Words made up of two languages

In English I realize we have a lot of “loan” words from other languages

I was wondering if any of these loan words come from two or more languages that combine to form one word in English

Like the first part of the word is from Latin and the second part of the word is from French or something like that.

Are there words like that? And if so is there a term for it?

Television, from the Greek tele - “distant” and the Latin visio “seeing”, is one of the most commonly used such words.

Try words ending in “nik”.

The first one I can think of is “octopi”, the plural of octopus. Apparently, it’s an incorrect plural, because “octopus” comes from Greek, not Latin, and “-us” to “i” plurals is a Latin thing. So “octopi” is a Green word with a Latin ending.

The correct plural is apparently “octopodes”. Who knew?

“Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device.” - CP Scott (1936)

I’m not sure if there’s a proper term for it, but hybrid word apparently gets the job done. “Automobile” is another good one.

Oh, and EDIT:

What’s wrong with “octopuses”?

That there aren’t nine of them.

Eh, works for me. (We language geeks argue about this at least once a year on the Dope, I reckon.)

From the wikipedia entry on our eight armed friends:

Lee DeForest called his first vacuum-tube an “audion”. There was a famous exchange about the appropriateness of this name:

Michael I. Pupin: I have had some experience in the constructing of detectors of electrical waves. If there must be a new name for each new detector, pretty soon the science of electrotechnics will be a maze of new names. For that reason I am opposed to new names. Although Dr. De Forest is very enthusiastic about the elegance of the name audion, I must say I am not much impressed by it. It is a mongrel. It is a Latin word with a Greek ending. If he had said acouion or acousticon it might have been better, but more difficult to pronounce.

Lee De Forest: Dr. Pupin’s opening remarks may serve as an argument why the study of Greek and Latin should be thoroughly introduced into our engineering schools. My knowledge of Greek is almost nil; I knew, however, that ‘aud’ was of Latin and ‘ion’ of Greek derivation. But they are both expressive. When we use a term one hundred times a day, it is necessary to have something brief."–“Discussion on ‘The Audion: A New Receiver for Wireless Telegraphy’, New York, October 26, 1906”, Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1907.

The Ouija board: French Oui, German ja.

Yeah, there must be a bunch in science, such as photovoltaic. photo-Greek, volt-Italian.

What’s wrong with “octopussies”?
It makes me smile.
AS for hybrid words - “Spanglish” comes to mind. Out here is the Southwest its a real word.

Isn’t automobile another?

Quadrilogy as in the When did ‘Quadrilogy’ become the official term for 4 works ? thread.

I read once (perhaps in a book by Willard Espy) that “remacadamizing” is derived from five languages: re- from Latin, -mac- from Gaelic, -adam- from Hebrew, -iz- from Greek, and -ing from Old English. That’s sort of cheating since the “-macadam-” part is from a proper name, and because productive suffixes and prefixes from different languages are often mixed. But it’s really cheating because “remacadamizing” isn’t in any of my dictionaries.

I find it interesting to note that the ancient prohibition against mixing languages in compound words is extinct. It’s rare to find a nonsensical affectation abandoned by even the most priggish of the illiterate pedants.

Quadraphonic is another Latin-Greek compound.

Someone can correct me, but the furthest I can trace (using the etymology sections of dictionaries) byte to is Old Norse, this would (in all technicality) make most of the SI prefixes such as “yottabyte” a mishmash (yotta- being Greek for 8 as it’s 1000[sup]8[/sup]). If that’s not “game” since byte is relatively recent feel free to replace it with “bit” which is pretty much the same etomology wise (the way I traced it at least).

This isn’t English, but I think it’s neat:

In Hungarian, the word ‘pályaudvar’ means ‘train station.’

‘pálya’ is of Italian origin (‘pista’), and means ‘track’
‘udvar’ comes from Slavic and means ‘courtyard’

As is homosexual.

Then there’s Torpenhow Hill in England, built up by successive waves of settlement asking directions from the locals. Each syllable of the name means “hill”, in a different language …

Also the name of the city where I live, Minneapolis is an odd combination: Native American Dakota Minnea meaning water, and Greek polis, meaning city. When it was named in the 1800’s, I wonder if there had ever been an actual meeting between native speakers of those two languages.