One last quote from McWhorter’s article:
In other words, the fact that Old Norse and Old English WERE so closely related might have actually encouraged the children (and the parents) to stop using grammatical constructions altogether, when the languages shared the construction but not its exact form.
Fair enough then. If we’re treating the word as an English word, I would probably have used the plural linguas franca, the same way that we say governors general. But this form also looks odd, and your source says that lingua francas is the most common form.
Settle down. Some of the comments I made follow from my experience of discussing language with English speakers in general, not necessarily with you in particular. There are some strong misconceptions about how language works around here, which I’m not saying you hold yourself, but which I see regularly. Nevertheless:
This seems to suggest that you think that’d be its goal, if it could do it. Do you have evidence for this?
I’ve never claimed that my native language has any sort of amazing or unique history or characteristics, or that it says anything about the characters of its speakers. It’s just a language like any other, with a quite ordinary history; but it’s mine. And let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that when native speakers of a language make grandiose statements about that language, there isn’t an ulterior motive at play. If an anglophone says “English integrates words from every language in the world, and has the most words of any language because of this, <insert that famous line about beating other languages over the head with sticks in dark alleys>, while other languages have ‘academies’ whose main purpose is to avoid borrowing words from other languages and especially English”, it’s not a neutral statement. It’s supposed to express something about the worldliness and open-mindedness of English speakers compared to speakers of other languages.
All I can tell you is that I live my whole life (in French) without ever hearing about or even thinking about the French Academy. I hear more about it from the mouths of anglophones than from any other source. I’ve never seen these publications and lobbying efforts you’re talking about. Of course I’m not actually living in France. But if our French Dopers’ posts are to be believed, the Academy isn’t much of an issue over there either.
In fact, it cannot regulate any language. The government does occasionnally make decisions about the language to be used in official documents. It might use proposals from the Academie Francaise (which does try to come up with French words to replace recent loan words, with or without success, or with mixed result).
But to give an example, when the government decided the “feminization” of occupation names (for instance “lA procureurE” instead of “le procureur”, which was used previously even when the prosecutor was a female) it was done against the opinion of the Academie. Whatever recommandation the Academie makes has no official value.
Come come, that’s weak. I brought up an argument and claiming that your point wasn’t really a swipe at it is lame.
It doesn’t “suggest” anything of the sort. What I’m “suggesting” is that having an organization with some sort of offcial standing and backing which is allegedly attempting to prevent adoption of foreign words and suggest non-foreign equivalents makes French historically different from languages that do not, to the exact degree that this organization has any actual ability to affect language.
If you guys wish to argue that ability is “nil”, fair enough; I merely suggest that some proof be advanced, that’s all. It goes against what information is available to me, which admittedly is not the strongest. To the extent you are arguing that the Academy isn’t attempting to prevent the use of English loanwords at all, I ask why the information I have is wrong, and how do you know.
From the link I posted:
Emphasis added.
Now, the link claims “mixed success”. You are arguing that (1) it isn’t making the attempt, and (2) it has no impact at all.
This is directly contrary to the cited source, and I only assume you must have better information.
Are you claiming I have? If so, where? Or is this another one of your ‘well maybe you don’t exactly say it, but some people like you often say it, so I’m going to advance this and if you don’t like it too bad’ sort of things?
May I request that in debating with me, you respond to positions I actually hold?
Once again you are reading stuff into the debate that is not there (and once again, I have to ask - are you attributing this to me or not?)
I am saying exactly nothing about the alleged worldliness or open-mindedness of English speakers. My argument was purely a historical one, nothing more.
That’s neither here nor there.
I’ve read his stuff before and I’ve listened to quite a few interviews he’s done on NPR. I agree that he’s a terrific writer (and speaker), and with your further clarifications, I probably don’t have a bone to pick with him on this.
Further, as with all things language related, there is probably a continuum between a “true Pidgin” and a “partial Pidgin” or whatever terms you might want to use. And although it’s possible Old English and Norman French (the subject we were originally discussing) creolized, there is not any evidence for that that I’m aware of.
I agree, on both counts.
Italian plural form:
Lingue franche.
I was rebutting the common misconceptions of English speakers about the French language. Maybe you don’t yourself believe in all of them, but some of them you obviously do. Example:
As written, that’s just wrong. The reason why the French Academy was set up in 1635 was definitely not specifically to prevent borrowings from other languages. It was established to fix the rules of the French language. This can be done in a conservative manner, or it can be done in an innovative manner.
Actually, according to the horse’s mouth, the French Academy’s role is twofold: to watch upon the French language, and to accomplish acts of philanthropy. Nothing about preventing borrowings. If that’s indeed their current policy (and you’re probably right about that), it’s due to politics and doesn’t have anything to do with their fundamental “mission”.
Also note that many languages other than French have a more-or-less official regulating body, including some rather major world languages. French isn’t as unusual as you make it in this. And yes, I maintain that there is a (political/nationalist) reason why anglophones, including you, know about the French Academy and view it as relevant, while not caring much about those other language regulating bodies.
(Bolding mine)
So you’d agree that if such an organization has no real ability to affect language, then it’s like it’s not there at all, right? And you’ve already said that regulating people’s everyday language is something a regulating body cannot really do.
I also think you’re getting too hung up on the “official” part. As I’ve said, English has its own dictionaries and style guides, and it’s got its own prescriptive/conservative movement which is the way the language is usually taught in schools. It may not be “official”, but what difference does it make? And while the French Academy is “official” in the sense that it was established by a government minister, as pointed out in this thread, sometimes even the French government mandates usages that go against the Academy’s recommendation. So how official can it really be said to be?
Okay, so can we see what the information available to you shows? Do you have any evidence that the French Academy is in fact powerful? Because we’ve presented evidence here showing the opposite.
I didn’t claim that the French Academy doesn’t disfavour English loanwords. (By the way, is it loanwords in general or specifically English loanwords we’re talking about here?) All evidence shows that it does. What I’ve said is this:
[ul]
[li]it has no power to do anything else than usage suggestions, which isn’t more than any lexicographer or language blogger;[/li][li]regardless of what power language academies have, their purview is formal, written language. They probably don’t care about how you talk to your friends over a beer.[/li][/ul]
I’m not arguing (1), but I’m definitely arguing (2). If a word like “courriel” enters the French language, can you really say it was because of the French Academy? It’s a word I use every day (overwhelmingly so in formal speech, about 50-50 with “e-mail” in informal speech, and I use the long form “courrier électronique” as well), but I’ve no evidence that the Academy had anything to do about this, and neither do you. They certainly didn’t invent it. It’s purely usage fighting it out, the old-fashioned way.
Well, I have my experience of speaking French every day, as I’ve said above.
Yes, I sort of suspect that you hold these positions, whether you admit them to yourself or not. It would come with being an urban, liberal-minded English Canadian (especially Ontarian, and especially Torontonian) who’s very proud of the alleged multiculturalism of English Canada. Which is something that you definitely are. And I’ve debated with you in the past, so I think I have somewhat of a handle on your political positions.
Of course, I have no actual evidence of it, and it’s not the purpose of this thread anyway. So I’ll drop it and bring back the discussion on the actual role of language regulating bodies in encouraging or preventing the adoption of loanwords into usage, rather than on your motivations for caring about the French Academy.
How so? How is my experience of being a native French speaker and speaking it every day not relevant? If the French Academy did have some sort of power, I can tell you I’d know about it.
The Swahili vocabulary is about 40% Bantu, 40% Arabic, and the rest comprised of English, German, Persian, and Turkish. The grammer remains essentially Bantu.
To my knowledge there is not and never was a pure language.
I’ve actually browsed many a website in Japanese, set my computer to Japanese, set Facebook to Japanese etc… every goddamn thing is in Katakana. Oh sure, there’s Kanji and Hiragana sometimes, but it’s rarely there. At this rate, by 2025 Japanese is going to be “funny sounding SOV English.”
There are three ways in which, in theory, the Académie can influence language. One is by pointing to examples of exemplary usage by awarding literary prizes prizes.
The second way, which was the reason it was originally created, is by compiling a dictionary.
The third, is by voicing opinions, either informally or by participating in commissions established for the purpose of coming up with new words.
Obviously, the impact of the first activity is minimal. As far as the second goes, its impact has been, in practical matters, nil. The first edition of the dictionary notoriously took almost 60 years to write, during which time private editors published their own works to fill the void. When it finally came out, it was already dated. Not much has changed since the 17th century. The dictionary is still written at a glacial pace; the last edition dates from 1935! The 9th edition, started in 1992, is still only written up to the letter P. It is a spectacularly conservative work, and even if it weren’t for the fact that it is and has always been, at best, a snapshot of the language as it was several decades in the past, the hurdle for entry is so difficult as to render it nearly useless. The Académie only very grudgingly allowed the word créativité, despite Google returning over 19 million hits in French for the word.
So, the only channel left for the Académie to exert influence is by lobbying language commissions. The track record of the commissions themselves is mixed. Sometimes they coin a word and it gains traction. Other times, it falls flat. Often, so few people are in a position to use the new words that no one really cares. Notice that even if in this context the Académie has some influence, it is only indirect, and it affects people who can at best only makes suggestions.
It’s true that there is a very vocal group of people who wish Francophones wouldn’t use so many damn foreign (English) words. However, wouldn’t you say that the very existence of these complaints is a sign that overall the language is very welcoming of those words? If it wasn’t, why would they complain?
I would like to add to all of this that despite being an extremely, almost laughingly so, conservative organisation, the Académie is not opposed to foreign loan words. From the horse’s mouth: list of foreign words added to the new 9th edition of the dictionary. At the bottom of the page, they have a list of words they wish people wouldn’t use. No one cares. Some of these words died on their own, or aren’t used much, and the rest (job, parking, …) are in wide usage.
Is that article on-line? I found What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic Hypothesis.
Norse and Old English may not have been mutually intelligible but, closer in time to common origin than today’s Slavic or Romance languages, there would have been enough similarities to ease learning, so bilingual speakers would have been common.
Nitpick: I don’t think the term “pidgin” or even “creole” would apply in such a context. In fact, if I understand Thomason-Kaufmann correctly, the reason for grammatical simplifications by Danes converting to English would be the opposite reason from a pidgin or creole: Pidgin/creoles lose target language features due to unfamiliarity. Danes and Norse would have failed to adopt Old English features because they were so similar to Norse features as to make learning/shifting unnecessary. (I may have stated this poorly.)
If a loanword is anything that doesn’t come from the “ultimate ancestor language” (I note the singular, there), then what does that mean for English? OK, English is a predominantly Germanic language, but there’s still a huge French influence, too. Must we, by that definition, consider everything in English of French origin a loan?
Maybe you didn’t read the first page of the thread, but this was discussed extensively there.
And it’s not just French. Many words from Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian (to name a few other languages).
No. It’s only a loan if you intend to give it back.
For example Fr. l’étiquette -> En. ticket -> Fr. le ticket
I imagine the real answer is not going to be a major language, but rather a minor local language in a colonized area. I think there are a lot of cases where these languages started borrowing for all new vocabulary, rather than coining new words.
For example, in Adamoua Fulfulde you can talk about farming all day in pure Fulfulde words that are pretty much the same as the Pullar spoken across West Africa. But once you start talking about things that came after around 1800 (keys, schools, buckets, bras, soccer terms, organized religion), it’s all a mishmash of Hasusa, Arabic, German, English and French words mirroring different waves of colonial influence. I doubt it actually is Fulfulde, but I bet the answer is somewhere in Africa or South America.
I wouldn’t even say postulated, it’s hotly debated. The only real solid evidence we have for an Ur-language is a computer reduction run on the words in a large corpus of languages that found all the languages were related. Unfortunately, it was overly permissive, finding oodles of “relationships” linguists already know to be false. The fact that with these parameters it “confirmed” the hypothesis of an Ur-language was predictable, and not very convincing given the false positives. Perhaps the best evidence we have is the relative similarities that have been shown between all documented languages (with regards to the way certain classes of words bind with one another regardless of the language’s constituent order or other grammatical or pragmatic rules). But that evidence could be attributed to human psychology/brain physiology as easily as it could be linked to a “common ancestor” theory of linguistics.
Of course, the hypothesis that language developed independently in multiple regions is similarly untested and unverifiable, so it really comes down to whether you, personally, think common sense says that language is so complicated and functionally equivalent that it came about once, or that it’s ludicrous to think that somehow it either developed before widespread human diaspora or else managed to spread to every human tribe after being developed in one location.