The mandarin's daughter, accompanied by her amah, rode in a palanquin borne by four sturdy coolies. The group travelled along the bank of a river, on which floated a number of Chinese junks, and through a bamboo grove, whose leaves rustled with the first stirrings of the coming monsoon. At last they approached the pagoda, its spire towering high above the surrounding banyan trees. Princess and maid completed their journey on foot, and made an offering of five taels of silver in a laquered vessel of indigo hue.
Seemingly, a typical Oriental scene; yet it does not contain any words of Chinese origin.
It does, however, contain a number of words borrowed into English from another foreign language.
What is the language, and what are the words?
There actually may be one word of (partial) Chinese origin. The word Chinese comes from
China + -
ese. The word
China is from the Latin
Sino,
Sina which, in turn, is from the Romanized Chinese name
Qin or
Jin, the name of the dynasty of its founding emperor Qin Shi Huang. (The suffix, -ese, is from French, from Latin -ensis "of or belonging to"). Of course, the word Chinese can be said to borrowed into English from French and Latin.
As Jer pointed out, many of the words have a Portuguese influence. Though some of these words that have come via Portugese from the Orient are not directly borrowed into the English language from Portuguese.
Palanquin is an example of one such word. The word palanquin is borrowed into English from French, though the French borrowed it from the Portuguese, who borrowed it from the Javanese.
Some of the words entered into the English language directly from the languages of the Orient, many of these are Anglo-Indian, borrowed during the Raj, the British colonial rule over India, and others entered the language due to the other Empirical interests of the Crown in the Orient developed by the East India Company, such as in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Java, and areas of Malaysia.
Edited on April 20, 2015, 1:52 am
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Posted by Dej Mar
on 2015-04-20 01:44:14 |
yes, many...
