I’m not sure if there’s a better or more technical term for it.
I’m referring to things like:
“Animation” (English) -> アニメーション (Japanese) -> アニメ (shortened Japanese, still the same meaning as the English word) -> Anime (re-adopted English, slightly different meaning than Animation)
I’m not asking how it happens, the mechanism seems pretty obvious (but if there’s something interesting, feel free to share). I’m just curious about what other examples of the phenomenon of a language loaning a word and then “taking it back.”
Anything can change, it may be that the meaning changes in the other language and the original language adopts it as another meaning, it could be that the meaning and phonology changes and are re-adopted or just one is readopted. Essentially any case where a word is “filtered” through another language is fine.
How about the French “rosbif”, derived from the English “roast beef”, when “roast” and “beef” came from Old French words about 900 years ago? That’s a long turnaround. (In Modern French it should be “bœuf rôti”.)
The word bistro is supposedly derived from the Russian bystro, meaning “fast.” The story is, when Paris was occupied after the Napoleonic Wars, Russian officers would bang on the tables in cafes demanding faster service (“Bystro, bystro!”). Bistro has since entered the Russian language from French with the meaning commonly associated with it.
In Spanish, a plaza is an open space surrounded by buildings - a square in the town-feature sense.
In English, it’s come to mean both “a large building which may or may not have an open space in front (normally used as part of the building’s name, people don’t just point to a big building and say “see that plaza?”)” and “a hotel chain”.
In Spanish, plaza has acquired the meaning of “a hotel chain” and, in US Spanish, it’s sometimes and capitalized “part of the name of a large building”.
Hebrew has adapted the English word “shallot” for the type of onion. “Shallot” comes from the French “échalote”, which comes from the Latin “escalonia”, which comes from the ancient Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Another Japanese one, although only a partial: karaoke – kara is Japanese meaning “empty” (also found in the word karate), but the oke part is from English “orchestra”. When Japanese makes compounds, they only take the first two syllables from each part, which is why the word is shortened.
Yet another Japanese example is Pokemon, which comes from English “pocket monster”.
French has loads of these. For example, in France (but not Quebec) a “pressing” is a dry cleaners (there is, or used to be a “Pressing Henri IV”, on the rue Henri IV) while “press” came originally to English from Latin via old French. A similar story for “parking”, which is a parking lot in France. Those two come to mind, although I am sure there are dozens more.
I don’t think this counts. Names can be anything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “plaza” itself used to mean either just a building or a hotel chain. A plaza in English is an open space between buildings, just as in Spanish.
Those buildings with “plaza” in the name and no open space nearby could never have such a name in Spanish, though; in Spanish you can have a building whose address involves being on a plaza, but a building can’t be called a plaza any more than it can be called a tree or a river. In English, it can, and I’ve had more than one native-English-speaker (generally but not always from places without a history of Spanish) tell me that the notion that you can’t call a building a plaza is absurd, or even that I was wrong about plaza meaning an open space in the first place. In Spanish it’s like calling an arm a navel; in English it’s not, the word’s meaning has shifted from “open space” to “building neighboring an open space” to “unique building”.
Oh, and btw: here’s what m-w has to say about it. Definition number ONE:
I would agree with this. I’ve never heard “plaza” refer to a hotel, and all the hotel names with “plaza” in them have “hotel” after them (Congress Plaza Hotel, Star Plaza Hotel, the Plaza Hotel), so it would be kind of silly and redundant if “plaza” meant “hotel” in that.
I never said that Plaza meant hotel, I said it was a hotel chain. It’s a specific hotel chain. Holiday Inn doesn’t mean hotel, but I do hope most Americans can recognize it as the name of a hotel chain.
The one I linked is the one that opened for me, I’d just searched and the definition 1a is the one I copypasted into the quote. If they turn out to send different definitions to different locations, search me.
Ah. There’s the confusion. “A hotel chain” in quotes to me implied that the word “plaza” means literally “a hotel chain.” That said, I don’t know of any hotel chain named “Plaza” or similar.
In the United States, any word can be used as a name for anything. That doesn’t mean that the meaning of the word has changed. There’s a chain called “Hilton Garden Inn” whose locations may or may not have any gardens. That doesn’t mean that “garden” means “hotel” or “building.”
The Plaza Hotel is pretty famous as a hotel and as a restaurant. The Green Derby is also a famous restaurant. That doesn’t mean that “derby” means restaurant.
The color orange as the symbol of Irish Unionism/Protestantism has a distinctly odd derivation involving both convergence and borrow-back phenomena.
The pre-Roman Celts of what is now modern Burgundy had a water god Arausio, which may or may not be a cognate of the Insular Celtic water deities. This name evolved through borrowings into Middle French Orange and modern Dutch Oranje (/j/ - English conconantal ‘y’).
Meanwhile the (South Asian) Indians had christened the sweet citrus fruit resembling a large tangerine and with rind and pulp a color between red and yellow as a “naranga.” This name was borrowed by the Iberian dialects – Nava can identify which – as “naran3a” (3=‘zh’), coming into modern Spanish as “naranja” with the final syllable “-ha”. But before this it had been borrowed by Late Middle or Early Modern English as “a naurange”. which turned into “an orange.”
The French/HRE Princes of Orange had risen to become leaders of the independent Dutch Republic (and later Kings of the Netherlands) as the House of Oranje-Nassau, and as it became evident in the 1680s that Charles II of Stuart, without legtimate children, would be succeeded by his (Catholic)brother James II and then James’s (Protestant) eldest daughter Mary and her husband William, Prince of Orange-Nassau.
As Ireland fractured along ethno-religious lines, the Catholic party retained Ireland’s traditional green, while the supporters of William and Mary adopted the color associated (even though merely by wordplay) with the House of Orange. Even though both houses gave way to later political developments, the distinction “stuck” as a rallying symbol for the two ethno-religious factions. Hence the Orangemen.
Then it’s giving you the wrong definition for “plaza.” I just checked five online dictionaries, both American and British, and none of them mention anything about a building, much less in the first definition.