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Most English resistant language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| boli Trilingual Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5525 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Hindi*, Punjabi*, Urdu*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 42 19 October 2009 at 4:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been studying Arabic for two months and it has alot of native vocabulary. I haven't seen many loan words at least in the beginners level. I am not sure if Arabic people are inventing words for new terms or using loan words from English at the present time but it seems like a vocabulary rich language.
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| 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 19 of 42 19 October 2009 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Not surprising, Boli. Arabic itself has been a principle source of loanwords for hundreds of other languages.
Everything from Spanish to Turkish to Indonesian has a stratum of Arabic vocabulary in it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6892 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 42 19 October 2009 at 9:15am | IP Logged | |||||
It was not clear which side of the argument they were meant to support. I think they do count, as they clearly support the resistance of Chinese to English loan-words. An authentic Chinese construction is used, instead of loaning the English word. The "translitteration" list would seem to support the opposite, except for the fact of how short it is, it really ends up supporting the "resistance" side as well. What is really mind-blowing though, is when they have managed to find a phonetically similar expression for a western trademark or concept with a meaning that makes sense in Chinese as well. Just look at Coca-Cola - "ke kou ke le", which is very similar to the original pronunciation and loosely translates as "mouth can be happy". Wow! I am also in awe of some of the directly translated ones, such as 大众汽车 (dàzhòng qìchē), literally "great masses car" which is a fairly exact rendering of the original German "Volkswagen". EDIT: It's an interesting subject by the way. I guess it is only natural that the languages furthest away from English: Chinese, Finnish, Arabic should be the most "resistant" to loans. Noone has mentioned Greek yet. I don't know how resistant it is in this sense, but a lot of Greek loanwords have travelled in the other direction, into English and most other western languages. Are they loaning in the other direction now ? Or do they use mostly their own constructions for all the new terminology ? Edited by Hencke on 19 October 2009 at 1:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6863 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 21 of 42 19 October 2009 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Depends what you mean by English resistant. In France, they go to great lengths to keep English and Anglicisms out of their language, at least on an official basis. In Iceland, they tend not to use loan words from English, but invent one based on Icelandic e.g. the word for camera is something like "light box machine"
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 42 19 October 2009 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Greek is surprisingly resistant (which is one of the things that makes it fun, but somewhat time consuming to study), and as far as I can judge from my scientific magazines and articles on the internet this is even the case in science and technology. Besides the loanwords from Greek in English (and other languages) have mostly come from Old Greek and they may not have the same value or even exist in Modern Greek. Furthermore the Greek haven't taken over many words from Latin - instead the Romans borrowed heavily from Greek for instance in medicin because most good doctors in Rome were Greeks. English has far more Latin loanwords than Greek, which also means fewer cognates between English and Greek. Loanwords from English certainly occur, not least in sport (Βόλεϊ = volleyball, γκολφ = golf etc), but as you can see they get a heavy trashing when transliterated into Greek. This extend to personal and geographic names: for instance Washington becomes "Ουάσινγκτον", London is rendered as "Λονδίνο" and for Sydney you can choose between Σίδνεϊ and Σύδνεϋ (both written with a rare trema). James becomes Τζέιμς, John becomes Τζον and Elizabeth get an unexpected soft 'b' in Ελισάβετ. However the pronunciations aren't quite as distorted as the spellings might suggest, and in most the distortions are due to general phonetic mechanisms. But you are in for a serious bout of guesswork when you see an English name written in Greek. Copenhagen gets murdered as Κοπεγχάγη, - but this is at least as close to the true name "København" as Copenhagen is. Maybe the fact that English loanwords can't unobtrusively creep into Greek has served to limit their use. Because of the Greek alphabet you have to invent a new spelling each time you borrow a word from English, and the result generally looks weird. Edited by Iversen on 19 October 2009 at 2:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5519 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 23 of 42 19 October 2009 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it is quite obvious why he is looking for an English-defying language, loanwards are boring and a lazy way to come up with new words. Also, since loan words originted somewhere else, they don't say that much about the language. Sort of like drinking Coca-cola in Japan. It might taste a tiny bit differently, but it is completely irrelevant if you are interested in Japanese cuisine.
My submission for a defiant language is Old Church Slavonic. You might think that this doesn't count, because it's old and dead. It is not, of course, being used everyday at mass by thousands of people all over the world. In addition, seeing how OCS originated it is quite surprising and cool that they escaped the temptation to use Greek loanwords for theological terminology. To a very large extent they have translated things like transfiguration and consubstantiality, which is quite a feat. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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