How to Handle Loanwords in English: A Focus on Schadenfreude

Loanwords are like buses: you don’t see one for ages and then three show up in quick succession, as I explain later.

A few weeks ago the copy editor working on my forthcoming book queried how to show schadenfreude, the German word long since adopted into English. I had written it exactly as just shown, lower case and roman. She wondered if it should be capitalised. Fair enough: German nouns begin with a capital letter. But I’m writing in English, not German, and this word has been around long enough – since 1895 – to be fully ‘naturalised’, to use the anthropomorphising term often employed.

Loanword styles

There are two basic ways of presenting a loanword that show it is still alien to English: place it between quotation marks or write it in italic. The second is the standard way according to copy-editing conventions, for instance in Hart’s New Rules (Section 7.2.2, pp. 122–4).

With German (loan)words, there’s the additional complication of whether to capitalise.

The fourteen OED citations, the latest of which is from 1978, show almost every conceivable variation. In descending order (I’ve noted their interpretation in brackets):

Schadenfreude x 6 – a clear favourite        (‘It’s VERY foreign and German.’)

‘Schadenfreude’ x 3                                           (‘It’s foreign and German.’)

Schadenfreude x 1                                             (It’s English, but please remember where it’s from.’)

schadenfreude x 2                                             (‘It’s furrin. Who cares about the capital?’)

schadenfreude x 1                                              (‘It’s really quite English now.’)

‘schadenfreude’ x 1                                            (‘It’s still not quite English enough, if you don’t mind.’)

On that basis, my choice was the least popular. I did think momentarily about changing it to Schadenfreude in the book, but then stuck to my guns.

I decided to consult editors on the Twitterverse with a poll. They told me this:

schadenfreude 53.8%

Schadenfreude 30.8%

Schadenfreude  15.4%

‘Schadenfreude’ 0%

So, the majority agreed with my approach, but the next most popular choice was to keep the capital even in English. To my mind, that’s the worst of all worlds. Finally, a sizeable minority opted to go on noting the word’s foreignness by italicising it.

Schadenfreude (in italics here to tell you I’m talking about the word, not the phenomenon) is what’s called a ‘loanword’, a foreign word that becomes part of English, the idea being that we’ve just borrowed it and it’s on loan. But like purloined library books, such words are never returned. Loanword is itself a loan translation of the German Lehnwort. As such, it’s an autological word: it possesses the quality it denotes.

As for those buses, in two recent editions of The Spectator, schadenfreude came up three times. How did the Speccie’s subeditors – if they still have such people – treat it? Once as Schadenfreude, twice as schadenfreude.

Of such minutiae – a word I never know how to pronounce** – is editing made.

To conclude, it’s worth quoting in full the sentence where schadenfreude first appears:

What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than one such a word is found… In the Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία [epikhairekakia], in the German, ‘Schadenfreude’.

R. Chenevix Trench, Study of Words (ed. 3) ii. 29

This from the man whose lecture to the Philological Society in 1857 ‘On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries’ was a spur to the creation of the New English Dictionary, the forerunner of the OED.

The almost-but-not-quite-transliteration of the Greek, epicaricacy, exists in English, but isn’t even in the OED and is notable for its rarity. That said, in the News on the Web corpus it occurs 24 times – compared to schadenfreude’s 7,121 appearances. Here’s a taster:

Nigerians have made no secret of their fondness for SA as a prime holiday destination – as close to the western world as one can get when all else fails – and they consider it painful watching the country struggle in ways that were previously only associated with other African countries – though, there’s a bit of epicaricacy accompanying the concern.

weetracker.com (za) 19 Sept. 2023

Of the 24 examples, only one is British and one US. It seems to be a very international word.

Hart’s New Rules has some measured advice on foreign words, including ‘Convention and context rather than logic determine when foreign words are sufficiently assimilated into English to be printed in roman type. In modern English the use of italics for foreign words is less prevalent than it used to be, and newly adopted foreign terms may pass into roman text very quickly. The best advice is to treat any one item consistently within a given text and follow the newest edition of a suitable dictionary, such as the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors or the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Take into account also the subject’s conventions and the intended readers’ expectations: if in doubt over the degree of assimilation of a particular word, the more cautious policy is to italicize, but in a work written for specialists whose terminology it may be a part of, it may be wiser not to. On the other hand, consistency or context may require words normally romanized in general English to revert to italicization (or, as in German, capitalization), to avoid their looking out of place among related but less assimilated foreign words.’

The book gives this example, where fait accompli, which is not normally in italics, has been italicised because coup d’état is taken to be not yet assimilated, still foreign, and therefore in italics.

A coup d’état depends upon the predisposition of the people to accept the fait accompli [fait accompli].

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** Minutiae seems to be /maɪnjuːʃii/ in British English and /mɪnuːʃii/ in US English.