Wanderwort

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A Wanderwort (plural Wanderwörter, German for "wandering word" ) is a word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually in connection with trade, so that it has become very difficult to establish its original etymology, or even its original language. The separation of wanderwörter from loanwords is not unambiguously possible, and they may be considered a special class of loanwords. Typical examples of wanderwörter are sugar, ginger, cumin and tea, some of which can be traced back to Bronze Age Mediterranean trade. Note, however, that there have been generally accepted theories regarding the etymologies of many such wanderwörter—albeit either difficult or impossible to prove conclusively due to the long existence of such words—such as an ultimately Chinese origin for tea based on linguistic analysis, that the word has most diverse counterparts in China and has undergone most phonetic change.

Some ancient loanwords are connected with the spread of writing systems, an example would be Sumerian musar, Akkadian musarum 'document, seal', apparently loaned to Proto-Indo-Iranian *mudra `seal' (Middle Iranian muhr, Sanskrit mudrā). Some even older, late neolithic, wanderwörter have been suggested, e.g. Sumerian gu-, Ancient Chinese giu, PIE gwou- 'cattle', or Sumerian balag, Akkadian pilaku-, or PIE pelek'u- 'axe'.