English also has a native word for “passport”: it’s “furlough”, though the word is no longer used in this more general sense. (It’s still used in the more specific senses of a document permitting a soldier or prisoner to temporarily leave their station or prison, or to the permission granted by such a document, or to the absence itself.)
Russian has a lot of words that come from the Western European words, especially newer words, things like passports, computers, machinery, etc. These words come into being by interacting with another culture and when the person introducing the new thing says that this new thing is called a passport, that’s what the people introduced to it start to call it.
Great find! But it’s not clear if it is a native English word. It seems to be derived from Dutch “verlof” instead of Old English “forlēaf”.
Ah, perhaps you are right about that. In that case, we can at least say that “furlough” is Germanic in origin, in contrast to the Latin “passport”. Is it possible that Old English had something like “lēafġewrit” to refer to a document granting permission to travel unimpeded?
Incidentally, for a native Russian (or at least Slavic-origin) word for “passport”, how about пропуск?
A lot of languages share vocabulary, especially in certain fields, such as science, technology, and international relations. I think you’ll find that many languages–including English–use a form of the French word “passeport.”
That isn’t a basis for concluding that “the very concept is alien to them.”
Yep. Time to drop a link to one of my favorite things - an essay on Atomic Theory that drops all those foreign (Latin or Greek) words (like Atomic and Theory) for words made out of good Germanic roots
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3fD7eW0/m/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
Definitely possible, but I can’t find any evidence for it. It’s very difficult for me to parse through entries of “leave” (to go away), “leave” (permission), and “leaf” (plant part). I’d have to read something more definitive than the online sources, because I think there’s a lot of unwarranted conflation between the words. (Alas, I no longer have access to the OED.)
Possibly a basis for concluding it was alien to them before the word was imported. Once an imported word has gained widespread usage, it’s evident that it’s not an alien concept. Because people are using a word for it. People don’t use words for things they have no use.
Yes, but this is a trivial observation. You might as well say “Before the English language adopted the French word passeport, was the very concept alien to the English?”
The question in the OP implies a fundamental difference between Russian-speaking culture/society and English-speaking culture/society that’s unjustfied.
As a non-Russian speaker, it would be too tedious for me to track down real Russian examples but my understanding is that it was common during much of history from ancient times to Renaissance (maybe even later?), throughout Eurasia, for commoners, merchants, serfs, villeins, etc. to need approval to leave their region to go to another region.
I don’t know that there was a formal name for these sorts of documents but, obviously, they would have had descriptive terms for them in Russian before the word “passport” took over.
I’d guess that there are native Russian ways to say things like “travel documents”, “movement permit”, “letter of permission”, etc. Given that they may have just been a hand written letter, not a pre-described form, as said, there might not have been any official, technical name for them.
Hairdresser in russian is: парикмахер (Parikmacher)
from the german Perückenmacher (wig-maker)
I always found that odd … clearly somebody would have cut other people’s hair in russia before they came into contact with the germans (or jiddisch?) …
or бутерброд (Buterbrod) from the german Butterbrot (bread and butter) as the word for Sandwich
Russian also has сандвич for “sandwich”. Бутерброд is a broader term that often maps to the prosaic English word “sandwich”, but also encompasses what we’d call “open-faced sandwiches”.
The best kind of observation! 
Another good example; “restaurant”, which is “ресторан” in Russian. Transliterated, that’s: r e s t o r a n
So they lost the trailing “t”. But unlike passports, or even sandwiches (which are relatively recent inventions), surely people were paying to eat food even before they were paying to get their hair cut! Even if the payment was in labor or other barter.
But as others have suggested, the whole premise here is kind of weak. “native words” are relatively rare. What language is “native” anyway? Even Native American languages had many similar/borrowed words. That’s how language works. I’d argue that it’s almost rarer to find a word that is not cognate with some other language’s term.
Unlike the French, you mean?
Conversely, the Russians exported the concept of the bistro 
Regarding “hairdresser” in Merriam-Websters:
First Known Use of hairdresser
1764, in the meaning defined at sense 1
In Norway we use “frisør”, which is obviously of French origin. Possibly because letting your hair grow was the norm for women up until relatively recently, and men went to a barber … also a word we got from French, because the medieval Norwegian “barber-surgeon” was called a “bartskjær” (mustache cutter), a word we got from German because …
The very basis of this thread is a lack of knowledge about language evolution in general, and a lot of replies seem to miss that.
Oh, Russian has drawn a lot of words from German too, for instance Butterbrot or бутерброд, that is a buttered slice of bread with cheese or ham or wurst on top. One of the simple pleasures in life. Ninja’d, of course, it must be obvious.
German, BTW, is the only language I speak that does not use the French word for passport, pasaporte, passaporto or similar. Germans say Reisepass: A pass for travel. There must be a lot of other languages like that, but I do not speak them. I guess most of the non-European ones. But following the OP’s logic, only French and German have a native word for passport, thus… yeah, whatever. You could hardly leave the German Democratic Republic in the good old days of the Wall even with a valid passport, so having a native word does not mean you can use it.
Lovely! Thanks a lot!
The concept of a restaurant–where you sit and are waited on–is very recent in many cultures. My own Indian grandmothers didn’t feel comfortable going to restaurants. Indeed, the most commonly used word for “restaurant” in Bengali is “hotel,” because, until recently, restaurants were almost always attached to a hotel.
So, Bengali, like English, has borrowed words from languages all over the world. Taking a look at Wikipedia, these are some words I use routinely when speaking Bengali. (I’ll give the English equivalents only, but sometimes the English word is pretty much exactly the same.):
Persian: job, mirror, comfort, slowly/softly, paper, bad, hot/warm, eyeglasses, servant, blanket, place/location, late, store/shop, curtain, garden, street/road, like, sound.
Arabic: real/genuine, weight, pen, news, empty, poor, collect, date.
Turkish: scissors.
Portuguese: wardrobe, clothes iron, basket, keys, window, nail, porch, bucket, button, soap, pineapple, cashew, cabbage.
English: office, jail, doctor, police, bank, vote, school, hospital, cup, glass, chair, table, box, lantern, plastic, college, bicycle.
French: restaurant, shirt.
Greek: price
Chinese: tea
You could make lists like this for every language in the world, including (especially?) English.
A native word and a cognate are orthogonal concepts. For example, English “two” and French “deux” are cognates of each other and also native words of each language. They are both direct descendants of the same Indo-European word and were never borrowed from other language communities, which is the strictest possible sense of a native word.
Other words, like the English words “chef”, “chief”, “captain” are cognates with each other, but their nativeness is rather subjective. They were borrowed from respectively French, Old French, Latin at different points in history as the word evolved in that language community.