[Lexicog] alter egos for double

[Fritz Goerling]

David, your subject line “alter ego for doubles” is interesting.

You also said further below:

“English could use "Sosias" as a doppelgänger for "double", and I would in
fact be surprised if no English-speakers ever have.”

Now, could “sosias”, “doppelgänger” and “double” be used interchangeably in
the same context?

Fritz



David Tuggy wrote:

If linguistic purity is given such a high value, understanding is likely to
suffer. When that happens, I have no qualms in encouraging people to forget
the linguistic purity and keep the understanding instead. Where you can get
both (i.e. where the linguistically pure neologism or archaism is also as
understandable and acceptable as the borrowing), then, sure, go ahead. 

--David Tuggy

Michael Nicholas wrote: 

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  <mailto:david_tuggy at sil.org> <david_tuggy at sil.org> escribió:

(¿)SOSIAS? I'd never heard of it, and it is! n'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!

 

 

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