Coining of a new "English" word

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Feb 12 21:04:00 UTC 2012


On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Coining of a new "English" word
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 11, 2012, at 10:35 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>> Prieniseiskaia Sibir' kak _lingvoregion_ : materialy II Mezhvuzovskoi
>> nauchno-prakticheskoi Internet-konferentsii, Krasnoiarsk,
>> noiabr'-dekabr' 2010 goda by ...
>
>> The Yenisei Region of Siberia as a _Linguoregion_: Materials from the
>> Second Joint Internet Conference on Scientific Practice in Schools of
>> Education. Krasnoyarsk, November-December, 2010
>
> apparently an innovative synonym for the borrowed German term _Sprachbund_, which is also known by the standard technical term _linguistic area_ in English. Â or maybe it's being introduced as new technical term in *Russian*, framed as a Latin-based (or English-based) term -- given that other words in Russian for 'area' or 'region' tend to suggest administrative or political areas/regions.
>
> Trubetzkoy introduced the term _yazykovoy soyuz_ 'language union' as a Russian calque on _Sprachbund_, but i don't know what terms are current among Russian-speaking linguists for the concept.
>
> arnold
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

_Areal'naia lingvistika_ or less-commonly, nowadays, _sprakhbund_, but
for some reason, this strikes me as merely a calque or a borrowing
based on standard, Western-European usage, whereas _lingvoregion_
strikes me as a being a whole 'nother word for the concept, made up,
to paraphrase the old, American Tobacco Company ads, "by Russians, for
Russians, to suit Russian taste," based on a shared knowledge of the
lexicon and morphology of English, as the Japanese have famously done
for dekkids.

But, of course,

Youneverknow.

--

-Wilson
-----
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.
-Mark Twain

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