Bayle in the New York Times

[Wilson Gray]

FWI, there's the little-used Spanish _estadounidense_.

-Wlson

On 7/8/07, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Fwd: Bayle in the New York Times
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Again from another list.  The writer asks some
> interesting questions about 18th century
> attitudes towards changes in vocabulary.
>
> Joel
>
> >While reading the Op-Ed page of the NY Times yesterday (Friday July 6),
> >I noticed something that I had never seen before on that page --- a
> >quotation from Pierre Bayle:  "the birth of one word is usually the
> >death of another."  An American or an anglophone author quoting
> >Bayle? Not likely, in our newspapers. The article containing this
> >quotation was composed in French by Martine Rousseau and Olivier
> >Houdart. It appeared first as a blog on the website of _Le Monde_
> >and was later translated for inclusion on the Times's Op-Ed page..
> >The main thrust of this piece is to recommend that the common
> >word "américain" be replaced by "états-unien."  Rubbish.
> >
> >A search on Google failed to uncover the precise source of Bayle's
> >sentence. At that point I emailed the problem to a few Bayle
> >scholars and very quickly was informed by Professor Antony
> >McKenna that the sentence occurs in Bayle's _Dictionnaire_, in
> >Remarque D of the article "Poquelin" (i.e. Molière).  Once I had
> >this information, I was able to bring up the exact page in Bayle
> >by searching for it in the University of Chicago's ARTFL database.
> >The Bayle quotation originally appeared as, "Notez enfin que la
> >naissance d'un mot est pour l'ordinaire la mort d'un autre." Today
> >we are well aware that many new words are introduced into our
> >language daily, but Bayle seems to have been imagining that the
> >French language of his time existed in a steady-state condition in
> >which the entrance and exit of its words resembles a zero-sum
> >game.  Did he find this idea in any earlier writer? Did any
> >English writers on language discuss or apply Bayle's notion
> >to their own language?  Swift criticized certain new words that
> >he thought would corrupt the English language, which he
> >wanted to "fix," but I can't recall any hint of Bayle in his
> >writings on the English language.
> >
> >I should also add that the original context of Bayle's sentence was
> >an essay (Remarque D) in which Bayle further pursues the
> >subject of Molière's neologisms.
> >
> >As it turns out, the Bayle quotation seems far more interesting
> >(at least to me) than the article in which it appears.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org