Denglish now verboten! (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Denglish now verboten!
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

Tropi
Diglot
Groupie
Austria
Joined 5240 days ago
67 posts - 87 votes

Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

Message 17 of 18

02 January 2011 at 1:08am | IP Logged

hrhenry wrote:

The only way it could possibly work is to cut off all cultural references to English, American, British or other. That's not likely to happen. Too much international trade going on with these nations, and let's not even talk of American and British TV programming.

That's not what I meant. Other languages have that references too and still have their owen version of this word. Just as an example "scanner":
English: Image Scanner
Spanish: Escáner de computadora
Italian: Scansionatore d'immagine
Croatian: Skener
German: Scanner (Datenerfassung)

(I don't know all this languages, I just took the translations on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner. If some of them are wrong please correct me.)

They all look very similair and are probably all derived from "Scanner". It's just that the word in German got adopted without any modifications.

But maybe words like "ticket" and "meeting" will get replaced by their German equivalents again, as it was with all the French words like "Portemonnaie" for "Brieftasche", "Trottoir" for "Gehsteig" etc. These are hardly used today but were very common 20 years ago. (at least I was told that.)
1 person has voted this message useful

SamD
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6468 days ago
823 posts - 987 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian

Message 18 of 18

02 January 2011 at 3:18am | IP Logged

Laws regulating language use are ultimately as effective as voting warmth into a snowstorm.

Why are Germans calling it a Laptop instead of a Klapprechner? Blame it on German advertising and the fact that Laptop is a short, easy word to say. It's a less dramatic example than why the French call it un parking instead of un terrain de stationnement.

2 persons have voted this message useful

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