My knowledge of French is limited to what I read on packages, road signs, and the occasional useful tidbits like bon mot or hors d’oeuvre. I’ve noticed that all the shampoo products I see have their French version of the word as “shampooing”. That’s the noun for what the product is. Which mystifies me.
We know “shampoo” came to English from Hindi:
I think French has very few -ing words. In fact, as far as I personally know (which isn’t very far) this is the one and only -ing word.
So a couple questions:
Are -ing words rare in French? Whether traditional French or recently imported words?
What the function of the -ing suffix? Make it sound better, verbify the noun, or what? Or is it not really a suffix?
Anything else anyone knows about this odd French word or other French -ing words.
All the -ing words I can think of in French are recent borrowings, almost exclusively from Germanic languages. The only native word that comes to mind is coing (“quince”).
As for the suffix, its presence is due to the fact that the word was borrowed from the English gerund, with the last vowel being nasalized, [ʃɑ̃pwɛ̃].
Cool! That’s the same word Brazilians use in Portuguese for Tuxedo–“Smoking”
They also use “Shopping” for what we call “Mall”, as in “I’m going to the ‘shopping’”
A billboard is called “Outdoor”
Though strange, I have always figured it’s just one language borrowing from another, without concern for exact application of the borrowed word. It hurts my mouth and brain to pronounce those English words with a Brazilian accent while speaking Portuguese, but it is what it is.
I thought the French policed these kinds of linguistic intrusions vigorously.
I can’t believe you missed this alternative wording:
the occasional useful bon mot like hors d’oeuvre.
(Where’s the smiley wearing a beret when you need it?)
To your question, I’ve always just assumed that “shampooing” is a borrowing from English. Since it’s a borrowing, the “-ing” doesn’t serve a French grammatical function, anymore than the accent aigu has any grammatical function in the now-English words like cliché and touché. In French the é shows that the word is a participle. Those words aren’t participles in English; the accent is kept to show the pronunciation.
Let’s face it: there is a handful of such words, but not as many as your shampooing, shopping, camping, etc.
It’s just Latin mangled over the centuries: e.g., “poing” from “pugnus”, “coing” from “cotoneum”, “parpaing” from “perpetaneus” or “perpedaneum” or something like that. In other words, it is not a specific suffix with a grammatical function.
What always irks me in France, and, let’s face it, in the U.S., are “pizzas”. But it could be argued this accurately reflects French, and English, pronunciation: “What do you call more than one pizza?” — “Pizzas.” Same for “sandwichs”.
Le lifting = facelift Un dancing = dance hall Un camping = campsite Un bowling = bowling alley Un parking = car park/parking lot Un living = living room Un skating = skating rink Le zapping = television channel-hopping Le footing = jogging Le smoking =smoking jacket
Ladies and gentlemen I think we have a winner here. It amounts to borrowing the English participle verb form to be used as a French noun. But I learned a lot along the way too, so thanks to all.
As to @Cervaise’s deli photo, of course they have to spell it “sandwichs & salades”. If they moved the “e” from “salades” and tucked it into “sandwichs” the audience would forget which country they were in.
Many words in -ing are in fact borrowed from English (smoking, parking…)
Those in -oing are from Latin or Greek roots.
“shampoing” came from Hindi in the XVIII" century, and is pronounced as the “poing” and not as “going”
Yeah, i mean, that’s typical in any language that adopts a foreign word, though, at least from my observation. Why would you keep the mother tongue plural? You adapt it to the rules of your own language. (Though classical languages like Latin and Greek seem to get a pass, at least in English, but those I generally use the -s plural for because, frankly, I think it’s silly to preserve those plurals. We’re speaking English, not Latin or Greek.)
