Timeline for Is there a word for replacing foreign words with English substitutes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 31, 2014 at 16:25 | comment | added | jello | At least Icelandic has a smaller population of speakers. Americans and Brits can't even agree on spelling or vocabulary for the same things! | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 10:49 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @BlessedGeek, why suicidal? Icelandic gets on quite well with it, saying tölva instead of kompjúter, þyrla instead of helíkopter, and (perhaps somewhat tongue-twistingly) rannsóknarlögreglumaður instead of detektívur. | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 10:06 | comment | added | John Lawler | Yes, but it means it in German instead of Greek. This apparently matters to some. Another term beside calque is loan translation. As for English Purity, see William Barnes' 1878 An Outline of English Speech-Craft, which is a grammar of English without loan words. | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 9:33 | comment | added | WS2 | @Hugo Yes, that article from The Economist is interesting. But I didn't really see the point about the literalness of some German words e.g. 'Fernseher' (far-seer). What does 'television' mean, if not 'far-seer'? | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 9:33 | comment | added | Blessed Geek | It's called suicidal linguistic tendencies. | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 9:28 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Colin, you'd end up with Icelandic, basically. | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 9:10 | comment | added | Hugo | "English purism": economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/01/english-purism | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 8:58 | comment | added | Colin Mackay | Linguistic Purity sounds insane. Where would you stop. If you take it to the extreme what would be left? IIRC, Almost all words ending in -tion were imported from French, for example. | |
| Jan 30, 2014 at 7:18 | history | answered | jello | CC BY-SA 3.0 |