[Lexicog] alter egos for double

Wed Jun 21 17:49:57 UTC 2006

Dear David,
   ALGIDO is just as you say but the vast majority of speakers use as if it meant high point or culmination. Obviously, if there is no viable own language equivalent, then we must borrow, and in doing so enrich our language. However, over here in Spain  the changes in the language brought on by English mean that a generation is akin to a century.
    Bungee jumping is a sport(?) that is practised over here too. Most people jump off bridges. The name in Spanish for bungee jumping is.................... (Clue, the Spanish for bridge is puente)

David Tuggy <david_tuggy at sil.org> escribió:
          It’s still in the online DRAE. 

¿álgido? Are people using it to mean something to do with algae? I guess in the past it meant "very cold", and "punto álgido" meant "freezing point", from which it meant figuratively "critical point, point at which processes  leading to a complete change are set in motion", or something like that.

We get the Icelandic attitude fairly frequently from people here in Mexico, once they 'get it' that the indigenous languages are really valid.  Never mind that the Spanish word "de" 'of' is an extremely frequent word in many varieties of Nahuatl, and people use it all the time to the point where they don't know how to talk without it—we mustn't write it in our documents. Never mind either that the awkward expressions we invent to try to avoid it are very hard for people to understand ... 

If linguistic purity is given such a high value, understanding is likely to suffer. When that happens, I have no qualms in encouraging people to forget the linguistic purity and keep the understanding instead. Where you can get both (i.e. where the linguistically pure neologism or archaism is also as understandable and acceptable as the borrowing), then, sure, go ahead. 

--David Tuggy

Michael Nicholas wrote:     Dear David,
   The word did exist halfway through the sixties in the standard DRAE. It was then gradually replaced by DOBLE and is now only heard of in the way that you mentioned very accurately in the first three lines of your note. I perhaps should have insisted on the problem of  borrowing for the sake of borrowing when there is word that already covers the meaning required. I have been told that Icelandic - if that is the correct word for the language spoken in Iceland - has chosen to give names to all that is new by using existing possibilities and not by simply lifting as it were the word from another language. Are you familiar with the change in meaning of ALGIDO in the last 30 odd years?

David Tuggy <david_tuggy at sil.org> escribió:
      (¿)SOSIAS? I'd never heard of it, and it is! n't in at least one good online Spanish-English dictionary I consulted. The Real Academia does have it, however, and the Pequeño Larousse has it, but only in its historical/biographical section. It is a borrowing just as much as the sense of "doble" that you mention, coming from a character in a play by Plautus (later echoed by Molière). To me your example would be like saying it was somehow illegitimate to have taken the word "legislator" from French or Latin, because the true English word would be "solon".

People do, as you note, tend to write the way they talk, and in both talking and writing they readily adapt  structures from neighboring languages, even when they already have a structure with similar meaning and usage potential. English could use "Sosias" as a doppelgänger for "double", and I would in fact be surprised if no English-speakers ever have. 

English would be totally unrecognizable if you took out all the borrowed forms from it, and it is by no means the only language on earth of which that is true. More generally, the only language that maintains its purity is a dead language. 

--David Tuggy

Michael Nicholas wrote:     Dear Fritz,
   The last bit got mixed what with being in a hurry etc. So I have rewritten it. What I am trying to get at is the following. The predominant position of English means that other languages are heavily influenced by it:direct loan words, adaptations or using words that are apparently the same but are not in fact. If a modern language is used worldwide and then decides to write dictionaries based on a corpus, and if the corpus is based primarily on the written word, and if the writers are heavily influenced by English, then we will end up with a language community using words/constructions/that are really not a part of their language. EXAMPLE: Spanish has a word - SOSIAS. Halfway through the sixties the Spanish word DOBLE began to be used instead of SOSIAS because it existed and to many it must have seemed the Spanish version of DOUBLE. It now has that meaning!

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