Re: NRC kwaliteitskrant? Echt niet!

Emungo wrote:

You certainly do _not_ have to 'dislike English', as Ekkehard puts it,
to share a lot of his sentiments; as an English speaker I really would
love to help Italians realise that they do not need to pepper their
discourse with more or less wonky English usages or anglicisms to add
value to what they are saying or writing.

Thanks, it's good to see I'm not alone. I do feel quite strongly about this.
And let me say that I am very fond of English.

It's language change like
any other, of course, but the dynamic that brings it about is rather
depressing. And if one can accept, for instance, that "footing" just
is the Italian for "jogging", it doesn't mean that there aren't other
less established or nonce usages that can be meaningfully described as
not just pretentious but erroneous.

I agree, but erroneous nonce usages can become the norm surprisingly
quickly. Since signifiers are largely arbitrary, they're also easy to
replace or reassign, which is why no living language will ever cease to be
an effective means of communication, regardless of what signifiers it uses
and what they are assigned to. It's probably for this reason that language
change tends to be considered in terms of processes and their causes and
results. While it makes sense for linguists to focus on what comes into
existence, speakers need not share this viewpoint. Any change implies not
only the appearance of something new, but also the disappearance of
something familiar, and rapid wholesale language change can cause a certain
sense of loss. I'm sure this is true for individual speakers, and it's
probably also true for language communities.
Remarkably, though, the majority of Germans seem indifferent to the ongoing
massive influx of English words. A couple of points you'll often hear made
are that "languages will evolve" and that "English is a mixture of several
different languages, too". Both of these statements are true, of course, but
I don't think they tell the full story.
First of all, speakers do have some say in how their language evolves,
especially with regard to vocabulary. At the beginning of the 19th century,
Joachim Heinrich Campe invented and compiled thousands of German words,
which he hoped would replace their respective foreign synonyms. Although he
was initially ridiculed, a few hundred of his coinages eventually caught on
and are part of everybody's vocabulary today (for example "tatsächlich",
"fortschrittlich", "Lehrgang" and "Voraussage"), as are most of the words
they were intended to replace. I understand Turkish underwent a similar, but
much more extensive process in the early 20th century. A language I know
more about is Portuguese. A substantial portion of the Portuguese lexicon is
made up of deliberate borrowings from classical Latin, which were at one
time deemed to be more correct than their vernacular descendants, but
generally failed to oust them from the language. Port. "artelho", "artigo"
and "artículo" are all derived from Lat. "articulus", for example.
In 21st-century Germany, however, any effort in that vein is doomed to fail
to a far greater extent than Campe's, as Germans tend to be dismissive of
German neologisms. More importantly, the idea that a language can be
intentionally altered by its speakers is often derided as tilting at the
windmills of language change, and few people appreciate that the lexicon of
any language is inevitably shaped by journalists, copywriters, translators
and others who produce texts that are read by millions. Campe is unknown to
the general public, as is the history of the Romance languages, of course.
Secondly, Middle English would be a better analogy than present-day English,
which is comparatively static. The fact that English as we know it is the
result of a fusion of several lexicons says nothing about how the average
grandparent in late medieval England felt about the way their grandchildren
spoke, for instance. It must have been unsettling to witness such dramatic
changes in your lifetime, to hear the younger generations speak a noticeably
different language from your own. (Incidentally, I've even heard German
children refer to, and address, their fathers as "Dad" [dEt]. If German was
spoken by Amazonian Indians rather than by central Europeans, I'm sure
ethnographers would regard the replacement of German kinship terms with
borrowed ones as a sign of incipient culture loss.)
Finally, I'd like to make it clear that I don't think the origin of words is
relevant here. It annoys me when I read things like "Cheers -- die komplette
zweite Season", but I regard "Saison" as a proper German alternative.
("Staffel" is another.)
Thank you for reading down to here.

Regards,
Ekkehard


.

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