Loanword

[1][2] Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything (i.e., the loanword).

[7] Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.

Most of the technical vocabulary of classical music (such as concerto, allegro, tempo, aria, opera, and soprano) is borrowed from Italian,[13] and that of ballet from French.

In particular, many come from French cuisine (crêpe, Chantilly, crème brûlée), Italian (pasta, linguine, pizza, espresso), and Chinese (dim sum, chow mein, wonton).

[15] The studies by Werner Betz (1971, 1901), Einar Haugen (1958, also 1956), and Uriel Weinreich (1963) are regarded as the classical theoretical works on loan influence.

Duckworth (1977) enlarges Betz's scheme by the type "partial substitution" and supplements the system with English terms.

There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Schadenfreude (German).

Haugen later refined (1956) his model in a review of Gneuss's (1955) book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one by Betz (1949) again.

Weinreich (1953: 47) defines simple words "from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist.

Many such words were adopted by other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Ladino, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian.

These words can be distinguished by lack of typical sound changes and other transformations found in descended words, or by meanings taken directly from Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin that did not evolve or change over time as expected; in addition, there are also semi-learned terms which were adapted partially to the Romance language's character.

Latin borrowings can be known by several names in Romance languages: in French, for example, they are usually referred to as mots savants, in Spanish as cultismos,[25][26] and in Italian as latinismi.

These common borrowings and features also essentially serve to raise mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages, particularly in academic/scholarly, literary, technical, and scientific domains.

[32] According to Hans Henrich Hock and Brian Joseph, "languages and dialects ... do not exist in a vacuum": there is always linguistic contact between groups.

In some cases, the original meaning shifts considerably through unexpected logical leaps, creating false friends.