Got a cite for that?
If you define the problem in such a way as to limit it to borrowings from French and Latin, yes. If you look at the language as it actually exists today, no.
The argument would go something like this: originally English was a composite language, like many European languages. Then colonialism happened. The era of colonialism is now over, but its legacy was a world dotted with English speakers; part of this legacy was that English, in the present century, is used as a lingua franca. The relative openness of English to loan words created an influx of such from all over the planet.
Thus, in coinclusion, although English was not really all that different oiriginally from other similar European languages, because of historical contingencies it is now somewhat different - via this influx. Though the size of English vocabulary is impossible to establish with precision, everyone acknowledges it is vast and ever-growing - and a good case can be made, moreso than other languages.
I disagree. Even though English is still fairly accepting of foreign words as far as languages go, it isn’t so in any particularly remarkable extent. How often do existing English words get replaced with foreign words? How many recent borrowings in the text of this thread?
The position of a language as lingua franca does not make it more likely to borrow, but the opposite: it’s more likely to be borrowed from. Take for instance Chinese, a language that has always been quite resistant to borrow foreign words. That it was the lingua franca of eastern Asia for a long time only affected the vocabulary of cultures that were under its sphere on influence like Japanese or Korean.
English is not the only language that has a vast and growing vocabulary. You can say the same thing about pretty much all major languages. Because English is now the language of science and research, a lot of technical terms are first coined in English to be later borrowed or translated by other languages. Notice that here, too, the movement is from and not to English.
J’ai stoppé le bus au parking pour aller faire du shopping. Il me fallait un pull et du shampooing.
French is a bad counter - example, because it somewhat unusually has an offcial organization set up specifically to prevent borrowings. Note it was established long before English became the lingua francia.
While such official opposition of course cannot prevent borrowings, it does make the language as a whole less accepting of loan-words.
I dispute that being a lingua francia makes a language less likely to borrow, rather than more. You have advanced the example of Chinese. It is simply factually untrue that Chinese is notably without borrowed vocabulary:
The difficulties Chinese faces with borrowing words is with their unusual system of writing, not with adopting the spoken word.
Way I’d put it is that the existence of a lingua francia accellerates borrowing in both directions - with the exception that while the “host” languages tend to be the beneficiaries of only one such transaction, the lingua francia gets the benefit of many.
The Lingua Franca of European diplomacy was French.
The Lingua Franca of science was Latin.
The Lingua Franca of the British Empire was English.
My native language is French. That’s the reason why I used it as an example. English speakers frequently (on these boards and elsewhere) like to bring up French as an example of a European language that’s resistant to borrowings. They’ll typically talk about the Académie. Here’s the thing about the Académie française: it’s purpose is not to prevent borrowings, it’s purpose is not even to regulate language, it’s sole real purpose is to give a prestigious job to old, usually conservative, authors. It’s like the Canadian senate. It serves no real practical purpose, regardless of its theoretical mission.
Like any other language, French speakers decide what word makes it into their language and they’re just as shameless about stealing foreign words as English speakers. Furthermore, French speakers are more likely to use recently borrowed words in their speech than English speakers. Take a look at this list of French words of English origin. There are a little over 250 words there, which may not seem like much, but almost all these words were borrowed within the last 100 years or so, and, more importantly, they’re almost all in extremely common usage.
When comparing French and English, it’s also important to take into account the different attitudes of lexicographers. There is not equivalent to the OED in French. The attitude of the OED is that if a word ever showed up somewhere, more than once, in an English text, then it’s an English word. Words are never taken out of the OED, even though a few of them only exist in dictionaries. By contrast, French dictionaries, Robert and Larousse, try to represent the language as it’s used and as it’s likely to be used in the long term. They only add words if they have reason to believe those words are likely to be used again in the future. The barrier for entry for new words is much higher, and they remove some words with each new edition. This is an important factor in English’s apparently large word count.
I’m arguing here that French speakers are not significantly less likely to use recent borrowings than English speakers. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that at the vernacular level they may be even slightly more likely to use those words. Comparing actual word counts is problematic, so I believe frequency of usage is a better metric.
With regard to Chinese, from the Wikipedia article you cite:
As a rule, Chinese speakers will prefer translation over phonetic borrowings. Now, I don’t dispute that a language whose speakers come into contact with many cultures will end up borrowing words. It’s almost a necessity. However, that doesn’t change the core nature of the language and Chinese is still fairly impermeable.
On the other hand, Tagalog and Japanese have never been used as wide-spanning lingua francas. They are nevertheless extremely welcoming of foreign words, much more fundamentally so than modern English is, frequently replacing common native words with foreign ones. I live in Japan and use Japanese at home and work and see this happening all the time. Not so much with English.
Now that’s a description of the French Academy I’ve never heard before, and I like it! I’ll try to keep it in mind next time the subject comes up. Because you’re right, that’s something anglophones always mention when discussing language.
I do wonder, though: while the Academicians themselves are old authors, does the French Academy have some sort of staff, and does it do some work? Or is it entirely a sinecure conferred onto the Academicians?
And of course, having a regulating body doesn’t make a language evolve differently from one that has no official regulation, like English. Whether it favours loanwords or not, a regulating body can only make usage suggestions, which may or may not be accepted into common usage. And it can only ever regulate formal, written language, which doesn’t describe most uses of language. Let’s not forget that English also has dictionaries and style guides which establish a standard and formal version of the language, used in publications, including official ones. An official language regulating academy wouldn’t do anything else.
But as you say, these arguments always come up when we discuss language with anglophones. Certainly they can’t actually believe that some languages have “official language academies” that decide everything up to how people speak with their friends. I suspect nationalism (well, with language instead of nation).
That’s an important point, which I wasn’t aware of before. I also have the impression that the main French dictionaries are published in France, and tend to favour words (even informal/popular ones) that are commonly used in France. Words from other French dialects face a much higher barrier to be included in them. I know there are American English dictionaries and British English dictionaries, but I don’t know if other English dialects have their own dictionaries.
Is that the correct plural of lingua franca?
If you treat it as Latin it would be linguas francas, if you treat it as English it’s whatever the speaker feels like.
If you treated it as Latin, it would be “linguae francae”. The trouble is that it’s not Latin: it’s originally Italian. According to the Wiktionary entry:
“Lingua francas” sounds best to me in English.
It would be linguae francae in the nominative or the vocative, but not in the accusative, dative or genitive.
English usually borrows nouns in the nominative case – those in other cases being in the other case because it’s essential to the meaning, e.g., “quorum” (of whom) and “omnibus” (for all).
Don’t think the OED represents the typical lexicographical practice among English language dictionaries. Other dictionaries are much more like the French ones in that they try to represent the language as it is currently used. Even unabridged dictionaries will remove older words as they are updated. For example, Merriam-Webster’s 2nd Unabridged (published 1934) had a cutoff date of about 1500 AD. That is, a word had to be current sometime after that date to get in the dictionary. For their 3rd edition (published 1961), that date was changed to 1750. They also removed a variety of other entries (e.g. reformed spellings) that were rarely used.
English’s large word count is not based on the OED. The word count is based on how large unabridged dictionaries are (Webster’s 3rd has almost half a million) plus estimates of the sizes of dialectal, technical, and other specialized vocabularies that don’t make it into general purpose dictionaries.
Whatever work there is is done by the academicians. For instance the articles of the dictionnary of the French Academy are discussed/written by those who bother to show up for the dictionnary sessions.
Also, membership isn’t really conferred. When an academician dies, the others elect someone to replace him.
However, I do think that seats at the Academy are mostly sought after for prestige sake than because authors really really want to write an entry for the word “rhizome”. Also, the Academy is famous for not electing well remembered authors. For instance, Emile Zola tried with obstination but with no succes to join it. I’d guess that 95% of the Academicians who voted against him, or were elected in his place, are nowadays totally forgotten.
Students of Japanese are likely to think it has more loanwords simply because they are only expressed in the katakana script, which is mostly dedicated to representing non-Chinese loanwords. (As for the Chinese loanwords, they’re expressed in Chinese characters and most people don’t know they are loanwords). But Japanese isn’t terribly different from most other languages I’ve studied as far as loanword content.
In 1956, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics conducted a study of word usage in magazine articles. Japanese lexicographers categorize words as either native (和語), Chinese (漢語), imported (外来語) or mixed. Imported refers to words that come from languages other than Chinese wheres mixed are compound words whose parts are of different origins. Their study showed that the vocabulary at the time was:
Native: 36.7% (53.9%)
Chinese: 47.5% (41.3%)
Imported: 9.8% (2.9%)
Mixed: 6.0% (1.9%)
The first number represents vocabulary ratio (each word gets counted only once) and numbers in parentheses represent usage frequency. As you can see, writers of the times used a smaller number of native words more frequently than Chinese words.
In 1994, they repeated their study. The results are:
Native: 25.7% (35.7%)
Chinese: 34.2% (49.9%)
Imported: 33.8% (12.3%)
Mixed: 6.4% (2.1%)
As you can see, the number of imported words completely surged, jumping from 10% to almost 34% of total vocabulary, in 40 years.
Now, that is for magazine articles, but I think they’re a good middle ground because the formal and vernacular. If you repeated the study with newspapers, or novels, or television, you would get somewhat different results. However, it’s undeniable that Japanese is taking in foreign words in at a tremendous pace.
This is in the nature of the language. Whereas English speakers will readily plunder other languages when there isn’t a good English word to describe the concept, Japanese speakers will readily plunder foreign languages despite there already being a good Japanese word to describe the concept.
Source: 語種 - Wikipedia
Ain’t that the truth. I spent a lot of time in Japan, and in one of my earliest trips I remember seeing a sign on a store saying (in English): Grand Opening! This was not written in katakana. It was written in the Roman alphabet. And I remember thinking… surely there are Japanese words for “grand” and “opening”, and a Japanese friend explained that it was somehow more prestigious to write it in English.
We actually do that in English quite a bit, too, except it’s usually French or Italian that is the “prestige” language, especially the former. But not to the extent that you see it in Japan.
I have to protest at this straw-manning of the argument I was making. Please re-read my point again, and note that you have extended it to an unreasonable extent.
I specifically stated that the Academy cannot actually regulate people’s everyday language:
Yet here you say thge opposite:
Right back at you. When someone willfully twists what I say to mean the exact opposite, ignoring my actual argument, “I suspect nationalism (well, with language instead of nation)”.
Now, as to the actual argument itself: you two are claiming that the Academy has no actual purpose other than as an honorarium. That may be true and it may not - and I will note that neither of you have advanced any actual proof other than your say-so. The actual evidence indicates the opposite, but I’m willing to be convinced that the publications and lobbying efforts made by the Academy are all so much hot air, meaning nothing, if actual proof is advanced that this is so.
Good, informative thread.
About this:
John McWhorter (linguist-turned-pundit) once wrote a scholarly article which showed, point for point, why it’s likely that English WAS indeed partly “creolized”, back in the late 800s. In a large part of Britain – the “Danelaw” region – enough men speaking (Old) Danish married enough women speaking (Old) English that children did indeed convert the pidgin spoken in the home to a sort of creole. Not an entirely new language, but one that was different enough to be quite new – and, which was widespread and influential enough to “stick” to English in general.
Most of the changes were “simplifications” – losses of overspecifications (for example, inherent reflexivity marking like *“he bathed himself” rather than standard English “he bathed”). These overspecifications tend to persist in other Germanic tongues except the truly, fully creolized Afrikaans.
Cite: McWhorter, J. 2002. What happened to English? *Diachronica *19:2, 217-272.
But that’s Old English/Old Norse. We were talking about Old English/Norman French. That’s a different matter.
And the thing about Old English and Old Norse is that they were, to a large extent, mutually intelligible. I haven’t read the article, but I have to question if two such closely related languages can be said to generate a Pidgin. It certainly makes sense that the interaction would cause the loss of a lot of inflections (one of the biggest differences between the languages), but loss of inflection is not the same as the formation of a Pidgin. I don’t think.
It’s true that there is a fine line between mere language change (which loss of inflection would be), and broader creolization. McWhorter addresses this in that article:
And, his evidence for the Danelaw being the place and time for this is mainly by process of elimination.
As for mutual intelligibility, he addresses that, too – that’s mainly why it’s a “partial creolization” not a full one. But it seems they weren’t quite as mutually intelligible as you might assume.
He’s a terrific writer, so definitely check out the article for yourself – you may or may not agree with him, but you’ll surely respect the scholarship. (And here’s another chance for me to recommend his book The Power of Babel to all Dopers with an interest in language.)