Classics 22: Etymology

First, a very basic distinction among words:

Those three sorts of words are difference because they followed different etymological paths: 'native' English words go back via a series of etymons to that never leaves English, 'borrowed words' come from another language, and 'coinages' originate as words in English but may be made up of borrowed words


The following contains English words that originated in North American, South American, Central American, and Hawaiian indigenous languages. Hence they are 'borrowings.'

All these words and their etymologies were taken from Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary and its Addenda Section ("W3" from now on).

Words listed here were selected for familiarity: there are a LOT more such words.

Listed below are a couple hundred English words that came from New World languages, namely those from North America, South America, Central America, and Hawaii. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, perhaps 2000 languages were spoken in the geographical area covered here. Many of those languages are still spoken, while many more have gone extinct or are spoken by only a few people. Those languages are from many different language families.

Note that the process by which these words entered English is called 'borrowing.' Borrowing is different from when a word exists in the earliest phase of English (Anglo-Saxon/Old English) or is a coinage made up in English.

Generally speaking, words were first borrowed into the languages of the Europeans who conquered and colonized the people who used the words. Thus we can speak of 'filter languages': languages thru which a borrowed word passes before it enters English. Pronunciation, spelling, and meaning an be affected by that filter language.
 Although there were native writing systems in some cases, the conquerors inevitably used their own languages' spelling and sound patterns to change the words they borrowed, and so Spanish, Portuguese, or English spelling patterns can often be seen. For example, the "Mexican potato" called the "jicama" would not have been written that way had English speakers first adopted the word (the original Nahuatl is now written xicama or xicamutl).