Re: Who castrated Esperanto?

On Mar 23, 9:35 pm, "Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ross Clark:

On Mar 22, 10:23 pm, "Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ross Clark:
So "Fremdwo:rter" are borrowings whose spelling has not been adjusted
to basic-German spelling conventions?
Spelling and/or pronunciation. An example from English could be
"garage"; if I'm not mistaken, it varies from [g@'rA:Z] to ['g&rIdZ]
("garaazh", "garridge").
And are you going to claim that "garage" is "foreign" or not,
depending on which of those pronunciations one uses?

No, I've not been hired to make a dictionary.

Well, you brought up the example. I thought you were going to make
some point with it.


"Barock" is foreign on behalf of its stress, but anyway, a
"Fremdwörterbuch" will base its selection on the need for explanation,
rather than on how nativized the loans are.
Yet another criterion!
So this is a dictionary of "hard words" which happen to be of foreign
origin? (Is there an assumption that there are no native words which
are "hard", i.e. require explanation?)

Yes, there is such an assumption. It's more wrong for English than for
continental Germanic.

And for whom? The book does not
seem to be aimed at children. I would think any German who had
finished high school would know what a play was, and thus know what
"Akt" meant.

"Akt" can have a lot of other meanings, not all of them colloquial.

Fine, but it's the well-known one that raises the question of why you
should need a special dictionary for it.


Antonio has pointed out
that there are genuinely unassimilated foreign words on the margins of
English, but they are far fewer in number than the total class of
borrowed words.
It's a sub-class at any rate.
Believe me, it bears no resemblance to the "foreign layer" you are
claiming.

So what? I knew it would be thinner in English and Icelandic (for
opposite reasons) than in Danish or German, but I'm surprised that
anyone should be so adamant about needing different kinds of
linguistics to study different languages.

Is this supposed to be a reference to me? I have not suggested any
such thing. I'm just saying your analysis of English is wrong.


All nativization requires is that words are acquired from other
languages, are modified (to varying degrees) to fit the existing
phonology and morphology of the host language, and eventually cease to
be recognized or felt as foreign. You might postulate that they all
pass through a kind of "foreign periphery" like the double-vertical-
line items I mentioned above, but that would be an ever-shifting class
and their stay there might be very brief.

All wordclasses are ever-shifting, and inherited words can be pushed
into the periphery too. What's so wrong about difining "a foreign
layer" of words as those in the periphery that happen to be
borrowings?

I don't mind you defining such a layer, I'm just pointing out that it
is a very different thing from the "foreign layer" you originally
claimed included words like "multiply".

There's no need to put a specific limit between core and
periphery before you enter the market of dictionaries.

To me it's not a categorical concept at all. "Foreign words" is just
the prototype of loanwords, and to the individual speaker there's no
necessary psychological difference between words of different origin.
One and the same word can be more or less foreign depending on who you
are and how you pronounce and spell it. I know that features like
[+learned], [+foreign] and [+Latinate] have been tossed around in the
literature, but when was the last time someone used them?
I've argued with PTD and others about this question on this newsgroup
within the last few years.

I wouldn't count a newsgroup as part of "the literature".

You didn't actually specify "used them in the literature". As far as
that question goes, Nathan would be the most likely to know. Various
ideas from SPE that I thought would have died a natural death keep re-
surfacing as un-discredited.

Ross Clark

In Danish we have the common expression that this or that is a
"fremmedord" to some person; it means something that that person
doesn't know or want to know about (for instance "Ansvarlighed er et
fremmedord for ham" - "Responsibility is a foreign word to him"). It's
the same in German: "Ruhestand bleibt ihm ein Fremdwort", the first of
894 Google hits with the search phrase "ihm ein Fremdwort". In both
languages the expression can be used in praise as well as in
dispraise.
Yeah, but that's metaphorical. The same expression would be understood
in English. But that's not what these books are about.

There's a difference between "Fremdwort" and "fremdes Wort" in German.
Actually the first would be better translated with "foreignism".
Interesting enough, you find "foreignism" in the Simple English WP,
but not in <en.wikipedia.org>.
.

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