I couldn’t help but overhear a woman speaking on her cell phone yesterday. Don’t know what language she was speaking, but anyway: “Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda First Street yadda yadda yadda…” and then a minute later, “Blah blah blah blah okay, bye!”
What language on earth doesn’t have words for “first” and “street” and an affirmative and signoff? Why would a non-native speaker presumably talking to another NNS use English this way? It is a puzzlement.
If “First Street” is the proper name of the road then you wouldn’t translate it. If you’re in Paris, you don’t talk about “Elysian Fields Avenue”, do you? Or stroll down “Under the Lime Trees” in Berlin?
As for signing off with “Bye”, Anglophones are hardly averse to borrowing such words: “Ciao”, “Adieu” or “Hasta la vista”, anyone?
“First Street” is presumably a proper name, specifically part of an address. Since that is the name of the street I can see it not being translated (although I wouldn’t fault someone for translating it either). That is what you are going to see on street signs when you are trying to find it.
Haven’t you ever heard an anglophone say “Ciao” instead of “Bye”? That’s a foreign word :eek:!
My stepmother’s mother tongue was French. It was quite amusing listening to her flip back and forth between English and French when she was talking to her real kids on the phone.
“First Street” and “first street” are two different things. “First Street” is as Colophon says, more or less a proper name. If I translate it to “pehela sarak”, well, that means '“first street”, or more accurately, “the first street”. Which it might not be! Plus when he gets there, it’s not going to say “Pehela Sarak”, is it?
As for affirmative, “Okay” is universally accepted everywhere. Besides which, I’m American. Raised here and all that. Okay is as natural to my tongue as anything. I do use the Hindi equivalant “accha” sometimes, but “bye” is just so much less formal than most of the Hindi equivalants.
I flip back and forth from Hindi to English all the time on the phone, and speak both languages very well (at this point my English is much better. Used to be about the same).
Hmmm. I see your point.
This is common, even typical of people who are fluent in two or more languages - it’s called Code switching." Setting aside the issue of proper names and proper nouns, some things are just easier to say in some languages, or have a different emphasis than the comparable phrase, or there can be emotional components to speaking in one language or the other than are either sought out or avoided in a given situation.
I recently overheard the following:
[Person speaking russian on the phone]
russian russian Russian RUSSIAN RUSSIAN! [pause] … whatever.
Yeah, there isn’t any equivalant, really, to tons and tons of English phrases. Plus, my slang English is WAY better than my slang Hindi. I really only speak Hindi to my family, so I don’t use much slang with them.
Of course, some street names get translated, or at least halfway translated (hence signs like this in Canada. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone talking about “Rue First”, for example, just like in Prague, English speakers might refer to Široká ulice (means “broad street”) as “Siroka Street”.
I am a non-native-speaker of English (although I have been speaking it for 30+ years now). I speak 3 languages. When I speak in Russian, for example, with a Russian speaker who also speaks English, we often employ some English words either when they are technical terms (“database” in English is a lot easier to say than the Russian equivalent) or, very often, when the English term has no exact equivalent in Russian (“image”, or “interface”, for example).
Of course, there is also the phenomenon with some Russian-speakers in the US to “russianize” English words and use them in Russian conversation. Many hilarious phrases ensue.
From the other side of the linguistic barrier: if you go to Miami and ask for directions to Eighth Street, people will give you puzzled looks.
Calle Ocho on the other hand, everybody knows where it is!
Also, if you look at the history of India, it wasn’t that long ago we were ruled by Britain, and they were there for 300 years. So we already have a lot of English terms woven in. Just take the example of “fasclas”, which comes from “First Class” and means the same thing. The Hindi word is even pronounced the way a Brit with RP would pronounce First Class!
Then there is Faroese, where “bye-bye” has been the standard signoff since we were occupied by the brits in the war.
And people from Greenland seem to prefer danish numerals for just about everything.
And any Norwegians under 30 use an English word or two every five sentences or so. Teenagers are worse.
Really, this sort of “borrowing” from other languages to fill in the gaps in your own is a really basic part of how languages work. I don’t think there exists any such thing as a native English/American word.
One of the things that sort of drove me crazy while living in Berlin was the way Germans would throw in English words every once in awhile. I guess they thought they were being hip and cosmopolitan and showing their mastery of another language, but as an American, I thought it was just pretentious and stupid. Sort of like when some Americans like to slip in a French phrase when they could have just as easily said it in English, n’est-ce pas?
However, many English words have made it so far into the German language that even people who don’t speak any English will now slip these words into their conversation.
Fahrkarte is a perfectly good word, but Germans all say the English word “ticket” now. Other words like “power”, “feeling”, “entertainment”, “sound”, etc. etc. have all become that special English word thrown into otherwise perfect German sentences. It is even in most of their advertising - I guess it makes the product seem more exotic and special to throw in English words in the ads.
When talking about computers, you can pretty much throw out every German word equivalent. Granted, much of this has to do with the German geeks working from English manuals, but if you listen to any German talking about computer technology, it is almost 50/50 English/German when discussing anything computer related.
I guess it all comes down to finding the best word to use for the moment, but it does sound silly to hear someone speaking German and hearing English words randomly, and needlessly, sprinkled into their conversation.
Years ago, people laughed when France declared it illegal to use English words like this, but a part of me understands the futile attempt to keep their language pure. Good luck with that. I think as long as every language evolves, new words will come into vogue - be it American/British slang, or other cultures adding foreign words.
That’s a good example. Say “Fahrkarte”. Then say “ticket”. Which one is easier to say?
How did all those foreign words like “vogue” make it into English? I would think it was because at first they were sprinkled into English conversations, and the onlookers may have thought it was done “randomly” and “needlessly”.
Actually, Fahrkarte (far-cart-ah)is just as easy to say and the literal translation is “travel-card” which is more evocative of what the object is.
And yes, I intentionally used the word vogue as an example of words that have slipped into English. But we could just as easily use the word(s) fashion, or style.
Of course many words from foreign languages have entered into English - any good dictionary will tell you the origin of many (if not most) of our words comes from some other language.
My husband used to do this all the time when speaking with his mother in their native language. What I found most amusing was that when he spoke the English words in the middle of a non-English sentence, he said them with an accent that would not have been present if the used the same words in an English sentence.
Three syllables. Versus two (well, the way most people pronounce it, really one and a half).
There’s also the fact that a street is referred to on a sign. Calling it by the name that is actually on the sign is more useful than having the other person have to translate it back to English. Especially since there’s often not a one-to-one mapping.
I will note that not translating proper names is a fairly recent phenomena, which is why names that have been around a long time are often translated, while modern ones aren’t.
Yes, with few exceptions, if a street is called “X Street” or the equivalent in the local language, when describing it in another language I will translate “Street” but not the street’s name. I find it funny when Americans call, for example, Paris’s streets “rue X”, with the wrong vowel sound in “rue”, even if they’re speaking English. This said, “First Street” might be one of those few exceptions. Unless it’s actually called “rue First” (not unlikely around here, see below) I might say “première rue” or simply call it “First” (e.g. “tourne à droite sur First”). For example, I will definitely say “la quarante-quatrième avenue à New York”, not “l’avenue Forty-fourth à New York” or “Forty-fourth Avenue à New York”.
Here in Sherbrooke, many street names are in English due to the city’s Loyalist heritage, even though the vast majority of residents are now French speakers. So the main street is King Street, which I’ll describe as such in English and as “rue King” or else “la King” in French. It is funny to see a francophone city in Quebec with such street names as King, Wellington, Queen Victoria and the like. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a literal “rue First” around here.
France never “declared it illegal” to use English words in French. First, it’s impossible to do this, and second, even if it were possible they wouldn’t have done it. And in any case French people use plenty of English words in speech. The French language has a regulatory body (more than one actually) whose purpose is to make usage suggestions, but usage suggestions apply only to formal language, and aren’t binding in any way. They are susceptible to being adopted or rejected by actual usage. Now, the regulatory bodies for the French language, and for other languages as well, have tended to favour homegrown terms rather than loanwords, but (even formal) French also contains plenty of terms borrowed from English or other languages.
It’s not the first time I read this thing about English words being “illegal” in French or something, and I think we may have hit on a specific mindset peculiar to English speakers. There’s also a current thread in GQ where Kimstu asks whether English has more words than Hindi or Urdu, while saying that of course it has more than other European languages, largely because it doesn’t have a regulatory body (other than dictionary editors, I suppose) and tends to borrow vocabulary from many other languages, while other languages are presumably run by xenophobes. People frequently trot out this quote about English following other languages in dark alleys to rob them of loose grammar. But in fact all languages influence each other, it’s not just English that does the borrowing. All this sounds like anglo exceptionalism to me. Even this claim about English having more words than other languages sounds dubious to me. To start with, what’s a word? And do we count both formal and informal language registers, the latter of which may contain words you won’t find in dictionaries? Which dialects?
This said, I’ll admit that the apparent lack of understanding of the distinction between formal and informal language isn’t unique to English speakers. It seems that many people believe the job of teachers should be to shame children into believing they speak badly instead of showing them that there exist different registers of language. Especially if said children speak nonstandard varieties of their language.
I guess this is OT, but, really, it is outside of the scope of the English (or in other countries, other language) teachers’ jobs to be teaching kids that “there exist different registers of language”. At least it’s outside of the scope for non-graduate-level education. For anything lower, the goal should be to teach the common language as a means of universal communication, not to emphasize regional, ethnic or class differences.