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Comment by zwp | Hacker News Reader

Hello!

I like the hypothesis, I'm sure there must be some research on this.

There is a writing style guide written by a well-known English author, Victorian era, that suggests using saxon over romance words for clarity. I feel this is valid (also more concise, more punchy (more consonants)). I thought it was Kipling but perhaps not... somebody help me out?

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You might be thinking of George Orwell, "politics and the english language" (a bit after the victorian era)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...

Rule 5 states: Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Yes! Thank you. Exactly (was later than I thought).

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones..."

Was it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barnes ?

"For example, the word "photograph" (from Greek light+writing) would become "sun-print" (from Saxon). Other terms include "wortlore" (botany), "welkinfire" (meteor) and "nipperlings" (forceps)."

In Finland there is a government agency called Kielitoimisto ("Language bureau"), which has as its mission to keep the language pure from foreign influences. They've recently tuned it down, but I remember a lot of proposals from them in the 90s similar to the ones you listed

Well, modern Hebrew is still like that, to a large extent.

Comparably, the French have L'Académie Française. Stuffed to the roof with curmudgeons who reject all foreign influences -- even from other Francophonic countries.

There's cases where Swiss French (counting), Quebecois French (conjugation of many verbs) etc is more logical or more consistent, but the changes are rejected as foreign by the Académie.

le weekend, le sandwich, un parking, un smoking ...

Yes, loanwords too.

In France the equivalent is the Académie française. So in French a computer is an Ordinateur, whereas in a lot of other languages it's derived from the English word. A few random examples: German: Computer. Spanish: Computadora. Scots Gaelic: Coimpiutair.

Edit: Oops Jacques beat me too it.

Actually, in European Spanish, "Ordenador" is way more common than "Computadora" (as an example, the former has 5 million results on Google for .es sites, while the latter has only just over 270k).

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