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  1. - Top - End - #61
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    German sounds fun.
    It is.

    High German is a very rational language and a good vehicle to transport information, as itīs pretty independent of additional context. Low German (aka the various dialects) is very good at transporting emotions and intent, but also very context-dependent (and also nearly unrecognizable to anyone not trained in it. I have a hard time understanding anyone speaking a dialect more than 400km removed from me... That's why we learn that stuff).

    Edit: As an European, you're getting pretty used to it. You can learn "Parisian", aka High French, and be pretty hosed when trying to speak that in the Narbonne region, you could also learn "High Italian", aka the dialect of the Emiglia-Romana and be hosed when you're either in Southern Tyrolia (The speak Austria-Based German), the Veneto or Sicilia. itīs simply something you get used to. Should tell you a lot, Peelee, that I have less of a problem understanding your southern slang when you care to use it.
    Last edited by Florian; 2019-04-18 at 03:38 PM.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    It is.

    High German is a very rational language and a good vehicle to transport information, as itīs pretty independent of additional context. Low German (aka the various dialects) is very good at transporting emotions and intent, but also very context-dependent (and also nearly unrecognizable to anyone not trained in it. I have a hard time understanding anyone speaking a dialect more than 400km removed from me... That's why we learn that stuff).
    See, that's the problem. I can learn High German, there's plenty of resources. I want to learn Tyrolian German, because I want to be able to talk to my extended family (as in, read what they write on facebook, for example. Be able to understand all their casual dialect talk that google translate can barely get 40% of on a good day).
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    It is.

    High German is a very rational language and a good vehicle to transport information, as itīs pretty independent of additional context. Low German (aka the various dialects) is very good at transporting emotions and intent, but also very context-dependent (and also nearly unrecognizable to anyone not trained in it. I have a hard time understanding anyone speaking a dialect more than 400km removed from me... That's why we learn that stuff).

    Edit: As an European, you're getting pretty used to it. You can learn "Parisian", aka High French, and be pretty hosed when trying to speak that in the Narbonne region, you could also learn "High Italian", aka the dialect of the Emiglia-Romana and be hosed when you're either in Southern Tyrolia (The speak Austria-Based German), the Veneto or Sicilia. itīs simply something you get used to. Should tell you a lot, Peelee, that I have less of a problem understanding your southern slang when you care to use it.
    Nitpick: Standard Italian is actually the descendent of an artistic variant of the XIV century Florentine dialect, so it's closest to the dialects of modern Tuscany. Emilia has a fairly different dialect.
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
    Something like 'luh-zan-yuh' here. Which I'd also say just about qualifies as "how it's spelled", in that it's pretty intuitive as long as you know that it's not an English word (EDIT: unless you're feeling pedantic).

    To continue the theme of food-related language misuses, there's always pronouncing 'paella' as 'pie-ell-uh', although I'm half-expecting to be told that that's actually correct and that only clueless English people try to pronounce it as 'pie-ay-uh'.
    English attempts to sound authentic have pedigree for mangling Spanish pronunciations, but "pi-ay-uh" is probably closer to being correct than "pie-ell-uh". But the Valencian "ll" sound is alien to English and difficult for Anglopone monoglots to hear distinctively (as compardd with Valencian "y" and Castilian "ll") so actually pronouncing it "correctly" is still rare.

    To be honest, assuming that you're using the word in an English sentence, anyone complaining about your pronunciation of it with the English "ll", probably needs to get a life. If they're actually Spanish then I'll let them off, but even then. Indeed I find it difficult to say the word in an English context with the "correct" pronunciation without sounding like a pretentious oaf, and end up fudging it.. Obviously if you're going to be using the word in Spanish then it's important to get the pronunciation right.

    On the other hand, anyone pronouncing "chorizo" with a rogue "t" sound is bad and wrong.

    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    It is.

    High German is a very rational language and a good vehicle to transport information, as itīs pretty independent of additional context. Low German (aka the various dialects) is very good at transporting emotions and intent, but also very context-dependent (and also nearly unrecognizable to anyone not trained in it. I have a hard time understanding anyone speaking a dialect more than 400km removed from me... That's why we learn that stuff).

    Edit: As an European, you're getting pretty used to it. You can learn "Parisian", aka High French, and be pretty hosed when trying to speak that in the Narbonne region, you could also learn "High Italian", aka the dialect of the Emiglia-Romana and be hosed when you're either in Southern Tyrolia (The speak Austria-Based German), the Veneto or Sicilia. itīs simply something you get used to. Should tell you a lot, Peelee, that I have less of a problem understanding your southern slang when you care to use it.
    Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
    Nitpick: Standard Italian is actually the descendent of an artistic variant of the XIV century Florentine dialect, so it's closest to the dialects of modern Tuscany. Emilia has a fairly different dialect.
    Yeah... I'm not sure whether this is a terminological distinction between native languages, but High French and High Italian aren't terms one hears in English linguistics, or at least not any more. Moreover the "High" in High German refers to topography rather than social status - High(land) German as opposed to Low(land) German, with standard German being a dialect from the High German group.

    There's also a dialect/language distinction to be wary of. Most of the regional languages of Italy are generally considered languages, rather than dialects, with standard Italian being a lingua franca. The dialect continuum makes classification a challenge, but the Emilian-Romagnol language sits somewhere between the languages of southern France and Tuscan (and its descendant Standard Italian).

    In France, there was an official drive towards monolingualism much earlier than in Italy, and so in parts of the south of France (including around Narbonne) we have the curious coexistence of a native language (Occitan), and a distinct but not entirely dissimilar local dialect of French, with the standard French dialect also used for official purposes.

    Compare, for instance, Britain, where English has been spoken in Wales for so long that there is a Welsh dialect of English in addition to the Welsh language itself, which is completely different. Of course, English and Welsh are much less closely related than French and Occitan, but the principle is the same. For a closer comparison to the situation in parts of France and Italy, whether or not Scots (as opposed to Scots Gaelic) is a language or a dialect of English is an ongoing debate. For what it's worth I'm firmly in the "language" camp, which makes most Scots speakers bilingual.

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    See, that's the problem. I can learn High German, there's plenty of resources. I want to learn Tyrolian German, because I want to be able to talk to my extended family (as in, read what they write on facebook, for example. Be able to understand all their casual dialect talk that google translate can barely get 40% of on a good day).
    Alas, it has always been the case, for reasons that are understandable if regrettable, that many more resources are devoted to the foreign study of - and making the available the foreign study of - more widely spoken languages (which further entrenches their competitive advantage). If you want to learn one of the "big four" Romance languages in its standard form* then it's a piece of cake, and it's not too hard to find a Romanian teacher in any sizeable city (in the UK at least). But after that things tail off sharply. Demand for Catalan, which has between 5-10 million speakers and is more or less the sixth Romance language in terms of population and profile, was so low ten years ago that there was only one taught class in London - which means probably in England - and even that was cancelled due to undersubscription more often than not. (Things may have picked up lately).

    If you want to learn Galician, or Neapolitan, your only hope of finding even a textbook will be if you already speak the relevant national lingua franca for that region. For something like Ladin or Romansh, you'll probably struggle even then.

    I think this also contributes towards a belief among English-speakers at least that Latin Europe is much more linguistically (and consequently culturally) homogenous than it is, and the casual assumption that there are only five or six extant Romance languages, as opposed to the reality of more than twenty, is widespread.

    *though with Spanish and Portuguese it's also worth checking which standard form, given divergence in even official dialects across the Atlantic
    Last edited by Aedilred; 2019-04-18 at 06:21 PM.
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  5. - Top - End - #65
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Italian dialects are considered languages if you are a linguist, but they are called dialects by their own speakers. Children thinking that the language is called "indialetto" because they cannot tell that they are actually two words ("in dialetto") is something of a classic. Although there surely are exceptions in which the dialect is only called with the toponym or a translation of "our language".

    I don't know enough Emiliano-Romagnolo to talk about its relative linguistic proximity with Tuscan, but one should not believe that they are too similar. They are separated by the most important isogloss among Romance languages (the La Spezia-Rimini line, aka Massa-Senigallia). I know that Wikipedia follows the bad convention of dividing Eastern Romance and Western Romance languages based on whether they are east of Italy, but the good convention is to call languages north and west of this isogloss Western, and those to the south and east Eastern. So Tuscan (as Standard Italian) is in the Eastern group, while Emiliano-Romagnolo is in the Western group (like French). Emiliano-Romagnolo in general belongs to a group of Northern Italian languages known as Italo-Gallic languages, in part because of the Gallic substratum, in part because they orbited close to French influence (to make an example, the city of Bologna used to pay to have French storytellers perform in its squares).

    Not all Northern Italian dialects are Italo-Gallic - Venetian for example isn't.

    To add another similar concept, if I have to nitpick my own previous nitpick, I shouldn't have said "XIV century dialect of Florence", but "XIV century Florentine [vernacular]", because no one calls the medieval variants/forefathers of modern Italian dialects "dialects".

    In general, the most important fact to keep in mind when talking about Italian dialects is that they generally aren't derived from Italian. They are Romance languages that developed autonomously from Latin, so there can be massive divergence, and they often are not mutually intelligible. There also are local variants of Italian, generated by the influence of local substratum, and they are quickly getting more and more different.

    Yes, there is no "high Italian". It's a frequent misunderstanding among Germans, because High German is, in a way, the highest language on the prestige scale, being used by the Goverment, Press, TV, and so on. Generally, you speak of standard Italian. It's a language with an odd story, in that it diverged from Florentine in the XIV century, as Italy's most important medieval writers composed their main works. Their influence meant that other writers imitated their language, and so standard Italian existed for many centuries as a crystallised, rarely spoken, literary language. It became more widespread with the introduction of obligatory elementary instruction, but only really started displacing dialects after WWII. Right now, most dialects are clearly falling from use, Venetian being an important exception. On the other hand, Italian is now subject to change with a speed that was previously unknown.
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    @Aedilred:

    I guess that is something that got garbled during translation. We tend to mark the standardized version of a language by either adding the prefix high or school, mark regional variants by adding the region as a prefix or use an official name, should one be known. Example uses:
    - I learned British English/Oxford English in school.
    - I learned High/School French in school.
    - I never bothered to properly learn High/School Italian, but speak the venetian and sicilian italian dialects.
    Note that we tend to drop the name of the language and just use the prefix if the context is supposed to be understood. So itīs "British", "Oxford" or "Venetian".

    @Peelee:

    You're out of luck then. Unless we're talking about recognized and protected minorities, itīs rare for local dialects/sub-languages to be taught in any meaningful way outside of family and friends.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    @Peelee:

    You're out of luck then. Unless we're talking about recognized and protected minorities, itīs rare for local dialects/sub-languages to be taught in any meaningful way outside of family and friends.
    Oh, I'm more than aware. The simple solution is to just get really rich, move there for a bit, learn it from the source, then be confounded by all the High German from pretty much any other source Id hear German from.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Oh, I'm more than aware. The simple solution is to just get really rich, move there for a bit, learn it from the source, then be confounded by all the High German from pretty much any other source Id hear German from.
    Ok, it might sound a bit unintuitive, but itīs easier to start with learning High German and then going for the dialects. Most of us are capable of switching between/mix and match dialect and High German just fine, so this gives you a leg up.

    Bit off topic, but you don't need to be rich, like at all, to move here (meaning D/A/CH countries). The way our societies and internal markets are structured mean that we are generally considered to be poor in direct comparison (net income, personal level), but counter that by having an extremely low total cost of living.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    Ok, it might sound a bit unintuitive, but itīs easier to start with learning High German and then going for the dialects. Most of us are capable of switching between/mix and match dialect and High German just fine, so this gives you a leg up.

    Bit off topic, but you don't need to be rich, like at all, to move here (meaning D/A/CH countries). The way our societies and internal markets are structured mean that we are generally considered to be poor in direct comparison (net income, personal level), but counter that by having an extremely low total cost of living.
    First off, that's good to know, thanks!

    Second, I do need to be rich if I'm going to keep the house down here and also hang out over there for a while!
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Aedilred View Post
    On the other hand, anyone pronouncing "chorizo" with a rogue "t" sound is bad and wrong.
    I literally have no idea whether or not I pronounce chorizo correctly. I pronounce it as basically English but with a lisp at the end, i.e., something like 'chur-eeth-oh'. I've also heard 'chur-its-oh' and 'hur-eeth-oh'. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also attempts at pronouncing it with an Italian or French 'ch', but I haven't encountered those personally.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
    I literally have no idea whether or not I pronounce chorizo correctly. I pronounce it as basically English but with a lisp at the end, i.e., something like 'chur-eeth-oh'. I've also heard 'chur-its-oh' and 'hur-eeth-oh'. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also attempts at pronouncing it with an Italian or French 'ch', but I haven't encountered those personally.
    Martha Figueroa-Clark, a linguist in the BBC pronunciation unit for more than 10 years, says the question of how to say "chorizo" comes up a lot.

    The usual pronunciation in English is chuh-REE-zoh, although chuh-REE-soh, chorr-EE-zoh and chorr-EE-soh (-orr as in sorry) are also certified as pronunciations in British dictionaries.


    Probably the closest thing to authority we're gonna find with a quick google. The articles goes on to talk about more Spanish pronunciation, and then points out some common mispronunciations.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    With how much english-speaker discuss the pronunciation of their words, you’d think that the International Phonetic Alphabet would have a more widespread use.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Fyraltari View Post
    With how much english-speaker discuss the pronunciation of their words, you’d think that the International Phonetic Alphabet would have a more widespread use.
    I know that it's a thing, but I only found out about it in the last couple of years and I haven't taken the time to learn it.

    Anyway, 'chorizo', 'paella', and 'lasagne' are all pretty directly lifted from Spanish and Italian, and I don't really think of them as 'our' words, even though they see a lot of use in English.
    Last edited by lesser_minion; 2019-04-19 at 09:51 AM.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Fyraltari View Post
    With how much english-speaker discuss the pronunciation of their words, you’d think that the International Phonetic Alphabet would have a more widespread use.
    People changing the very way they function in their day-to-day lives requires a lot of buy-in*, when for the most part people run into other people who pronounce or mispronounce things the same way that they do. As globalism has reduced borders and cheap/free cross-border communication has made people more aware of the world outside their own neighborhoods, things have changed, but not much nor as fast as some predicted.
    *See countries slowly change to decimalized currency or the metric system, or for a more direct corollary, how people haven't switched to languages like Esperanto, despite it supposedly solving communication problems.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
    I know that it's a thing, but I only found out about it in the last couple of years and I haven't taken the time to learn it.

    Anyway, 'chorizo', 'paella', and 'lasagne' are all pretty directly lifted from Spanish and Italian, and I don't really think of them as 'our' words, even though they see a lot of use in English.
    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    But it is, vis-a-vis the English language's unchecked imperialism and laissez-faire approach to vocabulary.

    Fun fact, I used only English words in that sentence.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post
    People changing the very way they function in their day-to-day lives requires a lot of buy-in*, when for the most part people run into other people who pronounce or mispronounce things the same way that they do. As globalism has reduced borders and cheap/free cross-border communication has made people more aware of the world outside their own neighborhoods, things have changed, but not much nor as fast as some predicted.
    *See countries slowly change to decimalized currency or the metric system, or for a more direct corollary, how people haven't switched to languages like Esperanto, despite it supposedly solving communication problems.
    I meant rather than use "chuh", "REE", and such who are still really ambiguous, not as a replacement for the roman alphabet.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Whoah, déjā vu!
    Yes, they are English words, but there's a difference between a loanword and one that we grew ourselves.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by Fyraltari View Post
    I meant rather than use "chuh", "REE", and such who are still really ambiguous, not as a replacement for the roman alphabet.
    So did I, and implementing use of International Phonetic Alphabet, or the like, in one's everyday life is something that requires a lot of buy-in (for very little gain for most people in their day-to-day lives, as discussed above).

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
    Yes, they are English words, but there's a difference between a loanword and one that we grew ourselves.
    Similarly there's a difference between the money I mugged a guy for and the money I made for work, but they spend the same.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    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.
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    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.
    That's probably because the words seem to migrate towards English in both cases.
    Last edited by halfeye; 2019-04-19 at 02:55 PM.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    This will probably make you laugh, but I had never noticed how you write misshapen until now. I thought it was mishappen, as in, something that "happened" the wrong way and now looks very weird.
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
    Yes, they are English words, but there's a difference between a loanword and one that we grew ourselves.
    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. (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?

    Heck, go back prior to the Norman invasion, and the language was a cross between the languages of the Angles and the Saxons, which would again cause the same problem. I'm a little less familiar with that point in history, but I'd assume that there was probably a similar system of borrowing and slowly changing until at some point the language just "popped" into existence, and suddenly the words aren't loan words anymore?

    I personally love loan words, and once they get to the point of fairly standard use, I'd just say that they're also an English word. Especially if we do not use the word in the same way anymore, like how the dish in Italian is "lasagne," and the noodle itself "lasagna," but in English, the dish is "lasagna" and the noodles "lasagna noodles."

    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.

    On the other hand, if the word is from one of the Khoisan languages (the ones famous for using clicks in their words) I understand (and I would hope a native speaker would too) that people who don't speak those languages don't know how to make the correct sounds, or even really that close to them. And the same is true in reverse - If someone borrows an English word, I wouldn't get mad that they can't pronounce "th". Most languages don't, and even in English, we have native speakers who can't get that sound down. But I would prefer if they used a sound that was close (an f, d, or t for instance) than just picking a random sound to replace it with, perhaps because the sounds look similar when written (ala the Spanish "ll" and English "l". They look similar, but your better off going with another sound that's actually closer)
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    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. (Yes, the English Language is THAT neighbor).
    Indeed, I've got some beef with the whole "loanword vs self-grown" thing.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    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.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    I would say that the point at which a loanword stops being a "live" loanword and becomes fully adopted is when it gets adapted. Of course, it would always remain an historic loanword, but that becomes largely irrelevant to anyone except etymologists and linguists. "Self-grown" is probably the wrong word, though, as it's hard to see how something can be both self-grown and borrowed. I suspect that this is little more than a problem of terminology.

    Take the word, for instance, "surrender". This was originally a loanword from French, but has been adopted as both a noun and a verb with a full English declension, so it's now an English word.

    Compare, say, "karate", which can be used as a noun, an adjective, or, in some forms, a verb of sorts, but is always "karate" and never gets modified as one might expect from an English word; I'd therefore argue it remains a loanword.

    To take a more descriptive approach and a less systematic one, a rule of thumb would be when it stops being commonly written in italics, although that might be a little too narrow.

    I don't agree though that all words are loanwords originally. Although the jury is still out on the original development of language, the majority of (real) languages will probably retain a core group of words which can trace their roots right back to the origin of the language. They will have mutated along the way, of course (in the same way that animal species have all evolved) but there is a difference between that and importing a word from a foreign language.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
    Nitpick: Standard Italian is actually the descendent of an artistic variant of the XIV century Florentine dialect, so it's closest to the dialects of modern Tuscany. Emilia has a fairly different dialect.
    That was sloppy of me, but I was operating on the overly casual basis that most of the Romance languages are really quite similar in a number of ways and therefore although the Emilian language might not be that closely related to Italian on the family tree, to a lay reader they will look fairly similar - albeit not mutually intelligible. Having formally studied three of them, plus Latin, I find that the remainder often look very familiar. Except Romanian, which is weird.
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  27. - Top - End - #87
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by ForzaFiori View Post
    How long does it take for a loanword to become "self-grown"?
    Depends on your level of isolation and ongoing cultural exchange.

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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Quote Originally Posted by ForzaFiori View Post
    one of the Khoisan languages (the ones famous for using clicks in their words)
    Relevant!



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  29. - Top - End - #89
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    I used to be able to do that! When I was around 6 or 7, my parents hosted a South African priest named Father N[click]yobo, who taught me how to pronounce his name. That skill is now lost to the sands of time. I feel Stephen Fry there, though, it's amazing to hear it in action, so smoothly.
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    Default Re: Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

    Haven't read through the entire thread, but have we been over "X AM in the morning" and its ilk yet?

    I'm not sure if it's incorrect, exactly, but it's redundant and has become a peeve of mine. I've never given anyone else guff about it, but I still catch myself saying it from time and time and cringe.

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