though, one hears passersby call out to one another [taking a deep breath as I attempt to translate dialect], “Would ya take a look at that crap! Some fool’s gone and littered right in the middle of the street!”

Was auffällt: Das Eigenschaftswort “der (die, das) letzte” wird in letzter Zeit nach und nach durch das Wort “final” ersetzt (vor allem, aber nicht nur in der Zeitschrift “News"), sodass wir heute eher schon vom finalen Abendmahl sprechen sollten als vom letzten, vom finalen Dreck eher als dem letzten Dreck, dem finalen Mohikaner eher als dem letzten Mohikaner. Teilen die Leser diesen Eindruck einer recht penetranten Final-Epidemie? Bitte um Nachricht! Auch sonstige Beobachtungen zu Ausbreitung und Bedeutungswandel des Adjektivs “final” im öffentlichen Diskurs sind herzlich willkommen.

You notice: The adjective “the…last” keeps getting replaced by the word “final” (especially, but not exclusively, in the magazine “News”), so that today we ought to speak of the Final Supper … the final straw … and from the final Mohican…

Grant Barrett - 13 May 2008 07:23 AM

For a huge store of these, check out A Dictionary of European Anglicisms, edted by Manfred Görlach.

Yeah, for $60 I’m sucking that one right up.  How does such a book make money?

Here are a few examples in various languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Anglicism

Here is a list of Japanese adoptions (from English and other European languages mostly): there are probably a few errors; the list only scratches the surface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gairaigo_and_Wasei-eigo_terms

I like the word/prefix “mai” (from “my") = “one’s own”. This is really conventional usage in Japanese AFAIK (e.g., “anata no maikaa” = “your my-car” = “your own car"/"your personal/private car").

http://www.jekai.org/entries/aa/00/nn/aa00nn71.htm

The Microsoft folks (and perhaps some marketing types elsewhere) seem to think a similar usage is reasonable in English (e.g., “your my-documents folder"). Maybe this is the origin of the Japanese word/prefix?

Sean Ferguson - 13 May 2008 12:47 PM

womöglich wollte man ganz besonders die im Land lebenden Briten, Amerikaner und Australier zur Ordnung rufen

Or to show off newly acquired linguistic skills. I don’t know if this is still the case, but the English-language instructions for public transport in Linz used to explain that you didn’t have to stamp your ticket in a machine to validate it, as it was already ‘obliterated’.

I do like Sean’s name, and I suppose a board such as this one is more likely than most to have people who know the joke from which he borrowed it. Unless, of course, it’s his real name.

"baikingu
viking
smorgasbord, buffet. It is said that this originated from the Imperial Hotel naming a smorgasbord after the 1958 American film The Vikings.”

Far out.