# Are there widely recognized words/slang from Amharic?



## refiZ

I was thinking about how waves of olim have affected the Hebrew language. There have been many people with Ethiopian heritage in Israel for over 20 years now. Have any words or phrases from their language entered the mainstream Hebrew language?


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## origumi

Practically nothing.

It's more prominent with Russian: nearly 20% of the Israeli Hebrew speakers are either native Russians (in regard to language, including the Ukraine or other former Soviet Union European countries) or first generation children to native Russians who arrived to Israel in the late 70s (smaller wave) and then 80s-90s (larger wave), and yet Russian influence on Hebrew during the last 40 years is minimal. We do have many Russian loanwords from earlier periods.


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## refiZ

Understandable. Well there is certainly Yiddish and Arabic influences from those waves of immigration, but those could also have found a place in Modern Hebrew because there were simply not better existing words (if any at all) to take the place. I guess by the time the later waves came in, the language was well-formed. But, I also figured that there would be a better chance for adoption from Amharic because of the shared language family.


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## tFighterPilot

Well, they're about as close to each other as English and Albanian. Hardly close enough for it to make a difference.


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## Drink

They are a bit closer than English and Albanian, it's more like English and Swedish. And still, I don't think closeness of languages ever affects borrowing.


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## refiZ

I will admit that I looked up Albanian and listened to some speech because of this comment!



Drink said:


> They are a bit closer than English and Albanian, it's more like English and Swedish. And still, I don't think closeness of languages ever affects borrowing.



I certainly think that there is an affect. For example, I don't think "epic" would have become such a popular word to use if it were not for so many Greek words already in English. I remember when I was in ~7th grade, somewhat of a micro trend of us schoolkids using 'uber' as an adverb ('uber cool', 'uber awesome'). I don't think it would have caught on so much if we had tried a Hebrew word or a Turkish word. But... these are isolated examples rather than any bulk tendencies. Thanks for the insight everyone!


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## Drink

refiZ said:


> I certainly think that there is an affect. For example, I don't think "epic" would have become such a popular word to use if it were not for so many Greek words already in English. I remember when I was in ~7th grade, somewhat of a micro trend of us schoolkids using 'uber' as an adverb ('uber cool', 'uber awesome'). I don't think it would have caught on so much if we had tried a Hebrew word or a Turkish word. But... these are isolated examples rather than any bulk tendencies. Thanks for the insight everyone!



It is not the closeness of the languages, but their degree of interaction. If Americans watched Turkish TV all the time, we would borrow more Turkish words.


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## tFighterPilot

Drink said:


> They are a bit closer than English and Albanian, it's more like English and Swedish. And still, I don't think closeness of languages ever affects borrowing.


Vikings had quite some influence on English. Hebrew and Amharic have been apart for over 4000 years.


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## Drink

tFighterPilot said:


> Vikings had quite some influence on English. Hebrew and Amharic have been apart for over 4000 years.



Nevertheless, I stand by my claim. It seems European languages have been changing much faster than the Semitic languages.


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