A Dictionary of European Anglicisms (review)

The editor and sixteen consultants, each from a different European country, document in this dictionary, the first of its kind, the numerous English loan-words that have found their way into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Hungarian, Albanian, and Greek. Happily, they are indicated for ease of reference in the same fixed order throughout (first Germanic, followed by Romance, Slavic, Uralic, and [Indo-European] Balkan). When the project began in 1993, the cutoff date of 1995 was arbitrarily selected.

First, a few words of praise for some of the book’s outstanding features. The English etymon serves as a convenient headword for the forms listed. It should be noted that many proper names are not included since the process by which names become actual utilitarian ‘words’ is different in individual languages, thus making it impossible to decide what to include and what not to include. Thus, one will not find such lemmas as Weightwatchers. Two other classes of words also proved most difficult to handle: internationalisms (like telephone), and words unknown to educated readers. Fortunately, the latter have been ‘intentionally omitted’ (xix).

Let me now briefly comment on the methodological aspects of this work. If an anglicism entered a language via another language, this fact is duly noted. If there is any doubt about the facts of transmission, a question mark is inserted in parentheses. For example, the word baby is said to be ‘one of the earliest and most widespread anglicisms’ (xxi, 11), but it was transmitted via French, in which an earlier rendition can be noted as bébé and a later one preserves the English orthography intact. However, I believe that sometimes the exact transmission would be most difficult to resolve. For example, let us take up the case of mango. The editor stipulates that the word comes from Portuguese, but ultimately derives from Tamil ‘with uncertain English mediation’ (195). Furthermore, in the case of the word igloo, we read that ‘its status as an anglicism is . . . uncertain’ even though we read that it was transmitted via Canadian English and possibly French (160). How can the editor rule out American English and British English as being sources as well since Americans and Britons have written about igloos, Eskimos, and Alaska? On the other hand, dingo ‘a wild Australian dog’ is said to be questionable as an anglicism, but how else could it have penetrated Icelandic, Romanian, French, and Spanish, etc. (88)?

In a few cases, it is possible to spot American English as the donor language rather than British or other dialects. Consider the case of gin-tonic (133), which shows up in Spanish as [jintonik] but in Romanian and Hungarian as gin and tonic (corresponding exactly to American English). The spelling of center over British centre (53) is increasingly prevalent not only in Europe but also in China (e.g. fitness center), as I can attest from a recent trip to that country during August 2002.

Let me conclude with three details. First, it is fascinating to discover that barber-shop (sic) (16) is not where one goes for a haircut but rather a style of four-part harmony singing (from barbershop quartet). Second, Yankee shows up in all sixteen languages, but ‘mostly with pejorative connotations’ (350) (probably from the slogan ‘Yankee go home!’). Third, the word yacht (350) is not an anglicism in Dutch (jacht) and other languages; rather it derives from Dutch jacht (Webster’s new world dictionary of the American language, Cleveland: New World Publishing Co., 1960, p. 1691).