1415: Loanwords with Different Meanings Oct 26, 2018

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Just because something is a loan word does not mean that it has the same meaning or at least connotations. This happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is because the original meaning is not relevant as a loanword, as is the case with 'kamikaze' (read more at the link). The Japanese meaning had nothing to do with war necessarily, but in English it got adopted to describe a military practice that had previously no single word to describe it. In other cases, words can gain or lose emotional meaning without being totally mistranslated. For instance, 'mensh' ('מענטש‎') in English refers to a good, commendable person, where as in Yiddish it only means 'person', with no innate quality implied, but often these loanwords are either misunderstood, or bilingual speakers use them for emotive effects and misinterpreted.

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