This week's word is a bit of a no-brainer, as are many culinary terms that have traveled with the food in question. But I wanted to end this year's blogging on a Christmasy note. 

Very often, foreign food simply keeps its name. To me, this is something different than other processes of word adoption. This is because people eating "exotic" food tend to be aware that they're eating something non-local. When they use a foreign non-food term, however, this is often not the case. 

In English (and probably lots of other languages), the sweet fruit cake known in German as Stollen and mostly eaten around Christmas time has thus simply kept its name.

Word of the Week will be back in January. Have a relaxed holiday!

The image is from whatscookingamerica.net.

This week's term is one of those cases where the adopted word is used much more widely in the "new" language than in the original one. In German, Marschrute is a military term for (an army's) route and is not very common, although it can also be used to mean "approach, strategy". In Russian, however, a маршрут (pronounced "marshroute") is simply a route, as is demonstrated by the image above, which shows the route the 2014 Olympic flag took through Russia. 

If you've ever been to Russia you've probably had to spend some time in a crowded маршрутка ("marshroutka") at some point. These minibuses can be flagged down anywhere along their fixed route (which is of course where the name comes from) and are a mainstay of public transportation in Russia. 

The image is from www.myshared.ru.

If I tell you that this week's choice is a rarity you will probably disagree, saying that you use this word all the time. But that's precisely what makes it a rarity - it's an English word of German origin used for an everyday item and probably known to every average English speaker. Usually, these German words tend to be technical terms from the realms of philosophy, psychology, art and music. 

In German, a rucksack is, well, a Rucksack. The Russians also took a liking to this word, they have adopted it in the form of рюкзак ("rjukzak"). This makes me think that it was probably a German speaker who invented the first backpack.

The image is from www.simplyhike.co.uk.

This week's term was suggested to me by my colleague Jakob Roël. Besserwisser is used in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian to mean exactly the same as the German Besserwisser: a know-it-all (literally, a better-knower). The (Swedish) image illustrates this nicely - the caption reads "I'm not a know-it-all, I just can't help it that I'm always right."

Interestingly, as Jakob also told me, the Swedes sometimes use messerschmitter instead of besserwisser for reasons that completely elude me (it must have something to do with a certain similarity of sounds, I suppose). 

The image is from vaggdekor-vaggtext.se.

Walking through the three Baltic capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius this summer, I discovered many words with German roots. One of them is beķereja, the Latvian term for bakery, which still closely resembles the German original - Bäckerei.

The image is from e-darbs.lv

This week's pick isn't as easily recognizable as being of German origin as some of the others I have presented here. In Norwegian, bursdag means birthday - a bastardized version of Geburtstag. They also use two longer versions, geburtsdag (Norwegian Bokmål) and gebursdag (Norwegian Nynorsk), both of which are almost identical to the original German. (Yes, the Norwegians have two (written) languages - more about this here.)

For those of you who read Norwegian, here's an interesting article about how the different Norwegian versions of Geburtstag came about.
 
The image is from www.hermon.no.

Here's another word I found during my trip round the Baltic Sea this summer: rotušė, the Lithuanian term for town house. The original German word is Rathaus. What you see here is the town hall of Kaunas (possibly including the mayor).

Polish and Russian also have words that come from Rathaus -  ratusz and ратуша/ратгаус (ratuša/ratgaus) respectively. The Russian ратуша seems to have entered the Russian language via the Polish ratusz, howewer. 

The image is from www.kauno.diena.lt.

This is the very first Word of the Week from Spanish - please let me know if you know of any others, since I completely depend on my readers for this language! Hinterland was pointed out to me by Marta in a comment related to one of my earlier posts. 

In Spanish, hinterland seems to be used the same way as the German original, Hinterland, and the English equivalent, which of course is originally German, too. The French use it, too. I'm not sure how a Spanish speaker would pronounce it, but my guess is that the "h" at the beginning is the point where the pronunciation of hinterland differs most between the two languages. 


The image is from www.slideplayer.es.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a singspiel is "a form of German light opera, typically with spoken dialogue, popular especially in the late 18th century." This is a good example of a German word (Singspiel) being used because there simply was no equivalent phenomenon in other cultures.

The image is from www.amazon.ca.

This is a picture I took in Gdańsk this summer. The text (which I unfortunately can't fully decode) contains a form of the Polish term urlop, which comes from the German Urlaub (vacation, holiday) and has the same meaning.