[Lexicog] Re: Naming the Beautiful Game: Football or Soccer?

Wed Jun 21 15:22:46 UTC 2006

Dear David,
   The word did exist halfway through the sixties in the standard DRAE. It was then gradually replaced by DOBLE and is now only heard of in the way that you mentioned very accurately in the first three lines of your note. I perhaps should have insisted on the problem of  borrowing for the sake of borrowing when there is word that already covers the meaning required. I have been told that Icelandic - if that is the correct word for the language spoken in Iceland - has chosen to give names to all that is new by using existing possibilities and not by simply lifting as it were the word from another language. Are you familiar with the change in meaning of ALGIDO in the last 30 odd years?

David Tuggy <david_tuggy at sil.org> escribió:
          (¿)SOSIAS? I'd never heard of it, and it isn't in at least one good online Spanish-English dictionary I consulted. The Real Academia does have it, however, and the Pequeño Larousse has it, but only in its historical/biographical section. It is a borrowing just as much as the sense of "doble" that you mention, coming from a character in a play by Plautus (later echoed by Molière). To me your example would be like saying it was somehow illegitimate to have taken the word "legislator" from French or Latin, because the true English word would be "solon".

People do, as you note, tend to write the way they talk, and in both talking and writing they readily adapt  structures from neighboring languages, even when they already have a structure with similar meaning and usage potential. English could use "Sosias" as a doppelgänger for "double", and I would in fact be surprised if no English-speakers ever have. 

English would be totally unrecognizable if you took out all the borrowed forms from it, and it is by no means the only language on earth of which that is true. More generally, the only language that maintains its purity is a dead language. 

--David Tuggy

Michael Nicholas wrote:     Dear Fritz,
   The last bit got mixed what with being in a hurry etc. So I have rewritten it. What I am trying to get at is the following. The predominant position of English means that other languages are heavily influenced by it:direct loan words, adaptations or using words that are apparently the same but are not in fact. If a modern language is used worldwide and then decides to write dictionaries based on a corpus, and if the corpus is based primarily on the written word, and if the writers are heavily influenced by English, then we will end up with a language community using words/constructions/that are really not a part of their language. EXAMPLE: Spanish has a word - SOSIAS. Halfway through the sixties the Spanish word DOBLE began to be used instead of SOSIAS because it existed and to many it must have seemed the Spanish version of DOUBLE. It now has that meaning!

Michael Nicholas <mrnicholas007 at yahoo.es> escribió:
        Dear Fritz,
     I think the song in question mentions how brave and honest and intelligent and honourable we English are  - while underlining that our most typical trait is that most English of virtues - MODESTY.

   The point I wanted to make is that this soccer/football debate is about how language  community B gets language community A  speakers to refer to the achievements of  A  in the language of community B. The next step is for A speakers to use B language instead of their own language in certain situations - (See the Jaques Tati film The Holiday of M. Hulot(?))

Fritz Goerling <Fritz_Goerling at sil.org> escribió:
          Sure, John, reminds me of the comic song with the refrain 
  “The English the English the English are best 
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.”

  Well, if England is the mother country of modern*  football, others have refined
  the game (I’ll send you something funny off-list, showing different football
  tactics which confirm our stereotypes about each other).

  Let’s keep our eye on the ball,

  Fritz

  *Maybe we can start a discussion about what is “modern”. 
        John Roberts wrote:
  Thanks, Michael. And the British can do this too. See this website:

http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/BestifBrits.htm

... but I think we have taken our eye off the ball.

---------------------------------

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---------------------------------

LLama Gratis a cualquier PC del Mundo.
Llamadas a fijos y móviles desde 1 céntimo por minuto.
http://es.voice.yahoo.com   

---------------------------------

LLama Gratis a cualquier PC del Mundo.
Llamadas a fijos y móviles desde 1 céntimo por minuto.
http://es.voice.yahoo.com
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