"Football" As A Loanword
Many languages use the English word "football" and variations of it as loanwords for association football. Examples include:
- Catalan: futbol
- Czech: fotbal
- Esperanto: futbalo
- Filipino: futbol
- French: football (le foot)
- Portuguese: futebol
- Russian: футбол (futbol)
- Spanish: fútbol or futbol
- Turkish: futbol
- Serbian: fudbal
This has contributed to the adoption of the word football into the auxiliary language Interlingua.
The loanwords bear little or no resemblance to the native words for "foot" and "ball". By contrast, some languages have calques of "football": their speakers use equivalent terms that combine their words for "foot" and "ball". An example is the Greek ποδόσφαιρο (podósfero).
By contrast, in German, "Football" is a loanword for American football, while the German word Fußball, a calque of "football" (Fuß = "foot", Ball = "ball"), means association football. The same goes for Dutch voetbal (voet = "foot", bal = "ball"), Swedish fotboll (fot = "foot", boll = "ball"), and so on — the words for "foot" and "ball" are very similar in all the Germanic languages. Only two Germanic languages do not use "football" or a calque thereof as their primary word for association football:
- Afrikaans — sokker. This echoes the predominant use of "soccer" in South African English.
- Icelandic — knattspyrna (knatt- = ball- and spyrna = kicking) is one of the two most common terms; this reflects a tendency to create indigenous words for foreign concepts. However, the calque fótbolti is equally common if not more common. The word fótbolti however is not a loanword since the word fót = foot and bolti = ball in Icelandic.
The Celtic languages also generally refer to association football with calques of "football" — an example is the Welsh pêl-droed. However, Irish, which like Afrikaans is native to a country where "soccer" is the most common English term for the sport, uses sacar.
Read more about this topic: Football (word)
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)