LL-L "Language politics" 2010.04.05 (06) [EN]

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 05 April 2010 - Volume 06*
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From: Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>

Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2010.04.05 (05) [EN]



In fairness part of the background that led to things like "Beistrich" and
"Wes-Fall" was a perceived abuse in some 18th- and 19th-century German to
borrow needlessly from French, using words like
"scherschieren"/"cherchieren" instead of "suchen".

Google these...

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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From: Marcus Buck <list at marcusbuck.org>

Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2010.04.05 (03) [EN]



From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>

Originally on this thread Roger spoke of French words being "banned",


eg, say "ramdam" instead of "buzz".

On Le Soir's technically rather irritating site:

http://www.lesoir.be/culture/airs_du_temps/2010-03-30/parlez-francais-ne-dites-plus-buzz-dites-ramdam-761799.php

it's talking about conversation rather than the law: "Don't say this,
say that."

It seems to me that the newspaper article is just a joke in retaliation
to Alain Joyandet's suggestion:

buzz > ramdam
tuning > bolidage
chat > éblabla or tchatche
newsletter > infolettre or sagement
talk > débat

I'm thinking about the way telling a person not to say or do something
can be not only ineffective, but the wrong approach can draw their
attention to it and make them decide to do it.



I don't speak French, but Google Translate says it's a competition to
propose new words that can be used instead of foreign words. I think that's
completely acceptable and far away from "banning" words.
Foreign words _are_ harder to understand than native constructions. Let's
take the linguistic term "Ausbausprache". To a person with English as native
language with no knowledge of German the word is meaningless. There's no
clue in the word that tells you anything about the meaning. If you come
across the word in a text and you don't already know it, you are lost. If
the author instead had used the term "umbrella language" you would have an
idea about the meaning of the word even if you haven't ever heard the term
before.

Much language purism is rooted in nationalism and that's a bad thing. But
language purism has also positive sides because it can make language easier
to understand. It depends on the individual case. E.g. the idea of some
German language purist to replace the word "Nase" (nose) with
"Gesichtserker" (face + bay window) was ridiculous cause every child knows
the word "Nase" while the word "Erker" is much less widely known. The
proposal was only based in xenophobia against the supposedly Latin loan.
Modern linguistics has even proven that "Nase" is no Latin loan but based on
a common Germanic root which further proves how ridiculous the idea was. But
language purism has also produced many words that are in wide use nowadays.
Words like "Tagebuch", "Briefwechsel", "Anschrift" or "Verfasser" were
coined by language purists. Their work clearly improved the German language.

Icelandic and Estonian also had interesting phases of language development.
Icelandic is strongly puristic (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic>)
and Estonian had a phase of language Ausbau in which words were created out
of thin air (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_language#Ex_nihilo_lexical_enrichment><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_language#Ex_nihilo_lexical_enrichment>
).

And about the converse effects of forbidden words: This kind of Streisand
effect (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect>)
happens every day at our schools. When I was still in primary school I once
called my sister a "Nutte" (whore). My mother asked whether I actually knew
the meaning of the word. I did not. I just knew that the word was a "bad"
word and effective profanity.

Marcus Buck



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