Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
It's odd for me to see how some people have knee-jerk reactions about importing loanwords, seeing it as acceptance of a cultural invasion, and how English-speakers instead see themselves as doing the mugging when they import words.
Many English-speakers are still in denial about England having been conquered by Frenchmen and will insist that William and his French speaking Christian vassals of the king of France who lived in France were totally Vikings because their great-great grandfathers lived in Scandinavia.
Quote Originally Posted by ForzaFiori View Post
How long does it take for a loanword to become "self-grown"? A lot of our words were originally on loan from France, and then we just never gave them back.
Actually ya did. Budget, tennis and a few other words were loaned back by us frenchies. Linguisticae has a video on that I would link to were I not on phone.
(Yes, the English Language is THAT neighbor). Over 1000 years, a lot of those words have changed, but some are still close enough for us to have cognates with the Romance languages. At what point did those "loans" from Norman French become a self-grown English word?
All words are loanwords if you go far enough back. Except onomatopae I guess.

On the topic of pronunciation, I think that a certain amount of attempting to pronounce a loan word correctly is OK, especially if you have the ability to pronounce the sound in question. For example, with Paella, I think you should at least know that they "ll" is pronounced closer to a "y" than to an "l" and pronounce it as such. I'd also expect the person to be able to make the correct vowel sounds (or again, at least get close) since all of the pure vowels in romance languages are used in English too. ((Though as an aside, this may be due to my hatred of people pronouncing my name as F-eye-or-eye instead of Fee-or-ee)) But you can go too far and sound pretentious: don't start putting on a Spanish accent if you don't actually have one.
Not sure what you mean by ‘‘pure’’, but there are plenty of vowel sounds in French that native English-speakers plain cannot pronounce. I once let an Irish family call me by another (etymologically close) first name than mine because that one they actually can pronounce.