# Purging languages of foreign words



## panjabigator

Does your language have a history of removing foreign words from its lexicon?  In Hindi, there are movements trying to remove any foreign word or "Urdu" word from the language, even though they are much more common and accepted in colloquial speech.  In Tamil Nadu (a southern state), they have sucessfully Tamil-ize the language by removing words that have Sanskritic origin.  

Have there ever been attempts to Tagalogi-icise Tagalog and remove the 6000 or so Spanish words?


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## jimreilly

In Norway there was a Nationalist movement to return the language to "purer" Norwegian roots after many years of Danish influence, Danish political control, and Danish-influenced education. This movement even resulted in the creation of a dialect called Nynorsk (new Norwegian), a dialect closer to the surviving "purer" Norwegian dialects of the time.

So today in Norwegian there persist two "official" dialects (among many others), one is Bokmal, the descendant of the more-Danish influenced language, and the other is Nynorsk. At times the whole issue has been a very hot political potato.

Bokmal is spoken by more people than Nynorsk.


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## Whodunit

I've been told that in the 17th century, there was something like reform to Germanize every foreign word (mostly from French or English). I can remember the word "Augenblick" (wink), that people used to say for "Moment". This is one of a few words which have survived until today.

"Einen Moment bitte" (one moment please) can often be replaced by "Einen Augenblick bitte".

But there were also funny attempts at Germanizations, like "Leibesübungen" (physical exercises) for "Sport", which sound so funny to many people that they are not used anymore.


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## sound shift

It's not my language, so perhaps I should not say this, but in its early years the Turkish Republic set up the Turkish Language Association and instructed it to replace the numerous Arabic and Farsi terms in Turkish with Turkic equivalents. At the same time Turkish acquired many loan-words from French.


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## Chriszinho85

panjabigator said:
			
		

> Have there ever been attempts to Tagalogi-icise Tagalog and remove the 6000 or so Spanish words?


 I read that there has been an attempt (a small one) to coin new Tagalog words but with no success. The interesting thing is that for some Spanish words, there is a Tagalog counterpart. For some reason, the Spanish words are used more. For example, to say “I don’t understand,” you would say “hindi ko maintindihan.” If you look closely, you can see that the root word of "maintindihan" is “intindi” which comes from Spanish “entiende.” You would rarely hear anyone say “Hindi ko maunawaan.” Also, in Tagalog people say “bintana” (from “ventana”) instead of “durungawan” and “pero” instead of “nguni’t” or “subali’t.” Those are just a few examples. The Tagalog words have become in a way “archaic” and reserved for use in literature.

So you’re saying that there are movements to remove any foreign word or Urdu word because there is already an existing, but less used Hindi word? Because in Tagalog, most Spanish words were borrowed because there was no way to express them otherwise. I think it would be hard to come up with new Tagalog terms for the months or days of the week, for example. Another interesting thing is that there are about 170 different local languages spoken in the Philippines. To try to unify the different groups, there was an attempt to incorporate terms from all the languages to make one “Filipino” language. The constitution states: “The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.” So basically, different words from the different languages were supposed to be incorporated into Tagalog. However, this didn’t work, and I don’t think anything has been done to make this happen…lol.


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## Etcetera

There are sometimes laments about Russian being too foreign-oriented, but I can't remember any case when there could be a law or just demand to stop using some foreign word. 
In fact, I don't think it's a good idea to try to manage a language in such a way. A language always knows better what is good for it!


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## panjabigator

Chriszinho85 said:
			
		

> I read that there has been an attempt (a small one) to coin new Tagalog words but with no success. The interesting thing is that for some Spanish words, there is a Tagalog counterpart. For some reason, the Spanish words are used more. For example, to say “I don’t understand,” you would say “hindi ko maintindihan.” If you look closely, you can see that the root word of "maintindihan" is “intindi” which comes from Spanish “entiende.” You would rarely hear anyone say “Hindi ko maunawaan.” Also, in Tagalog people say “bintana” (from “ventana”) instead of “durungawan” and “pero” instead of “nguni’t” or “subali’t.” Those are just a few examples. The Tagalog words have become in a way “archaic” and reserved for use in literature.
> 
> So you’re saying that there are movements to remove any foreign word or Urdu word because there is already an existing, but less used Hindi word? Because in Tagalog, most Spanish words were borrowed because there was no way to express them otherwise. I think it would be hard to come up with new Tagalog terms for the months or days of the week, for example. Another interesting thing is that there are about 170 different local languages spoken in the Philippines. To try to unify the different groups, there was an attempt to incorporate terms from all the languages to make one “Filipino” language. The constitution states: “The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.” So basically, different words from the different languages were supposed to be incorporated into Tagalog. However, this didn’t work, and I don’t think anything has been done to make this happen…lol.



Very interesting.  Well, the Urdu words that Hindi shares (and they're a lot!) are all loan words from Persian and Arabic.  For most, I'd say that Hindi has a Sanskritic equivalent that is is used in literature, news etc.  But the other words are more colloquial.  There are plenty of words for love in Urdu that Hindi just couldn't create though.


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## misdirection

Chriszinho85 said:
			
		

> The constitution states: “The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.” So basically, different words from the different languages were supposed to be incorporated into Tagalog. However, this didn’t work, and I don’t think anything has been done to make this happen…lol.




Actually, it did work and it is currently working and noone needs to do anything to make it happen. Let me quote a Filipino essay I read:

   Let me point out we shouldn’t get an inferiority complex because of this penchant for   borrowing words. Languages are like living organisms, their vigor coming from interactions   with other languages. English itself is a hybrid language filled with loan-words from all   over the world, reflecting how original English speakers explored and colonized the world.   

 and:

   People sometimes complain that we are captives of a colonial mentality, relying too much   on English. But another perspective, often expressed with alarm by Americans and English,   is that we’re colonizing the Queen’s English, gobbling up words and   regurgitating them in new forms. 

  Just look at how English nouns have been transformed into Tagalog verbs, complete with   conjugation (nag-text, mag-che-chess, makikipag-Internet). 

  Languages evolve because of cultural contacts, people meeting as tourists, traders,   teachers, whatever. It’s not just a matter of the Tagalog language borrowing words   from the world. You just wait and see. 

    Courtesy of the many Filipina yayas caring for the children of the world, someday we just   might hear a British prime minister ordering Parliament to come to   "votation"--but only after very properly offering a 10-minute break for people   to go to the ‘‘See Ah.’’
 
You can read the whole essay at this url:
  www*seasite*niu*edu/Tagalog/essays_on_philippine_languages*htm

It is very enlightening and informative. Just replace the * with a .​


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## french4beth

In Quebec, there's a very strong movement to avoid using English words - some terms are more French than the terms used in France!  For example, _fin de semaine_ is preferred in QC, but you always use 'weekend' in France (I've been corrected several times by French for using '_fin de semaine_').  There are many government commissions that concern themselves strictly with protecting the French language in Canada - after all, they're completely surrounded by English.  This applies to formal correspondence, but a lot of _'franglais'_ or '_frenglish_' words are used daily in conversation throughout Canada.


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## panjabigator

A lot of Hindi learners will use the actual Hindi word for things, however it sounds very artificial at times so they are usually corrected and told to use the english instead.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

A concept that comes up in linguistic circles is what is referred to as a "calque" - adopting a word from another language by translating the word roots into roots in the receiving language.  In European contexts, this has largely meant taking words from Latin and translating the roots into the other language; this happened a lot with German and Russian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Actually, the Japanese did something similar in the late nineteenth century, translating the Latin word roots into separate Kanji and stringing them together to create new words.

Not all languages can create calques successfully since they have different ways of forming words from word roots.  In a lot of situations there is a political agenda involved too.  It seems that the only major language in the world that has no problem with acquiring foreign words wholesale is English!


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## Outsider

Perhaps because it's the language the least subjected to borrowing foreign words wholesale today...


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## lady_skywalker

I suspect that if English were to purge all of the loanwords, there wouldn't be much left of the language as the language has changed so much over the space of 1000 years and has adopted words from pretty much every corner of the globe.


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## jimreilly

I love the English (American) language, with all its borrowings, slang, and rich vocabulary. I would hate to see any of the "foreign" words purged.

But if I lived in a country (or was a member of a minority) that felt its language was threatened, for political reasons or because the number of speakers was small, I might not be so open to linguistic invasions. 

I wonder how succesful purging can be when it's done far after the fact?  One would have to be quite alert and jump in with a word for some technical invention before the English or Chinese or whatever word got too established. 

Are my French friends better off for using "ordinateur" for computer when my Italian friends all seem to use "computer"? Maybe!


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## Chriszinho85

panjabigator said:
			
		

> Well, the Urdu words that Hindi shares (and they're a lot!) are all loan words from Persian and Arabic. For most, I'd say that Hindi has a Sanskritic equivalent that is is used in literature, news etc. But the other words are more colloquial. There are plenty of words for love in Urdu that Hindi just couldn't create though.


Ah..I see. That's interesting.





			
				panjabigator said:
			
		

> ...it sounds very artificial at times so they are usually corrected and told to use the english instead.


Another interesting thing...The same thing is happening in Tagalog.





			
				misdirection said:
			
		

> Actually, it did work and it is currently working and noone needs to do anything to make it happen.


 I guess I wasn’t clear.  Sorry about that.  I was referring to the part that talks about “enriching and developing the language based on existing Philippine languages.” To my knowledge, there has not been a large influx of words from other Philippine languages incorporated into Tagalog vocabulary since that statement was written in the constitution. Or am I wrong? As I understood it, the government’s intention was to introduce new words through education or some other form in order to create a sort of single, unifying Filipino language. This wasn’t done and that is why I said it didn’t work and that nothing has been done to make this happen. Thanks for the link also. Actually, the first essay is the exact essay I read before I posted my message…lol According to one of the essays, it says there isn’t much borrowing from other Philippine languages.


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## jmx

In Spain, you often hear or read people in the media who lecture about how stupid it is to use an English word instead of an already existing Spanish one. They do not seem to have so much hatred for loanwords from languages other than English.


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## big-melon

It's said that major words in English now are transform from other languages such as French, Latin, Greak, etc..



			
				lady_skywalker said:
			
		

> I suspect that if English were to purge all of the loanwords, there wouldn't be much left of the language as the language has changed so much over the space of 1000 years and has adopted words from pretty much every corner of the globe.


I think today every language has import the Loanword to enrich itself.


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## Why Not?

big-melon said:
			
		

> I think today every language has import the Loanword to enrich itself.


What, when it comes to adopting (and sometimes just simplifying!) grammar and syntax?

That's what seems to be happening with regard to the German language at the moment: traditional grammatical structures seem to get lost, structures that were still quite common in the 1980s after all, structures that, apart from being typical of the language as such, also represent(ed) a significant share of the language's "expressive power" as to linguistic differentiation and the complexity of contents that can be coded within one sentence.

In how far will the worldviews of German native speakers will become less structured or less complex, as well? Will they at all?

How about grammar and structural "degeneration" of other languages? What do you think?


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## mansio

It is not so evident to replace a foreign word. Let's get back to the example of "fin de semaine" and "weekend".
To me those two words do not express the same thing. 
Fin de semaine is just the end of the week as one would say the beginning of the week.
Weekend refers to the two days off from work (beginning sometimes Friday afternoon) in opposition to the working days.


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## Etcetera

^The same think occurs in modern Russian.
We have the word *выходные *(vykhodnye) for Saturday and Sunday, as well as for holidays, days off etc. But *уик-энд* (a transliteration of the English week end) has become very popular in recent years. So far these two words are pretty interchangeable in daily speech. But God knows what will be there in five years.


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## Encolpius

Both *Czechs *and *Hungarians *tried to get rid of the Austrian [German] influence in *the 19th century*, so they both made a big language reform but German words are still popular in informal language.


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## apmoy70

^Likewise we did that too, in late 18th c. in order to get rid of Ottoman Turkish and Romance (Venetian and Genoese mostly) influence; the language this purging produced, was the artificial Katharevousa i.e. the "Pure" language. We have had for more than 100 years a phenomenon called Diglossia in linguistics i.e. the coexistence of the "Pure" artificial variety for formal purposes, and the "Demotic" (of the Demos, the people) variety for daily purposes. Diglossia ended in 1976 when by law the language of the people (Demotic, or Neo-hellenic Koine in Gr) became the standard language of the Greek State.


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## Encolpius

Interesting comment, Apmoy, so you use a lot of Turkish and Romance words in modern everyday Greek?


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## apmoy70

Romance terminology is mostly found in navy jargon (for 200 years, large parts of the country were under Venetian and Genoese domination, and both of these states were Mediaeval maritime superpowers).
Turkish is found mostly in slang, food nomenclature, and names of professions/professionals


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## Gavril

Icelandic is like Tamil in that there is a systematic and ongoing practice of replacing foreign words with neologisms from native  elements.

For example, 

diode = Ic_e_landic_ tvistur_
transistor = _smári_
telomere = _oddhulsa_
etc.

I  think the fact that Icelandic has so few speakers (less than 350  thousand right now) makes it easier to foster this kind of purism than  it might otherwise be.

(The OP asked about "your language", and  Icelandic is not my native language, but I thought that this was an  interesting enough example to share nonetheless.)


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## kaverison

I feel, why a language tries to get rid of foreign words depends on the social and cultural factors. English has a legacy of ruling the world, so the foreign words they carry equates to the conquests they made around the world. They are their trophies. British Raj brought a lot of words to English and that crept into modern English vocabulary in America. Once they got on that path, it was not difficult to acquire more such in the modern world and thus English is well ahead in the game of coming up with new words for new concepts.

On the contrary, if the culture was subjugated or culturally superceded in some ways, when they recover, they want to wipe out the traces of the foreign languages, to get back to the glorious days before the conquest. At least, this is what happened with Tamil. But, in my opinion, this was amplified by a myth pushed by European colonists, the Aryan invasion theory. While, I don't want to go into the politics of it, the linguistics impact is interesting.

Instead of considering the languages of India to be related, this created a clear divide between the Aryan or the Indo-European languages based around Sanskrit and the Dravidian group of languages of which Tamil is an important member. Looking at the geography of the land 2000+ years ago, the landscape and the cultures were very different between north and the south of India. Yet, there were many exchanges happening between north and south in culture, religion, language. A lot of references to Vedic literature occurs in old Tamil literature and you hear about Tamil kingdoms in the mythologies in Sanskrit and as early as in Asokan history. So, there were exchanges. Successive import of religious ideas from the north (Vedic, Buddhist, Jain etc) brought a lot of new concepts and words to Tamil and this is acknowledged in old Grammar book of Tamil, called Tholkaapiyam. As a language, Tamil is agglutinative and Sanskrit is not. (is it a fusion language? I am weak on this subject). So, they are distinct entities.

Coming back to my original argument, yes, there are borrowed words in Tamil, Tholkaapiyam has a word for these words - vada sol - words from Sanskrit (or probably any northern languages like praakrit or paali included) and thisai sol - for any other foreign words; thisai - direction. The fact that they had a separate classification for northern words, tells me that it held a special places. The only rule for including such words in Tamil was to transform sounds to fit the local phonology - this is not unlike what we do in modern times as in Japanese or Korean. Almost all Japanese words related to Baseball seems to be "nipponized" words (Again, I don't know the name for this linguistic transformation). Several ancient Tamil scholars were equally well versed in Tamil and Sanskrit. (otherwise, there wouldn't be classic literature in Tamil like Kamba raamaayanam. Though the story is based on Vaalmiki's Sanskrit epic, kamban took liberty in Tamilizing it!).

In this tradition, we also have words from Arabic and Persian and Urdu(through trade), Portuguese, English etc through colonization. The cleansing Tamil of foreign words is relatively a recent phenomenon. Centuries of royal patronage to Sanskrit (not unlike Latin in England) caused resentments. Being educated meant you had to know Sanskrit and conversely, if you didn't know it, you are deemed lower in status (castes came into play as well, but I won't go there). This, kind of pushed Tamil to a second language status in Tamil land, not very much unlike English trying to dethrone Tamil in modern times! At some point, every word in Tamil was to be replaced with a Sanskrit word to show "sophistication".

Currently, we greet each other with namaskaaram instead of the vaNakkam in the local tongue. We feel _santhoosham _instead of being _makizhchi_. We drink theertham instead of thanniir and so on. Not only that, apparently Tamil words were given new sounds to make them sound like Sanskrit - not for consumption in the north, which would make sense, but to "elevate" the words in Tamil (Even today, I hear comments about original Tamil sounds as "crude" vs these "elevated" Sanskritized sounds). _aatchi _(government - root _aaL _- rule) became _aakshi_, _kaatchi _(scene - root _kaaN _- see, _kaN _- eye) became kaakshi and _arasan _(king - arasu - government) became _raaja _and _amaichar _(minister) became _manthiri_. Once the royal patronage happened, everyday words got replaced too. eNNam (thought) became sinthanai, uLLam (mind) became manam. But, poor villagers/workers didn't understand or couldn't pronounce these words and thus, deemed uneducated. The several more social phenomenon happened around this, but again that's off the topic.

So, purging of Sanskrit words in Tamil is not really (only) finding/making new words for Sanskrit words in Tamil, it is more about reviving the  old Tamil words to replace the redundant foreign words that crept into Tamil unnecessarily. This also legitimatizes the language of the common Tamil people, who never accepted/could not accommodate Sanskrit words thus, they can finally understand their own language fully again!!

I agree, the purists go overboard. When a common man is so used to bassu (bus), we try to push peerunthu to mean the same thing, latter never succeeded! Often times, they lose focus and go to the other extreme, but that's the reason for the Tamil language cleansing. I feel, there has to be a balance to move the language forward, but instead, we get stuck in as vicious cycle of "discovering" an appropriate replacement word, while, during the same time, English and other languages moved lightning years forward. That again is a topic for another day!

While I explain this, I see parallels in Norwegian movement or the Turkish movement.


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## Penyafort

In Medieval Catalan, poets took a long time (three centuries) to distance themselves from the Old Occitan literary koine. Prose works were written in Old Catalan, but poetry was regarded as something to write following Occitan rules, which even if close, were already quite different from the Catalan spoken by the 13th century.

In Modern Catalan, the main influence came from Spanish, making Catalan look somewhat more 'Iberian-like' than it originally was. The influence on the vocabulary and the syntax became particularly strong from the 17th century on. In the case of Northern Catalan, it was French.

In contemporary Catalan, the main influence continues to come from Spanish, to the point that many spoken constructions, idioms and much of the slang are often but a 'Catalanization' of some Spanish words. These are usually not admitted in the official standard dictionaries, though, and the reverse phenomenon is also true,  some words taken from Spanish a century ago having gradually turned into genuine Catalan equivalents in the standard speech. Recently, English has also appeared as a new strong influence, specially for things related to very new concepts. There is *an official center for terminology*, though, committed to ensure that those terms for new concepts coming from other languages adopt a genuine Catalan form to be promoted in the media and incorporated naturally into the language.


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## desi4life

panjabigator said:


> Very interesting.  Well, the Urdu words that Hindi shares (and they're a lot!) are all loan words from Persian and Arabic.  For most, I'd say that Hindi has a Sanskritic equivalent that is is used in literature, news etc.  But the other words are more colloquial.  There are plenty of words for love in Urdu that Hindi just couldn't create though.



I'm not sure what you mean.  There are two principal words for love of Urdu origin that I can think of: muhabbat and ishq. And there are three principal words for love of Hindi origin that I can think of: prem, pyaar, and preet(i).  There are probably a few other words for both languages.  None of these words are created either.  They have been in use for a long time.  It would be hard to create a word that expresses an emotion such as love.


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