When do non-English words become English? What constitutes a word’s integration into more than one language as a legitimate word within each language?

The word no, for example, means the same thing and is spelled the same way in English, Spanish, French and Italian, among others. It is exclusively an English word? When Spanish-speaking people hear the word no, do they accept it as a Spanish word or do they consider it a foreign word?

Have you ever tasted sauerkraut? It’s a German dish of chopped salad. Its name is spelled the same in German and in English. The word refers to a specific item associated with Germany, but it is part of the American lexicon. Is it English and German, or only German?

The popular hamburger, a word that describes one of the most “American” foods that exists, traces its origins to the “Hamburg steak,” which was a reference to a German city. Is hamburger a German word or an English word? The word is listed in the dictionary as an “Americanism,” which is to say that it originated in or is peculiar to American English.

In the southwestern United States, one can find mesas in the desert. It is a word that comes from Spanish for a small, high plateau with a flat top and steep sides. Plateau is a French word that means an elevated tract of land that is more or less level. But both words are regarded as English words as well, because they are used in English and their spellings and meanings are not changed in any kind of language-to-language conversion. These words are not Americanisms, because they originated in other languages but are used in everyday English to describe American things. Does this mean that one can talk about the desert and refer to mesas or plateaus without leaving the English language?

A recent debate in my writing journal involved two Yiddish words. Yiddish, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a language of Middle High German derivation, written in Hebrew with vocabulary “borrowed” from Russian, Polish, English and Hebrew. What constitutes which “borrowed” words from other languages become Yiddish? And what constitutes which Yiddish words which have made their way into English become part of English? If a Yiddish word can never be part of English, can those words regarded as Yiddish but borrowed from other languages not be Yiddish?

A great deal of English derives from Latin words. Countless other languages have contributed words into our language, just as English words appear in foreign languages with the same spelling — and often the same pronunciation — they have in American English. Does this mean that no word that originated in a different language can ever be considered English? Does this mean that anyone who uses a common word that is “supposedly” part of our language but has its roots in Latin or a different language really speaking in a foreign tongue?

The two words that started the discussion were schlemiel and schlimazl. Schlimazl does not appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary. Oddly enough, schlemiel does appear…and as all things, as an Americanism! The word that we know as schlemiel in English, comes from the Yiddish word shlemil, which, in turn, came from the Hebrew word shelumiel, the name of a tribal chief identified in the Talmud with a prince who met an unfortunate end. If schlemiel is an Americanism, if it truly is a word that originated in this country or is used in its current form only in English, then how can it not be part of the English language?

Where do you draw the line? When does a word become English?