# All Slavic languages: Purism



## DenisBiH

Hi everybody! 

Given how the other thread about purism is now definitely Croatian / BCMS only, I would like to see what kinds of attitudes toward language purism other Slavic languages have, or have had in the past. Feel free to share the modern situation as well as important stages in historical development where purism is concerned. You don't have to restrict yourselves to standard languages, information regarding dialects is also welcome.


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## Sobakus

/rant on My feeling is Russian really needs some of that Croatian purism. While the words remaining from the old Franco- and Germanophilias might need some cleaning, the real pestilence is today's business sphere and what English is doing to it. I mean, we have at least 3 words for manager in Russian: управляющий, заведующий, руководитель. Yet here comes менеджер, and before you know it the job advertisements make a good use of it. The result is that now we have a "менеджер по клинингу"! Not only simple salesmen, but even cleaners are also managers in modern Russia. Whaddya know! Every second word in an article about economics is Latin(via English). I mean, these terms are made up by the Russian businessmen, who know more about criminal life than languages, that was especially true in the nineties. Surely they didn't bother themselves with even analysing the Latin word to pick some Slavic equivalent, the same with journalists and officials. And nobody's doing anything about it, because there's still that feeling of total postcommunistic "freedom" where you can do whatever you want and speak in any way you desire and not give a rotten egg about anything or anybody. /rant off


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## Orlin

O situaciji s bugarskim vidite postove br. 11 i 13 ovde: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1985999.


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## DenisBiH

Sobakus said:


> Yet here comes менеджер, and before you know it the job advertisements make a good use of it. The result is that now we have a "менеджер по клинингу"! Not only simple salesmen, but even cleaners are also managers in modern Russia.




Ah, those pretty English PC terms.

Person A: _I went to apply for the position of cleaning manager, yet they told me only the position of nocturnal safety manager was still open. and I accepted._
Person B: _That's great! I got a job last week as a caffeine procurement manager in a Fortune 500 company!_

Sorry for the off-topic.


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## Awwal12

> rant on My feeling is Russian really needs some of that Croatian purism. While the words remaining from the old Franco- and Germanophilias might need some cleaning, the real pestilence is today's business sphere and what English is doing to it.


Russian is still very moderate in loaning words in average. We're very far from the situation in Japanese, where nowadays they use loanwords of English origin even for "rice" (God forbid). That hardly can be called normal, but on the other hand, I'm not a great fan of such a purism that takes place in Icelandic. There should be some balance, and, I believe, if a word sounds normally, doesn't create homophones and doesn't fully duplicate some already existing word, it can be loaned.


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## sokol

Still, Russian is probably the one Slavic language which is most open to loans; I don't know about Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian, but Czech to my knowledge is definitely stricter, Slovak even more so I think, and Slovene certainly so.
From Croatian to Bosnian to Serbian it seems that purism is decreasing (strongest in Croatian, intermediate in Bosnian, weakest in Serbian), but still I think that Serbian is by no means as open to loans as is Russian. The attitude taken in newly emerging Montenegrin remains to be seen but it seems it'll adopt rather a puristic approach.

Anyway, it seems - hugely over-generalising here of course - that "bigger" and "stronger" Slavic languages are significantly less puristic than "smaller" ones.
(Well - Ukrainian, actually one of the "bigger" languages, might possibly be an exception: I've got no idea but I could imagine that Ukrainian linguists _*could*_ have a more puristic attitude, in order to counter Russian influence. It would be interesting if somebody could comment on that - I can only offer my guesses here. )


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## Awwal12

As for Ukrainian, the problem is that a strong literary tradition is comparatively young over there. There were some cases when new words basing on Ukrainian morphology and vocabulary were created ("летовище" instead of Russian and also Ukrainian "аэродром" which comes from Greek "αέρος" and "δρόμος", comp. Eng. "aerodrome"), and this tendency is somehow kept up till nowadays (the use of nouns like "завідувач" and "командувач" becomes popular, instead of "завiдуючий" and "командуючий" which are calques from Russian "заведующий" and "командующий" - the roots and/or general shape are still loaned, though), but it seems the main tendency now is replacing of Russian loanwords (dominating in Eastern dialects) by Polish loanwords (dominating in Western dialects) in the literary language. And that's only about words related to modern realities; as for more basic vocabulary formed several centuries ago, it's full of Polish loanwords and other loanwords that came through Polish (German, Latin etc.), plus some amount of Turkic loanwords describing phenomena of traditional life and old art of war.


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## Sobakus

Funny thing is, when I read Polish, Czech, Serbian or even Ukrainian for example, I sometimes smile at the unnecessery, from my point of view, German loans. This is especially the case with Polish. I can't say for sure but I don't think I come across words in these languages(maybe except for Ukrainian) that don't have a Slavic equivalent in Russian as often as the other way round.


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## Orlin

It seems that Bulgarian is also an "exception": a "small" language but quite open to loans (not extremely though). Moreover, the loans usually follow the social and the political situation and after important social changes many loans that become "out of fashion" are either deliberately suppressed (e. g. Ottoman Turkish loans after 1878) or simply naturally lose popularity (e. g. Russisms after 1990). I described all this more detailedly in the thread to which I posted a link.

P. S.: I think that this "openness" of Bulgarian is due to important political and social factors:
1. Bulgarians had no state in the 15th-19th cc., when modern national states and standard languages were formed, and in the Ottoman Empire there was no way to "protect", support or standardize Bulgarian language. There were strong processes of denationalization among Bulgarians and the "prestigious" languages of the secular Turkish and the religious Greek authorities had very strong impact on Bulgarian and even were about to prevail.
2. During the national revival and soon after the independence (19th and early 20th century) there was a strong and urgent need to develop the language and adapt it to the processes that took place in Western Europe earlier and from which Bulgarian was isolated. The easiest possible way to achieve this was to use numerous loans. Moreover, Bulgarians were unable to get good education in their homeland and had to study abroad, so the languages of the countries where the most progressive Bulgarians studied highly determined the way in which "modern" Bulgarian vocabulary developed.
3. It seems that Bulgarians are very open to foreign political and cultural influences (in my opinion this is highly probable to be true for the period after 1878 - we seem to have always thought that we've fallen much behind due to Ottoman rule and the only way to achieve the necessary progress is to "copy" foreign experience). This has a strong influence on the language too: every important period in history has its "specific" vocabulary loans. As far as I know, we've deliberately "cleaned" only loans from the Ottoman period, the "characterictic" loans from the next periods weren't removed, only lost popularity and gave way to the next tendencies.


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## trance0

Slovene has a lot words of foreign origin as well. I wouldn`t call Slovene overly puristic, though I can imagine it is more puristic than Russian or Serbian. At least in colloquial language we have many words of especially English origin and also many words that come from German and Croatian.


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## DenisBiH

As for Orientalisms, i.e. Ottoman Turkish loanwords, modern Bosnian sometimes practices a kind of 'reverse purism' whereby Orientalisms, both those still in everyday use and those slightly (or not so slightly) archaic, are afforded a higher status by some speakers and authors as 'authentically Bosnian' and a reflection of Bosnian culture, tradition and history. During the last war and immediately after it the trend was much stronger than today, but it still exists today among some speakers.

However, I'm not sure the 'deturkification' movement was ever that strong in Serbo-Croatian as it had been in Bulgarian (judging by Orlin's description of it). For example, most of those Orientalisms I discussed above can be readily found in the HJP Croatian dictionary we often use here, and I would be surprised if the situation was very different in Serbian dictionaries. True, many of those may not be used very much (or at all) by most Serbian (and especially Croatian) speakers, but they're there. 

To give an example from Yugoslav times: Orientalisms enjoyed prominent status in the 'New Primitivism' movement in the decade prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Below is an interesting quote, but someone a bit older than me may decide to comment (I was too young then, and can mostly speak from the perspective of _Top lista nadrealista_ and _Zabranjeno Pušenje_ songs)




> The discourse of New Primitivism was primarily humorous, based on the  spirit of Bosnian ordinary people from cultural underground. They  introduced the jargon, rich in Turcisms, of Sarajevo _mahalas_ (suburban neighborhoods) into the official musical and TV scene.


Another cultural phenomenon that is Bosnian in origin but popular on a wider, (ex-)Yugoslav scale, are of course the sevdalinke. I assume they would also have played an important role for the status of Orientalisms in Yugoslav times.


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## iobyo

trance0 said:


> Slovene has a lot words of foreign origin as well. I wouldn`t call Slovene overly puristic, though I can imagine it is more puristic than Russian or Serbian. At least in colloquial language we have many words of especially English origin and also many words that come from German and Croatian.



What is "overly puristic" or "not puristic enough" is very subjective. Slovene, as far as I can tell, has some of the strongest (if not the strongest) puristic trends at the at the moment.


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## sokol

trance0 said:


> Slovene has a lot words of foreign origin as well. I wouldn`t call Slovene overly puristic, though I can imagine it is more puristic than Russian or Serbian. At least in colloquial language we have many words of especially English origin and also many words that come from German and Croatian.


Yes indeed, in colloquial speech a great many loans are used.

But it is different when you read quality newspapers (Delo and such) or when you watch TV (RTV Slovenija; but even private stations I think, I haven't watched Slovene TV for some time, it isn't available to me here in Vienna without having to pay for it - in Graz I could watch it for free).

I've learned first Slovene and then Croatian, and my impression was (in the late 1990ies) that Slovene is more puristic than Croatian, concerning formal standard language. This might have changed though - comparatively, as Croatian purism might have significantly increased since then.


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## el_tigre

A listo loan words in Croatian from non-Slavic languages:
http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turcizmi
http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talijanizam
http://hr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dodatak:Talijanizmi
http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanizam
http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarizam


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## TriglavNationalPark

trance0 said:


> Slovene has a lot words of foreign origin as well. I wouldn`t call Slovene overly puristic, though I can imagine it is more puristic than Russian or Serbian. At least in colloquial language we have many words of especially English origin and also many words that come from German and Croatian.


 
Much of the purism in standard Slovenian was in in fact the result of widespread borrowings in informal speech. In Austro-Hungarian times, German was the most serious threat, so linguists and intellectuals turned to other Slavic languages (Croatian most of all, but also Czech and Russian) as a source of words intended to replace German borrowings. In Yugoslav times, it was Serbo-Croatian that represented the most significant threat, and that caused linguists to frown upon recent Serbo-Croatian borrowings.

(For example, in the 19th century, the established Slovenian word *brati* [= to read] was deemed a German-derived calque, so it was replaced by the "more Slavic" *čitati*, which is used in BCS. In the 20th century, however, *brati* again replaced *čitati*, since the former was now viewed as more authentically Slovenian than the pan-Slavic, BCS-influenced *čitati*.)

The puristic character of standard Slovenian is alive and well in this English-dominated age, with neologisms such as *zgoščenka* (= compact disc) being almost universally preferred to direct borrowings. Meanwhile, English (and even BCS) borrowings are very common in informal speech.


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## bibax

The Czech purifying machine of the 19th century was very effective and successful. For example we have kyslík (O), dusík (N), uhlík (C), vodík (H), hliník (Al), hořčík (Mg), křemík (Si), draslík (K), sodík (Na), vápník (Ca). We also have rozhlas for radio broadcasting. But in the 20th century the machine seized up, so we say televise, email (ímejl), notebook (noutbuk), cédéčko, etc.

BTW there is no need for zgoščenka as the CD is already dead.


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## ilocas2

We say "televize"

"televise" is just an allowed (but old-fashioned) manner of spelling


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## vianie

*The puristic dictionary of the Slovak language*


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