Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 25th Oct 2009 12:51 UTC
A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-06-21
I was just wondering how the French Academy deals with this issue. If you put up barriers against foreign "pollution" of a language you give up a major source of neologisms. Or it may be that blocking foreign words is just wishful thinking and eventually they are forced to accept them as they make their way into colloquial language.
Member since:2005-07-06
It may come as a surprise to many, but that's exactly how french grows also.
Then explain why the French Academy dedicated resources to developing a French word to replace email? if adoption is so willing and open then why not accept it? it seems to me as more of a 'screw you' to the anglo-saxons than anything to do with anything reasonable.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Language purity reminds me when I was working at a khebab shop in Australia where the owners were speaking in arabic but would occasionally drop in an english word on the odd occasion. Puzzled by this I asked they used an english word instead of an arabic, he noted that it would take many words in arabic for which there is on in english - its a lot easier to just use the english word.
The reason for adopting english words into a language is because the language itself needs to have a way of organically growing without having some over seeing council of elders deciding what is and isn't french, german, etc. English organically grows, a new word is created, it enters into use and when it reaches critical mass it is added to the dictionary - with no care about where it originated from. The result now is that less than 25% of english is actually english.
With the rise of globalisation, english will eventually adopt more words from other languages and the usage of those new words will become common place as it gains traction online and offline which will mean the fragmentation won't occur. What ever the case maybe, its an interesting language given how it developed and where it has arrived at.
As for Apple, personally, I've said it once and I'll say it again - Apple should go out, purchase Adobe, take off the protection controls on Mac OS X and focus on producing hardware that works well instead of using restrictive licences. If it means you have to have two tier licensing then so be it - one price for Mac users and a slightly higher price for non-Mac users then do so.