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Most English resistant language | ||
Tags: Purism | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5565 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 9 of 42 18 October 2009 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually, our prepositions are still overwhelmingly Germanic. There are some French ones (such as 'around', 'concerning', 'during'), but not many. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_prepositions Edited by Levi on 18 October 2009 at 9:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5763 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 10 of 42 18 October 2009 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Borrowed verbs behave differently than native verbs, but maybe they're verbs too. But for the snobs using Chinese 有する for Japanese ある, I would certainly say that 有する is kinda verb. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6766 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 11 of 42 18 October 2009 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
True, but Middle English had many more prepositions than modern English does, and most came from French. (Or so I was taught at university, so it's possible I'm wrong.)
True, I was ignoring the nouns-that-take-suru, but those are more like nouns that can be verbed than real verbs. Edited by Captain Haddock on 18 October 2009 at 2:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6032 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 12 of 42 18 October 2009 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Just on a side note, "outwith" is marked as archaic on this list but it is still used in Scotland. It means "outside of" (the opposite of within) and I've encountered it mainly in formal texts; It's used in speech too but as far as I can tell only in formal situations. I really like betwixt and hitherto. H.P. Lovecraft tends to use those two a lot, perhaps becasue of their ominous look or simply because they were in common use at the time he wrote (about 1920-40). Edited by Sennin on 18 October 2009 at 3:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| AlexL Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7082 days ago 197 posts - 277 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 13 of 42 18 October 2009 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure that the translated ones count. There are only so many ways to refer to a CD--they chose "light plate". There are only so many ways to refer to "self service", they use "self help out". Of course homosexuality is "same sex love"; that doesn't need to be borrowed. Chinese is resistant to English in that it does not use the English word but creates a Chinese one. Just because the Chinese word makes semantic sense doesn't mean it's borrowed. I also think it's unfair to include proper nouns like Coca-Cola, Benz, Canon, etc., because the company chooses the name for the product, which of course it wants to sound similar. It would be like saying "Obama" is a loan word. No, it's a name. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5531 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 14 of 42 18 October 2009 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
On one hand Finnish is good example. They do have some obvious English loanwords which are widely used, but they very much encourage creating own words. Somehow they have managed to resist even such international (not necessarily just English) words or their variants like electricity, restaurant or sport and have their own words for them (sähkö, ravintola, urheilu respectively). On the other hand the use of specifically English loanwords is increasing. However, general attitude, to my knowledge, still favours using own words when available. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 42 18 October 2009 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Standard Croatian has this purist tendency too but as someone mentioned earlier in this thread, it's impossible for any language to take such a rigid stance on loanwords. In the case of Standard Croatian, the results of its purist language policy also expose the futility and pettiness of language purism. Judging by the actions of Croatian language planners and some snobbish or politically conservative native-speakers, there is a politically-motivated policy when incorporating loanwords or foreign structures in the language. The first rule is to use a "pure Croatian" equivalent in place of a loanword when possible. If the first rule cannot be applied, then the choice of loanword depends on how much the word has been adapted into modern Croatian. At the top of this sub-scale would be a foreign word that's fully adapted into Croatian's "natural structure" (whatever that means). In the middle would be a foreign word that's partially adapted into this "natural structure". At the bottom would be a foreign word that's hardly or not adapted into this "natural structure". Overlapping this hierarchy is the orientation that loanwords or linguistic features which can be identified with the supposedly "good" or "Western" cultures (e.g. Greek, Roman, German) are preferable to loanwords or linguistic features which can be identified with the supposedly "bad" or "Eastern" cultures (e.g. Serbian, Russian, Turkish). This undertone is consistent with a strand in Croatian national consciousness that Croats are not part of the "uncivilized" Balkans and are more "Western" than the neighbouring Bosniaks and Serbs. For example a word like "kompjuter" would be deemed to be undesirable since it looks "too foreign" (i.e. it's at the bottom of that loanword hierarchy). The prescription is that Croats use "računalo" instead which is a derivative of the Serbo-Croatian word "račun" meaning "bill", "account" or "calculation". The irony (or hypocrisy) of this prescription is that the "native" word "račun" itself is ultimately a borrowing from the Latin word "ratiō" meaning "calculation". "Računalo" seems hardly "purer" than the word "kompjuter" as the latter is a loanword of the English derivative "computer" whose root ultimately derives from Latin too. In this case, the root of "computer" is borrowed from the Latin "computare" meaning "to reckon". Another example is the choice between the loanword "literatura" and calque or native construction "književnost". Croatian purists prescribe that the "pure" form "književnost" is the "proper" way to translate the word "literature" into Standard Croatian. In reality the word "literatura" is also used by Croats (albeit at a lower frequency because of the adherence to the aforementioned "pure" form by the education system and much of the media). "Literatura" is felt to be "too foreign" and also "Serbian" because of its more frequent use by Serbs ("književnost" is used by some Serbs - especially by those who grew up or were educated in Croatia) The irony of this prescription is that both "literatura" and "književnost" are foreign, regardless of the purist credentials of the Croat who uses them. "Literatura" is a borrowing from the "civilized" Latin language and should have made it favoured by the Croatian language planners who wish to emphasize a "Western" linguistic connection (I suspect that the thinking of the Croatian language planners was coloured by the high-frequency use of "literatura" among Serbs and this could only mean that it would be disqualified from being deemed to be "proper" Croatian). "Književnost" is a derivative from the native Serbo-Croatian word "knjiga" meaning "book" (cf. Czech, Slovak: "kniha"; Russian "книга"). What the purists seem to overlook is that the Proto-Slavonic ancestor of "knjiga" very likely entered the speech of Slavonic-speakers from a Turkic source (cf. Uighur "küin" meaning something like a "book-spool" - my original Hungarian source translates it as "könyvtekercs"). The word itself is of undetermined origin as reflexes of this word also occur in Armenian, Assyrian, Chinese, Korean, Mordvin and Sumerian). Thus the purists' choice is arguably more foreign (despite its root being inherited from Proto-Slavonic) because of the root's probable entry into Proto-Slavonic from some Central Asiatic source.
I too wonder. Do you find common cause with language planners who try to make a political statement about the culture of at least some English-speakers? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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