Italians oppose English infiltration

[AAllan at AOL.COM]

from theage.com
http://www.theage.com.au:80/news/20000923/A13044-2000Sep22.html
(- Allan Metcalf)

Italian for the Italians, by jingo!


By DESMOND O'GRADY ROME Saturday 23 September 2000
A hundred Italian scholars have blown the whistle on English infiltration of
their language. Basta! That's enough!
They have issued a manifesto proclaiming the need for "active resistance
against linguistic contamination".
Their concern may have been reinforced by the new edition of the prestige
Devoto-Oli dictionary, 4000 of whose 100,000 words are foreign, and 60 per
cent of them English.
This is double the number listed by its competitor, the Zanichelli
dictionary, which appeared some months earlier.
English words are adopted partly for snob value, but also because they are
attached to new technologies or trends arriving mainly from the United States.
The newest imports are from the world of Internet, such as chat-line,
e-commerce and netiquette, or reflect trends such as blockbuster, pet
therapy, acquagym, piercing, new age, fusion and infotainment.
Fly and drive, bed and breakfast, gay, outing, new economy, greenkeeper and
millennium round have also been adopted recently.
Purists ask why hobby, container and smog are used when there are perfectly
good Italian equivalents.
Vittorio Sermonti, a Dante scholar who signed the Linguistic Manifesto, says:
"It would be ridiculous to insist that topo be used instead of (computer)
mouse. But it is ridiculous also to see shop signs for gloves rather than
guanti, or hairdresser rather than parrucchiere."
The Manifesto claims linguistic globalisation forces some to resort to
dialects, and Italian, being caught between these two tendencies, suffers.
It is not solely a right-wing concern. Greens and Communists are among those
campaigning not so much for linguistic purity as for vigorous Italian.
Although comparatively poor in words, Italian has a complex syntax. . . .