Bayle in the New York Times

[David A. Daniel]

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

-Wlson


Folks around the Americas (and now the French too?) are always complaining
that the USA has hijacked the word American to describe its citizens when,
in fact, everyone in North, Central and South America is "American". But
truth is, the USA is the only country that uses the word America in its name
making American unique, whereas United Statesien, estadouniddense,
etats-unien could also be a Mexican (Estados Unidos Mexicanos is the name of
the country) and at one time could have been a Brazilian as well, though no
more. A lot of folks down south call Americans norte-americanos - North
Americans - but then that should also include Canada, Mexico and Greenland.
What to do? Result is, though, Europeans, Africans and Asians have regional
names but residents of the Americas are left without a viable one.
DAD



>
> 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

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