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It’s still in the online DRAE. <br>
<br>
¿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.<br>
<br>
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 ... <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
--David Tuggy<br>
<br>
Michael Nicholas wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid20060621152246.22904.qmail@web25113.mail.ukl.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div>Dear David,</div>
<div> 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?<br>
<br>
<b><i>David Tuggy <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:david_tuggy@sil.org"><david_tuggy@sil.org></a></i></b> escribió:</div>
<blockquote class="replbq"
style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px;">
<div id="ygrp-text">
<div>(¿)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".<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
--David Tuggy<br>
<br>
Michael Nicholas wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid20060621132302.533.qmail@web25105.mail.ukl.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div>Dear Fritz,</div>
<div> 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!</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
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