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January 24, 2026

English Gerunds as Loan Words

A casual observation. It seems English gerunds or present participles, such as 'streaming', 'jogging', 'rock climbing', are fairly popular as loan words in other languages. Of course, any part of speech can become a loan word (and English has been a fruitful source of nouns and verbs), but I'm particularly fascinated by the popularity of the gerunds.

A handful of examples - my Russian professor in college spoke with special venom about English loanwords in Russian such as 'jogging' and 'rock climbing.' You can see such an example below:

In Russian, the official is ЛЕДОЛАЗАНИЕ (ledolazanie) but we also have АЙС КЛАЙМИНГ (ais klaiming).

In French, 'going jogging' is 'faire du jogging'.

In Japanese, there is the loan word 'トレーニング' (toreeningu, training) which can be turned into a verb by adding 'suru'.

In Spanish, the word 'streaming' has been borrowed for live digital transmissions, as in 'hacer streaming.'

My interest is in whether gerunds are especially popular as loan words. I can understand borrowing a noun, verb, or adjective, but the present participle of a verb being used as a noun? That's quite specific. No other verbal derivation seems popular. Past participles (bitten, ridden) don't seem to be borrowed much. Verbs are usually borrowed in their dictionary form, not a conjugated form (so no past tense or third person singular).

The simple explanation may be that since gerunds function as nouns ("I love swimming! Climbing is my favorite hobby. Labored breathing is a bad sign."), it doesn't really matter that they were derived from verbs. Gerunds are also very common in English and easy to form.

Why borrow gerunds then? There is a certain cosmopolitan cool factor in English loan words, and English gerunds are quite distinctive. I wonder, though, if it's really just that. I have an inkling gerunds may somehow be more convenient. There is already a word for 'ice climbing' in Russian, so why the English calque?

It is certainly easier to say 'hacer streaming' than to say 'hacer transmision en directo.' It's also much more compact - instead of using a noun phrase with an embedded prepositional phrase, you can just use this shorter noun phrase. (It helps that 'streaming' is a more particular activity than 'transimision en directo', which refers to any live streaming of data. A meteorologist on television may rely on live streaming data, but she is not a 'streamer.')

It may also be a matter of ignorance. If you somehow don't know how to say 'ice climbing' in Spanish ('escalada en hielo') but you know the English for some reason, instead of trying to figure out how you would say it (is there a single word for it, or is it a phrase?), you can just borrow the English and add 'hacer' to it if you need to turn it into a verb. Google search results gives 3 results for 'hacer ice climbing', so it's definitely very rare, but not unprecedented.

1 comment:

  1. Israeli Hebrew also has the pseudo-gerund סְנֶפְּלִינְג snepling 'rappelling', folk-etymologized from English snap link, alongside the normative גְּלִישַׁת מְצוֹקִים glishát metsokím, lit. 'cliff gliding'. There are plenty of plainly borrowed English gerunds as well.

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