IN my university years, I got hooked on a subject where students had to learn the origins of Spanish words. I got to know that libro (book), silla (chair) and cuerpo (body) came from Latin; names like Fernando and Úrsula have a Germanic origin; we have thousands of words from Arabic: ajedrez (chess), aceite (oil) or almohada (pillow) for example. Spanish has, of course, a lot of Amerindian words: maní, camote, tomate or chocolate. I might be mistaken, but it is my belief that the words tocayo and palangana were actually borrowed from Tagalog. Other words came from unexpected places: jungle (jungle) came from Malay, coche (car) came from Hungarian and robot came from Czech.

The history of words is fascinating and mirrors the history of the people who speak the language. Many surprises would appear if anyone would take the task of tracing the etymology of Tagalog words, for example. It is easy to identify words coming from Spanish or English, for example, but I am sure many words believed to be purely native might have been borrowed from somewhere else too. Scholars have computed that approximately 45 percent of words in English — the language you are reading right now — come from French. And I am pretty sure English speakers do not feel less proud of their language for that reason.