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Denglish now verboten! | ||
Tags: Language Politics | Press Article | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4941 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 9 of 18 30 December 2010 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh we have some pretty ridiculous made-up foreign-sounding product names in the US too. Cars and pharmaceuticals/health products come to mind. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ratis Hexaglot Newbie Germany Joined 4914 days ago 28 posts - 43 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin Studies: Czech, Japanese Studies: Hindi | Message 10 of 18 30 December 2010 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Not the first one to try... and I guess also not the first one to eventually be ignored
by everyone but his direct reports and some newspaper hacks. :D I absolutely agree that there's no need to say 'meeting' or 'ticket' instead of the existing native words, and it makes sense to ask your staff to watch out for unnecessary Denglish, but with the made-up 'Klapprechner', this guy made himself a laughing stock in my view. Fatally reminds me of the German language reformers in the Baroque area who won notoriety for weird coinages like 'Gesichtserker' (facial bowfront) for 'Nase' (nose). Edited by ratis on 30 December 2010 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 11 of 18 30 December 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I, for one, don't see how English loanwords in German are any less desirable than all the older Latin, Greek and French loanwords in German. Surely words like "Linguistik", "Anthropologie" and "Souvenir" could be replaced by "Sprachwissenschaft", "Menschenwissenschaft" and "Andenken", right? I say let the language evolve as it will. Languages are always importing new loanwords, and the more globalized our world gets the more futile will be the efforts to resist them.
Keep in mind also that a new loanword does not immediately render obsolete the original word. Often loanwords will simply be synonyms that co-exist with the older words, or they will acquire particular nuances that the older words don't share. For example, compare English pairs like "lengthen"/"elongate", "work"/"labor", "truth"/"veracity", "dead"/"deceased", and "ass"/"posterior", and the contexts you might use those words in. I think if English is any example, languages are enriched by loanwords more than they are impoverished by them. Edited by Levi on 30 December 2010 at 9:46pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5131 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 12 of 18 30 December 2010 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Levi: There's absolurtely nothing wrong with adopting English loanwords per se, especially if one English
word would have to be expressed with two or more German words. For example I'd find it pointless to insist that people say Bilderfassungsgerāt instead of scanner. Some time ago I read an interesting German discussion in which a German translator (sic!) got a lot of flak for speaking out against too much Denglish. In the not too distant past French was en vogue in Germany. At that time language lovers came up with a list of German translation proposals for overused French terms. One of them was Stelldichein for rendevous which has (barely) survived to this day. I remember seeing web sites asking for suggestions to replace pseudo-English words such as handy (=mobile/cell phone), but none of them were successful.. Edited by Doitsujin on 01 January 2011 at 12:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4933 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 13 of 18 01 January 2011 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Well they can at least adapt the English words to the German spelling system if not get rid of them completely.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6679 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 14 of 18 01 January 2011 at 11:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Some languages stick with their roots rather than branch out and adopt vocabulary from others: Iceland and Hebrew I think are both examples of this, although I've never studied them so I don't have specific details.
However, the fact is that if a language is living, it will most likely change, and that includes influences by other cultures. This doesn't mean a language is losing its identity, it simply means that it finds terms and uses them. It's a natural course of a language's life. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6476 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 15 of 18 01 January 2011 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
Both "Sprachwissenschaft" and "Andenken" are frequently used. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 16 of 18 02 January 2011 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Indeed they are, that was part of my point. Loanwords do not necessarily replace their native synonyms.
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