Linguistic purism in English
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'm no linguist but one can clearly observe this in japanese "Engrish" (which is a real phenomenon abroad, my former sensei had stories of mispronounced English being taught in schools and understood locally), or in hybrids like Afrikaans or Portuguese. Or in any of the regional dialects that spring up in mixed cultures.
"Pure" languages like Esperanto are neat, and I think they can serve a legitimate and useful role at the world's table, but a language that fights impurities has to constantly push against a strong current. (See: French.) Real language is messy -- because if the majority of people break some rule of grammar together, it becomes the new grammar!
Also, those examples of 'pure' Modern English were ugly/crude-looking/inelegant :(
A "want of" something means a 'lack of' - "The kingdom was lost for want of a nail"
You probably want "the want for"
Portuguese is not a hybrid language, it's a romance language, a direct descendant of Latin with some influences from classical Greek, the same as Spanish, French, Italian and so on.
Modern English could more easily be classified as "hybrid" than Portuguese, given how much it is influenced by both French and Germanic languages.
There are local dialects influenced by the languages you mention and others, but Portuguese is Portuguese, like English is English, with the normal variations you would expect from a language widely spoken around the world. European and Brazilian Portuguese native speakers can communicate with each other easily, share TV shows, etc.
Even in my Portuguese textbook it says that there is significantly more difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese than between UK and US English.
I think the main issue you are alluding to is phonetic. European Portuguese speakers tend to really close their vowels, while Brazilian speakers open them. The end result is that it is easy for Europeans to understand Brazilians, but not necessarily the other way around.
I have seen this happen with English speakers, by the way. I remember a friend from the US needing subtitles to follow a British comedy show.
Would your wife have any trouble reading this, for example: http://publico.pt ?
And you're right about English, there's a joke about how our tongue stalks other unsuspecting languages in dark alleyways, knocking them out when opportune to steal loose grammar and vocabulary
I've never had any purposeful encounters with any of the languages you mention, though I would certainly like to!
Here's a wiki in Anglish. It looks very fun.
Think of it as a cargo cult of language; play-acting at meaning-saying: Language wielded like a ritual dagger instead of a tool.
You can recognize some examples of what he'd complain about if you pay attention to that sense. I'm annoyed by lots of uses of English; I must be fun to be around. I can't say they're misuses, but i dislike them. My favorite might be "I would argue", followed by... the author making an argument? Why the distancing? It's a verbal tick. It creates an air of passivity or detachment which is immediately contradicted by the words that follow. I suppose there's an idea these days that being detached and emotionless confers objectivity and wisdom, but I can't say i know at all for certain why people write or speak the way they do.
Language should stick to meaning like muscle to bone.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...
I would argue Orwell would definitely get downvoted all the time on HN for saying clearly his opinion and not masquerading it in an etiquette of apparent self-doubt. ;)
I really like his essay on politics and language, thanks for the reminder.
It's a lovely thought that, in this modern day, we might once again unlock our wordhoards!
I once read a poem by Seamus Heaney (who also re-translated Beowulf) in which the language of the poem itself recapitulated the development of English over the centuries. It was really quite beautiful, though a bare five minutes of Googling has not turned up the name.
edit: I think it's the Bone Dream sequence, from the collection North.
For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
>For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
I meant that fonts and IMEs make it technically unfeasible to change kanji or create new ones.
> kanji .. are the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
But not for neologisms. That's what my post was about.
Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc).
Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.
To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.)
The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.
For example with the last spelling reform, the rules for writing an ß or ss got streamlined. The rules follow the pronounciation of _some_ German speakers. If your region doesn't have the same pronounciation you can't rely on that but have to learn the rules.
German being a pluricentric language and therefore people knowing that one spelling doesn't fit all, different spellings for different regions is just a pragmatic matter of fact. The various governmental and non-governmental organizations that work together for defining the official spelling just try to minimize the rules for spelling. So that German spelling doesn't become the abomination that English or French spelling is. ;-)
Also we should remember that the official spelling is not mandatory. Nobody will sue you if you write "kuhl" instead of "cool" (unless you are a civil servant). There are of course soft factors at work so that your spelling isn't that far from the official one but there are still lots of people that write according to the old rules from before the spelling reform from 1996.
"Let them write how they feel writing, don't interrupt their creative processes with not so important rules".
> From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[6][7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
That wiki also lists a number of proposed spelling reforms.
(And given that there are many pronunciations in common usage, we can't alter the spelling to fit them all. And there are essentially only two spelling systems, and they only differ in minor ways.)