Choepining

[icarus]

Oh hey, Linguists ahoy! Check out vamplover84's cool post: Words of the year.

Here's a fun something about how quickly foreign words get "English-ized" and folded into English derivations.

At a Buddhist temple we had some new Tibetan terms:

Choepin - (choe' pen) n. the one who performs the intensive ritual work during a Tibetan Buddhist religious practice (carrying offerings, pouring wine into scullcups and serving the practioners, carrying incense, performing ritual gestures called "mudras", etc.) Sort of like an altar boy, but way more extensive.

Umsay - (oom' say) n. the chantmaster for a Tibetan Buddhist religious practice.

Puja - (poo' jah) n. a Tibetan Buddhist tantric religious practice.

Tsog - (sok') n. a portion of a Tibetan Buddhist religious ritual where food is offered and then consumed by the practitioners; the food that is served within the Tsog ritual practice. (Tibetan makes no distinction between these words.)

Within six months, I kid you not, the Americans had adopted these terms like they'd known them all their lives. "Choepin" transformed into a verb, as in "Are you choepining tonight?" or "Who's choepining tonight - they're late! Can you choepin instead?" and "Look at this mess! Who choepined last night?"

We changed the spelling to: Chopin (chup' pen), dropping the umlauted sound.

Now Tibetan doesn't derive words like this. A noun is a noun is a noun. So when Tibetans arrived at our temple, they had no clue what chopining was. To them this "choepining" word was really wrong and weird. It just couldn't be a verb.

Interestingly, the Americans didn't create verbs out of any of the other Tibetan terms. No one "umsayed" (it was tried out, but the noun form was preferred: "Who's the umsay tonight?"), we never "pujahed" ("Are you going to puja tonight? I'm not, I've had a 12-hour day."), and we certainly didn't tsog! ("Is there a tsog tonight? I hope so, I'm starving.")

But here's something we didn't change: where Tibetan made no distinction between the ritual practice of tsog and the actual food offerings of tsog, neither did the Americans. We adopted that usage wholesale, even though normally in English we would make a distinction. This happened the exact same way we adopted the Native American term "moose" meaning both "a moose" or "a herd of moose."

Curious, isn't it? *grins*

You Are 22 Years Old

22 Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

I loved that Word of the Year post. It's scarily accurate. (We linguists are nerds of the highest order. We amuse ourselves as we can.)

As for the adoption of the Tibetan words...dude, totally. It happens all the time; it's called need-based borrowing. (As opposed to presige borrowing, which is about using a foreigny word to sound all smart and shit.) English is loaded with it, because historically it's been a very borrowing-friendly langauge, as compared to French or German, which prefer internal coinages (like courriel for "email" or Mitleid for "compassion," respectively; the latter is technically called a calque.)

English is really the most flexible language I've ever studied when it comes to syntactic categories, although German is quite close; a give root can function in any of the content classes interchangeably, whether the pedants like it or not. That's part of the power of the language and one of the things that makes it useful, as maddening as it may be for foreign learners.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I knew you'd love this. :D

Icarus