I don’t know what other current thread this might belong in, but it’s certainly a mundane and pointless question:
Doesn’t the Russian language have its own native word for “passport”. Maybe the very concept is alien to them?
Here is a Raw Story article with a picture of a Russian passport. Note that the Russian word for passport is just the English word transcribed in Cyrillic letters:
In spite of using a different alphabet, there is a certain amount of congruence between Russian and other European languages. This has happened in the past three centuries or so, especially in the 18th century when French was the language of the educated classes and the court, as well as being a lingua franca for negotiations with other countries.
In various little snippets I’ve seen of Russian, there are a noticeable number of words that appear to be cognates, or near-cognates with English or other Western words.
One that has gotten well-known in English is kompromat, which is actually a portmanteau of the Russian words for “compromising material”.
From Wikipedia:
Note the word материал in there, on obvious cognate (or outright pilfered loan-word) for “material”.
Kompromat is a marvelous word to be borrowed, which had no prior English equivalent that I know of!
The word for passport in many languages is ultimately derived from a late fifteenth century word in French that means “to be authorized to depart from a seaport”.
Well, the English word for passport is French.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/passport
In English, it would be a portpass.
Yup. Both Russian and English words for “passport” are transliterations of the French. Russian contains many loan-words from other European languages, but probably draws more from French than from any other single language.
I’d have guessed that Russian draws a lot of its loan words and roots from Greek. The Cyrillic alphabet is clearly largely derived from the Greek alphabet.
But Russian was a spoken language with an ample vocabulary before it became a written language. The process of becoming a written language didn’t necessarily involve the importation of much new vocabulary (except religious/theological - the development of literacy in Russia is associated with the spread of Christianity).
After all, Icelandic (say) is written with the Latin alphabet. But this doesn’t mean that the Icelandic vocabulary draws heavily on Latin (and in fact it doesn’t). And there are many other languages of which this is true.
The Cyrillic alphabet is similar to the Greek one because the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity was dominant in both Greece and Russia. The languages spoken in the Roman Catholic areas of Europe in the Middle Ages (which includes the Protestant areas of today) tend to use the Latin alphabet, while the languages spoken in the Eastern Orthodox areas of Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages tend to use the Cyrillic alphabet. There are some cases where a language started out using one alphabet and then changed to another later.
Similarly, English has no native word for “street” - instead they just use the Latin word strāta slightly misspelled.
More seriously: after a few centuries, borrowed words feel as natural and normal to native speakers as words that originated in their language and were not borrowed. Use of “passport” in Russian may indicate that several centuries back Russians didn’t have the concept of passport - but it’s certainly a familiar one to them now, just as “streets” are familiar to English speakers now, even though West Germanic peoples whose language eventually became English were new to paved roads, and had to borrow the word from Romans.
Slavic languages are Indo-European and Russia is a country in Europe with a shared history with “Western” nations. Slavic languages aren’t Germanic or Romance, and Russia is at the far edge relative to Britain, so the differences are naturally larger, but the occasional shared word is no big surprise.
ETA: If you can only slowly spell your way through cyrilic words, walking through e.g. St. Petersburg feels a bit like being a first grader. You see a sign like Суши Бар, start spelling your way through it, S-oo-sh, and get the rest in a flash, Sushi Bar!
We have a word: “way”. But note that although “street” ultimately comes from Latin, it’s been in our language since before the Angles came to Britain.
As a side note, the word “road”, is cognate to “ride” and “raid” and originally meant the journey, not that surface the journey was on.
That’s why I said “West Germanic peoples whose language eventually became English.”
Russian might also have a native word for “passport” that they use about as often as we use “Way”
Thanks. Maybe the real road is the friends we made on the way.
While we’re at it, the Russian word for “flag” is… “flag”.
Oh, they have a distinct word for “banner”, but for example “flag of the Rusdian Federation” is флаг российской федерации, “flag Rossiyskoy Federeratsii”.
Isn’t “way” from Latin, too? From via?
Some googling suggests that way and via go back to different Indo-European roots. When I’m not on my phone I’ll give details
I was recently watching a youtube video on the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages, and it claimed that the origin of a lot of the major differences between the languages was that Russia had a period of wanting to be like the major western European powers and incorporated a lot of loan words then, which Ukraine did not.
So is the Latin alphabet. 
But which alphabet is used is not a great indicator of origin. As an extreme example, Croatian and Serbian are pretty much the same language, one written with Latin script, and one with Cyrillic.
Modern English “way” ← Middle English “wey” ← Old English “weg” ← West Germanic “weg” ← Germanic “wegaz” ← Indo-European “weǵʰ”.
Modern English “via” ← Latin “via” ← Italic “wijā” ← Indo-European “weyh₁”. Although some linguists think it could “weǵʰ”, but most think that word becomes Latin “vehō” (which is the root of “vector”).
(Too many links to cite, I spend hours reading etymologies at Wiktionary.)
Sorry, I read that and promptly forgot when writing my reply. 
Thanks. Me, too. It’s fascinating stuff.
No offense taken.