English Words Borrowed From Other Languages, and Why They Break the Rules

English spelling looks broken until you know that English is not one language’s vocabulary. It is several, stacked. Words that arrived from French, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Japanese each kept some of their old shape, and that shape usually tells you how the word sounds. The rules are not missing. They belong to different languages.

Why English spelling stops making sense

Most languages that borrow a word file the edges off it until it fits. English mostly does not. It keeps the foreign spelling, anglicises the sound somewhere between a little and a lot, and moves on. The result is a dictionary where the same letter pair does three different jobs depending on which century and which country a word came in from.

By most counts, more of the English dictionary traces back to French and Latin than to Old English. That is a strange fact about a Germanic language, and it is the single best explanation for why learners feel that English pronunciation is arbitrary. It is not arbitrary. It is layered, and the layers have accents.

French borrowings and the ending you do not say

After 1066 the ruling class in England spoke French for generations, and the vocabulary that came across is still the vocabulary of law, food, government and fashion. A large group of those words ends in a consonant that nobody pronounces.

• ballet — /bæˈleɪ/, no t
• buffet — /bəˈfeɪ/, no t
• gourmet — /ɡʊrˈmeɪ/, no t
• debut — /deɪˈbjuː/, no t
• rendezvous — /ˈrɑːndeɪvuː/, no s
• entrepreneur — /ˌɑːntrəprəˈnɜːr/, and the first syllable is nasal in French but not in English

Two signals are doing the work here. The written ending is silent, and the stress falls late, which is unusual for English and is exactly why these words feel slippery to say. If you see a word ending in -et, -ot, -eau or -ez that refers to food, dance, art or high living, guess French and guess a silent ending. You will be right more often than not.

The trap is the exceptions that came in early enough to be fully absorbed. Nobody pronounces the French spelling of carrot or parrot, because those have been in English long enough to be treated as English. Recency matters: the newer the loan, the more foreign the pronunciation.

Greek borrowings hide their first letter

Greek came into English mostly through scholarship, which is why the words cluster in medicine, science and philosophy. Greek left three spelling signals that are worth memorising, because each one covers dozens of words.

The first is ch pronounced as k. Chaos is /ˈkeɪɑːs/, character is /ˈkerɪktər/, chorus, architect, echo, anchor, scheme and psychology’s cousin psychiatry all follow. If a word looks academic and has ch in it, the k sound is the safe bet.

The second is a silent first consonant in the clusters ps-, pn-, pt- and mn-. Psychology is /saɪˈkɑːlədʒi/. Pneumonia is /nuːˈmoʊniə/. Mnemonic is /nɪˈmɑːnɪk/, which is a small joke at the expense of anyone trying to remember it. English simply does not allow those clusters at the start of a word, so the first letter goes quiet while the spelling stays put.

The third is a set of fixed endings: -phy, -logy, -graph, -meter, -itis. These are not really word endings so much as parts you can assemble, and once you know a handful of Greek roots you can decode words you have never seen. That is worth more than any list of loanwords, and it is why root study appears so often in vocabulary advice.

Latin borrowings move the stress

Latin arrived twice, once through French and again directly through scholarly writing, so its words are everywhere and they behave predictably. The giveaway is a long word built out of a root plus a recognisable ending: -tion, -ity, -ous, -ate, -ment.

What makes Latin-derived words hard is not the sounds. It is that the stress moves when you add a suffix, and the vowels change with it.

Base	Derived	Stress moves to
PHOtograph	phoTOGraphy	second syllable
ECOnomy	ecoNOMic	third syllable
POlitics	poLItical	second syllable
ANalyse	aNALysis	second syllable

Learners who study only the base form get ambushed by the derived form in a listening test, because the word they memorised no longer sounds like the word they are hearing. This is a good reason to learn a word family together, and a good reason to hear each member of it rather than only read it.

The other lenders, and what English kept

The rest of the borrowing is more scattered, and it tends to be concrete. These are things, foods, weather and instruments, words that arrived with the object attached.

• Arabic gave algebra, alcohol, algorithm, alchemy, cotton and sugar. Several arrived through Spanish or Latin, and the al- at the front of the first four is the Arabic definite article, fused into the word and now invisible as a separate piece.
• German gave kindergarten, angst, doppelgänger, rucksack, wanderlust and delicatessen. English kept the compound structure and the spelling, then flattened the vowels to something English mouths could manage.
• Japanese gave tsunami, karaoke, futon, emoji and tycoon. Karaoke is the clearest case of the sound drifting on arrival: English speakers usually say /ˌkeriˈoʊki/, which is some distance from the original.
• Hindi and Urdu gave shampoo, jungle, bungalow, pyjamas and loot, most of them through the period of British rule in India.
• Italian supplied almost the entire vocabulary of music. Piano, opera, soprano, tempo, allegro, concerto and solo are Italian, and so are balcony, umbrella, studio and volcano. Italian words tend to keep their vowels intact, which makes them some of the easiest loans for a learner to say.
• Dutch is the quiet one. Yacht, cookie, landscape, skipper, easel and iceberg all came across the North Sea with sailors, painters and traders, and almost nobody notices. Yacht is the exception that keeps its foreign spelling loudly: /jɑːt/, with a silent ch that belongs to Dutch and to no rule English can explain on its own.

Notice how little English translated. Other languages would have coined a native compound for tsunami. English took the word, spelling and all, and left the pronunciation to sort itself out.

A quick reference table

Source	Spelling signal	What it does to the sound	Example
French	-et, -ot, -eau, -ez	final consonant silent, stress falls late	ballet /bæˈleɪ/
Greek	ch, ps-, pn-, mn-	ch becomes k, first letter goes silent	chaos /ˈkeɪɑːs/
Latin	-tion, -ity, -ous, -ate	stress shifts when a suffix is added	phoTOGraphy
Arabic	al- at the front	the article is welded on and no longer separable	algebra
German	compounds, sch-	spelling kept, vowels anglicised	kindergarten
Japanese	open syllables, few clusters	English imposes its own stress pattern	karaoke

Treat this as a set of first guesses, not a set of laws. English has had a thousand years to make exceptions and it has used the time well.

Two words for one idea

There is a side effect of all this borrowing that matters more for writing than for pronunciation. English frequently ended up with a plain Anglo-Saxon word and a borrowed French or Latin one meaning nearly the same thing, and the pair split by register rather than by meaning.

Ask and inquire. Help and assist. Buy and purchase. End and terminate. Freedom and liberty. In each pair the native word is the everyday one and the borrowed word is the formal one, which is why a paragraph made entirely of Latinate vocabulary reads as stiff and bureaucratic. Knowing which half of a pair you are reaching for is most of what people mean by tone.

The sharpest example is on the dinner table. The live animal kept its English name and the meat took a French one: cow and beef, pig and pork, sheep and mutton, calf and veal, deer and venison. The usual explanation is that English-speaking farmers raised the animals while French-speaking households ate them, and while that story is tidier than history usually is, the split itself is real and it survived into modern English intact. No other everyday corner of the language preserves the old class divide so plainly.

How to actually learn a borrowed word

The origin is a hook, not a curriculum. Here is the sequence that works.

1. Meet the word and notice the pattern once. Seeing that gourmet is French and the t is silent takes two seconds and makes the word memorable.
2. Hear it before you decide how it sounds. Loanwords are the category where reading-only study fails hardest, because the spelling is a record of a language you do not speak.
3. Read the IPA when the audio and the spelling disagree. With mnemonic or rendezvous, the transcription resolves in a glance what guessing never will.
4. Review on a schedule instead of in bursts. Pronunciation decays quietly. You do not notice you have lost a word until you say it out loud in front of someone.

That last step is the one people skip. Vocaby handles it with FSRS spaced repetition, which schedules each word for the moment you are about to forget it rather than on a fixed calendar, and every one of its 29,000+ words carries IPA and audio so the sound is never something you have to reconstruct from the letters. You can browse the same entries on the Vocaby word pages as well.

For the specific problem of letters that are written and never said, our guide to silent letters in English covers the ground in more detail, and if the issue is your mouth rather than your eyes, start with how to improve English pronunciation.

The short version

English did not invent a spelling system and then break it. It absorbed several systems and kept them all running at once. Ballet is French, chaos is Greek, algebra is Arabic, and each of them is spelled exactly the way its own tradition would spell it. Once you stop expecting one rule and start reading the fingerprints, the words stop fighting you.

Learn them with the sound attached. Get Vocaby on the App Store and hear every word as you learn it.