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Apropos of sosiases and suchlike: how about "(Las Vegas) elvis" for the
same meaning?<br>
<br>
--dt<br>
<br>
David Tuggy wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid44994FDC.10802@sil.org" type="cite">
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(¿)SOSIAS? I'd never heard of it, and it isn'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!<br>
</div>
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