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In French, it means "beginning." The English meaning of the word exists only when in the plural form: [faire] ses débuts [sur scène] (to make one's débuts on the stage). The English meaning and usage also extends to sports to denote a player who is making their first appearance for a team or at an event. décolletage a low-cut neckline ...
The word comes from English dialect geek or geck (meaning a "fool" or "freak"; from Middle Low German Geck). Geck is a standard term in modern German and means "fool" or "fop". [ 6 ] The root also survives in the Dutch and Afrikaans adjective gek ("crazy"), as well as some German dialects , like the Alsatian word Gickeleshut (" jester 's hat ...
Note that the word in French has retained the general meaning: e.g. château in French means "castle" and chef means "chief". In fact, loanwords from French generally have a more restricted or specialised meaning than in the original language, e.g. legume (in Fr. légume means "vegetable"), gateau (in Fr. gâteau means "cake").
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This is a list of bodies that consider themselves to be authorities on standard languages, often called language academies.Language academies are motivated by, or closely associated with, linguistic purism and prestige, and typically publish prescriptive dictionaries, [1] which purport to officiate and prescribe the meaning of words and pronunciations.
Younger speakers will be more likely to directly understand "Geek" as an Anglicism, with the same meaning as in English. I think in linguistics "modern German" started more than 100 years ago, and in the 1920s "Geck" would have been readily understood. The meaning was closer to a vain person, though, like a dandy, not necessarily a fool.
The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [ 1 ] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect , even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
A pseudo-French expression in English is a word or expression in English that has the appearance of having been borrowed from French, but which in fact was created in English and does not exist in French. Several such French expressions have found a home in English. The first continued in its adopted language in its original obsolete form ...