French words from Dutch
8 French words with Dutch in their history, whether borrowed directly or passed on through other languages.
blague
It is borrowed from Dutch balg (“sheath, pouch; skin”), with the /al/ turned into /la/ because the group /lg/ was rare in popular French. Rey favours Dutch over another Germanic source because the…
capitaliste
The TLF-Étym takes it as a calque: it is borrowed from Dutch Capitalist, a tax term coined in 1621 for taxpayers whose property exceeded 2,000 florins; from 1625 those with 1,000 to 2,000 florins…
estompe
It is probably borrowed from Dutch stomp (“stump, stub”), a word that Dutch painters working in France would have used. The DHLF compares German stumpf (“blunt”), from which Littré derived it. The…
gui
1. The word for mistletoe is inherited from Middle French guy, inherited from Latin viscum (“mistletoe, birdlime”), like Old Occitan vesc (12th–14th centuries). The forms with /i/ (visc, vist, viz)…
lingue
1. The word for the fish is borrowed from Dutch leng, derived from lang (“long”), or from another Germanic language. In its first record it was probably taken from ling, as A. Thomas and P. W…
pamplemousse
It is borrowed from Dutch pompelmoes. The word first appears in French texts that present it as Dutch (1665, 1666), and the modern form, with a gallicized ending, follows almost at once. The origin…
potasse
It is borrowed from Dutch potasch (“pot ash”), first taken as the masculine pottas and then adapted with a French ending and the feminine gender (1690). The Dutch word is a compound of pot (“pot”)…
thé
It came through Dutch, about 1610, from a southern Chinese or Malay word: Wiktionary gives borrowed from Dutch thee, from Hokkien 茶 (tê); Rey and the Grand Robert give the Malay teh or a southern…