# Foreign Lexical Influence



## tafanari

It's interesting how this idea of banning words from other countries to stem the cultural influence of other countries is spreading.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...0jul30,1,548748.story?coll=la-headlines-world

What do you think about these kinds of measures to "protect" languages and cultures.


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## maxiogee

tafanari said:
			
		

> It's interesting how this idea of banning words from other countries to stem the cultural influence of other countries is spreading.
> 
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...0jul30,1,548748.story?coll=la-headlines-world
> 
> What do you think about these kinds of measures to "protect" languages and cultures.



As someone from a country whose language and culture were oppressed for many many years and thus are stultified, I have some sympathy with the concept — but — I would want to point out to these people that stagnating and 'locked' cultures and languages degrade of their own isolation.
Languages need to live, grow, expand and contract and shelve off new dialects eventually. This is what keeps them current. Where would English be today if it didn't import new words as it met them and found them useful?
And, who complains that English is betraying its roots when it bastardises both Greek and Latin to come up with a word such as _television_?


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## Kräuter_Fee

This case you posted is kind of crazy. It doesn't make any sense to me. Pizza is pizza all over the world, it has been pizza for ages and it should stay pizza!

In other contexts, I agree with this. I think people should try to protect their language. If there is a word in your language and people understand it, why use the English word? There are people who say it because they think they look cool if they use foreign words. One example of what I mean is _coffee break_, it is useless in Spanish, we can say _pausa_ or _intervalo_. 

On the other hand, there are words that we can't translate because people learned them in English (like _chat_), it would be stupid to try to translate them.


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## tafanari

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Where would English be today if it didn't import new words as it met them and found them useful?



I suspect that this is a rhetorical question but the answer is that it would be in a Linguistic tome as the only known example of a language that didn't copy words from other languages.

What I find interesting is that they are banning words but not banning pizza itself. I mean, if you think saying "pizza" is bad bacause it's not Persian wouldn't allowing pizza at all, whether you call it elastic loaf or not, be just as bad?


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## Frank06

Hi,

I read the article, originally published by AP, and tons of reactions to it a few weeks ago and I have some question marks .
There is a huge problem with the main example of the text, viz. 'elastic loaves'.
1. The original Persian phrase is 'kesh loghmeh'  (کش لقمه), which is normally translated as 'elastic snack'. Loghmeh means 'bite', 'mouthful', 'snack'. You can find back 'loghmeh' in many names for local food: gaz loghmeh (a kind of nougatine sweets), loghmeh kabab,  loghmeh zaferani, ...
2. I heard the expression 'kesh loghmeh' three years ago in a pizzeria in Tehran, and I could find on-line referrences dating back from 2001. It is a bit weird that AP uses this very old example. 
3. According to the French Press Agency AFP, it's not the Persian Language Academy that coined this purifying phrase 'kesh loghmeh', but the writer of a "popular sitcom on state television" who came up with "the term "stretchy bite" as an alternative to "pizza"." Since I put my reactions to this article on my web log, I asked people in Iran to verify this and to check out the sitcom. I must say that quite a lot of Iranians I talked to think 'kesh loghmeh' _is _coined by the Academy, or at least think it looks like one. *IF* it is a joke from a sitcom, then it's a very good one .
4. The Language Academy of Persian aims at a purification of Persian in governmental and official texts (which includes news bulletins on state TV, etc.). I doubt they are going to spend energy on a word like 'pizza' .

I should ad that the Language Academy of Persian is an international instance, including academics from Iran, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, four countries where (a variant of) Persian is spoken (among other languages). One of their aims is to bring the four nations, the four language variants, closer together.

As for language purification -- 'cause that was actually your question -- I think there are two basic problems:
1. Quite often, the people who actually speak the language don't really care about the output of the local language academy. A good example is Iran, where the neologism are hardly used by the public (most often they re-appear in jokes!) and France. Just watch the French tv channels for one day and you'll come across more loans from English than the Academie Française can 'purify' in a decade . 
BTW, I really advise you not to order a 'kesh loghmeh' in an Iranian pizzeria, but simply ask for a پیتزا
2. The idea of a "pure language" in itself is false. It's not a matter of linguistics, but of ideology. There is always a very subjective idea about what is 'pure' and what is 'foreign'. Again Iran as an example: they want predominantly use words which were common in Persia round 250 AD. While the Persian language of 250 AD already was "contaminated" by tons of loans from neighboring languages and dialects (Indo-Iranian Median, language isolate Elamite, Semitic Akkadian).

Groetjes,

Frank
[PS: I'm so sorry, I am not allowed yet to include web links to the AFP article, the site of the Persian Language Academy, articles about the organisation of that Academy and reports on the co-operation between the four Persian speaking countries].


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## tafanari

Frank06 said:
			
		

> 3. According to the French Press Agency AFP, it's not the Persian Language Academy that coined this purifying phrase, but the writer of a "popular sitcom on state television" who came up with the term "stretchy bite" as an alternative to "pizza".



Hi Frank,

I guess I would have to admit my ignorance about how things work in Iran and ask you what the difference is between bureaucrats working for the Islamic Republic's television station and bureaucrats working for the Islamic Republic's Persian Language Academy?

Aren't they just two bureaucrats working in different departments of the same store? The little I know about Iran tells me they are both controlled by the government.


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## karuna

It is not always possible to simply take the words from another language because the do not fit in in the gramatical or phonetical system of the target language. _Pizza _or _chat _are easy ones because they become _pica _and _čats _in Latvian. But such words as _software _are impossible in Latvian and calques sound even worse. When foreign IT companies want to sell their services in Latvia they often want to keep the names of their services untranslated as registered trademark names. I sometimes wonder about their linguistic insensitivity because the words that a native finds difficult to read and pronounce will rarely make a positive impact. This also includes the use of acronyms, for example, SMS becomes _īsziņa (=short message) _in Latvian.

On the other hand we are also suffering from bureaucrats who want to show their power, including the use of language. There is an independent comittee who invents the official terminology. They are guided by nationalistic ideas but are not very knowledgable about specific fields. They invent a new words for already established terms used by specialists, thus creating big confusion. _A file _(in IT field) is know as _fails _by all Latvians. Then language committee decided it was too "foreign", so they forced to replace it with even more foreign word _datne_, which sounds like a joke. Of course, nobody was using it except in official documents. After 10 years or so the committee decided that they have made a mistake and the form _fails_ should be allowed to use as well.

The similar story was about the EU currency _Euro _which in Latvian becomes _eiro, _but the language committee recently was unsuccessfully trying to change to _eira _despite the fact that all banks and other people have been using the _eiro _form already for several years. Language should not be imposed on people by the government.


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## Frank06

Hi Tafanari,



			
				tafanari said:
			
		

> Aren't they just two bureaucrats working in different departments of the same store? The little I know about Iran tells me they are both controlled by the government.


I must admit that it's indeed quite ambivalent a situation.

It might be a surprise, but quite a few sitcoms in Iran really have harsh  and (thinly veiled) sarcastic comments on a broad range of govermental issues. Certain prototypes and clichés are enormously enlarged and ridiuclised (including the mullah, the office clark, ...).
BUT, tja, to such an extent that some Iranians are convinced that it is indeed part of the governmental tv policy. I mean, I often heard from Iranians that those kind of satirical comments are allowed only 'to give the public some reason for laughter', that the government deliberately not censors that kind of things, an outlet for frustrations.
On the other hand, quite some shows _are_ censored / aborted after a while because being too critical, quite a lot of papers had / have to close down because of their comments on the government.

I don't know myself what to think of it, I only hear a limited amount of opinions, most of them from the same (kind of) people: educated, fairly liberal, anti-goverment, but (still) living in Tehran. I sometimes sense some far going paranoia in the opinions of some people, but I am really the last to blame anybody (but the government).

But I think that we can agree upon the fact that a joke in a sitcom - *If* that would be the case -- cannot have the same value as a neologism published on an official list of the Persian Language Academy.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## tafanari

Thanks for such a quick response, Frank. I'd also like to give you a belated thanks for your first response.



			
				Frank06 said:
			
		

> But I think that we can agree upon the fact that a joke in a sitcom - *If* that would be the case -- cannot have the same value as a neologism published on an official list of the Persian Language Academy.



I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying TV has more weight or that the Persian Academy of Language does?
Some things that are said on TV in the US are much more important than many things the government says and from my experience, Language Academies are much less influential than the media.


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## ireney

There were (and still are I assume) some who decided that we shouldn't take any English words in. They usually didn't say a single thing about the amount of foreign words we've been using sometimes for countless (not really) centuries. When really provoked (or egged on, depends on your perspective) they would come up with the ridiculous answer that the other foreign words had been 'hellenised', assimilated.

I remember that the word they seemed to oppose more volubly was 'fast-food' (what they really opposed was Greeks liking the idea extremely well) . They proposed a Greek alternative, a translation so to speak (Ταχυφαγείο). That caused a lot of articles to be written (pros and cons and so on), lots of heated TV 'discussions', lots of laughs, and a clever businessman in my town naming his place "Ταχυφαγείο" and putting up a sign saying that it was a fast-food (in English) joint called so.


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## Frank06

Hi Tafanari, all,



			
				tafanari said:
			
		

> Thanks for such a quick response, Frank. I'd also like to give you a belated thanks for your first response.


And thank _you_ for your reactions and comments!!

I hope you don't mind if I keep on rambling on the topic for a while .



			
				tafanari said:
			
		

> I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying TV has more weight or that the Persian Academy of Language does?
> Some things that are said on TV in the US are much more important than many things the government says and from my experience, Language Academies are much less influential than the media.



Oh, I agree about the influence of tv. But in the case of Iran, I have the very strong impression that neither the Academy nor the *state* television have any weight what introducing purified neologisms is concerned. Maybe that will change over the generations.
But, still in connection with tv and Persian, lots of people in Iran watch programmes from American based Iranian sattelite channels, though that is officially forbidden. If I remember well, L.A. has an Iranian community of 2 to 3 million people and at least 5 tv channels! I sometimes watch those channels and I hear a lot of English words. Not really surrpising, since the biggest wave of Iranian immigrants arrived in the States after the Revolution, almost 30 years ago: There is a whole new generation of American born, bilingual Iranians, also on those channels.
If there is a medium that has an influence on the language of Iranians in Iran, it sure is those American-Iranian channels rather than the fairly boring state tv channels.

As for Iranian 'kesh loghmeh', I found this on a Persian language board:
"have you heard the words:
"kesh loghmeh" be jaye Pizza!!!!
"charkh bAl" be jaye helikopter!!!!
"namA bar" be jaye fax!!!
va lots of these funny words!!!!!"

So, the netto-result for most neologisms in Iran, whether they find their origin in the Academy or in a sitcom, is this: "va lots of funny words".
I know this quote is slightly anecdotal, but this opinion is shared by most Iranians I know.

Also rather funny in connection with Persian, is the term they use for 'pure' Persian: "sare(h)", which is an Arabic loan. And oh ja, Farsi فـارسی is an arabicised form . Some Persian purifiers have already suggested to change it into Parsi (again). The Language Academy of Persian, which originally was founded to purify Persian from Arabic loans, but, erm, broadened (or shifted?) its scope after the Islamic Revolution, sure has a lot of work to do. 

Groetjes,

Frank


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## tafanari

Frank06 said:
			
		

> Also rather funny in connection with Persian, is the term they use for 'pure' Persian: "sare(h)", which is an Arabic loan. And oh ja, Farsi فـارسی is an arabicised form . Some Persian purifiers have already suggested to change it into Parsi (again). The Language Academy of Persian, which originally was founded to purify Persian from Arabic loans, but, erm, broadened (or shifted?) its scope after the Islamic Revolution, sure has a lot of work to do.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



Ironic, isn't it? I see many parallels with the Spanish Language Academy. I guess we are not that different after all. Iran has clueless bureaucrats as well! 

P.S. The word for Spanish in Spanish "español" is a term borrowed from across the Pyrnees (it's Provençal).


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## panjabigator

> P.S. The word for Spanish in Spanish "español" is a term borrowed from across the Pyrnees (it's Provençal).



What is Provençal? Isn't that a French related language?


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## ireney

I browsed through  this  and it seemed ok. It's a beautiful place!!


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## tafanari

panjabigator said:
			
		

> What is Provençal? Isn't that a French related language?



It's closer to Catalán:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provençal


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## Frank06

Hi,



			
				tafanari said:
			
		

> Ironic, isn't it? I see many parallels with the Spanish Language Academy. I guess we are not that different after all. Iran has clueless bureaucrats as well!


Oh, I think every country has its share of clueless bureaucrats. When I'm in a bad mood I just think that we only have the bureaucrats we deserve ;-). When I am in a good mood, they give me lots of reasons to laugh...

Over here in Belgium, we don't have a Language Academy in the pure sense of the term, but rather an international "Language Union" (De Nederlandse Taalunie), a co-operation between Belgium (Flanders) and The Netherlands. They don't purify the language, they don't really force people to use this or that neologism, but they do regulate the *spelling* for both countries. What the spelling is concerned, there is no difference between the Dutch  in Belgium and in The Netherlands.
So far my introduction.
Well,they changed the spelling once again recently, and the funny things is that they have spent a lot of energy on the spelling of *-en-* in compounds. They have invented rules in the past, changed those rules, made rules for exceptions, changed those... It goes on and on. The funny thing is: the *-en-* in those compounds is not even pronounced as such. In Dutch, *-en* at the end of a word, and *-en-* in the middle is pronounced as shwa in normal standard speech, the *-n- / -n* is omitted. Only when -en comes at the end of a word, it is sometimes pronounced, but solely in _emphatic_ and very slow speech. Talking about clueless nitwits. The second part of the fun is that it basically is about words which are mainly used in classrooms when that set of rules (and words) is explained.
Less funny is that they they spend loads of money on it, and force people to buy whole new sets of dictionaries, correction programmes and (school) books. And they make people feel insecure about the written language, I mean, about the spelling, and hence about their language. It's a bit silly of those people, but anyway. 

Back to language purification. 
Over here in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium (and yes we do speak _Dutch_ over here, not Flemish  ), there is no official instance that works on a lexical level. What often happens is that some people come up with a translation of an English loan, and that the new word (often a calque) slowly, but very slowly, finds it way in the media and in the daily language usage.
'Webstek' is often found in stead of 'website', 'harde schijf' is normally used for hard disk (c-drive).

People often complain about the presence of English terms (e.g. many job descriptions in personnel and job ads are stuffed with English words), but there is no organised 'resistance' movement.

On the other hand, lots of loans have gained a firm basis and I don't see a reason to 'purify' them.
One example: the normal Dutch word for shop is 'winkel', a shop where you buy clothes is a 'klerenwinkel'. The old French loan 'boutique' has been narrowed down to the meaning of a small, rather exclusive (and expensive) clothes shop, while the English word 'shop' (and the verb 'shoppen', for 'winkelen') denotes a flashier, more modern kind of shop (or a Paki nite shop .
I think both 'boutique' and 'shop' have enriched Dutch.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## jimreilly

There was another similar thread recently

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=195773


One thing that becomes apparent when one reads the present thread as well as the earlier one is that there are so many different language and political situations! The ecological analogy--that languages are like species, and that species diversity is valuable--is pretty common when it comes to the desirability of preserving languages that might disappear; I think that, as stimulating as that analogy is, it only takes us so far.

Is a language that has been _relatively_ isolated or "uncontaminated" (say, Icelandic) better off than one that has been more "contaminated" by other languages? I doubt it, however fine a language Icelandic might be. I doubt that it's worse off, either. What does it mean for a language to be "better off" anyway? Rich in vocabulary? Flexible, that is able to describe "new" things without too many contortions? Open to change? Stable?

I'm rambling a little here, but the point I'm edging towards is that it's almost impossible to consider these questions from a language viewpoint without political questions/value judgements quickly asserting themselves. Which makes the whole thing much more frustrating and interesting at the same time!


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## mayale

Languages need to live, grow, expand and contract and shelve off new dialects eventually. This is what keeps them current. Where would English be today if it didn't import new words as it met them and found them useful?
And, who complains that English is betraying its roots when it bastardises both Greek and Latin to come up with a word such as _television_?[/quote]

Very well said!!! And I personaly believe that one of the reasons for English to flourish is that it does not have an authoritative institution (such as the Academie Francaise) to order what the speaker wants to use or not.


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## mayale

panjabigator said:
			
		

> What is Provençal? Isn't that a French related language?


Broadly speaking, it is a variety of Langue d'Oc, which in its turn was one of the main languages spoken in the southern area of what we call France today. The northern part spoke the Langue d'Oil which produced the current standard French (all due to socio-political reasons of course).


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## Outsider

Kräuter_Fee said:
			
		

> This case you posted is kind of crazy. It doesn't make any sense to me. Pizza is pizza all over the world, it has been pizza for ages and it should stay pizza!


You may be right, but I couldn't resist checking. 

I liked *Karuna*'s reply above very much. The people who react with laughter to language protection may never have realised that some of the neologisms we are supposed to embrace joyfully violate grammatical or phonetic rules of certain languages. Let me turn the question implicit in this thread around: *What's wrong with adapting foreign words a little bit, or even translating them when possible?*


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## mayale

Outsider said:
			
		

> *What's wrong with adapting foreign words a little bit, or even translating them when possible?*




Nothing is wrong with that. We all (languages) have been doing that all along anyway.


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## zaigucis

karuna said:


> It is not always possible to simply take the words from another language because the do not fit in in the gramatical or phonetical system of the target language. _Pizza _or _chat _are easy ones because they become _pica _and _čats _in Latvian. But such words as _software _are impossible in Latvian and calques sound even worse. When foreign IT companies want to sell their services in Latvia they often want to keep the names of their services untranslated as registered trademark names. I sometimes wonder about their linguistic insensitivity because the words that a native finds difficult to read and pronounce will rarely make a positive impact. This also includes the use of acronyms, for example, SMS becomes _īsziņa (=short message) _in Latvian.
> 
> On the other hand we are also suffering from bureaucrats who want to show their power, including the use of language. There is an independent comittee who invents the official terminology. They are guided by nationalistic ideas but are not very knowledgable about specific fields. They invent a new words for already established terms used by specialists, thus creating big confusion. _A file _(in IT field) is know as _fails _by all Latvians. Then language committee decided it was too "foreign", so they forced to replace it with even more foreign word _datne_, which sounds like a joke. Of course, nobody was using it except in official documents. After 10 years or so the committee decided that they have made a mistake and the form _fails_ should be allowed to use as well.
> 
> The similar story was about the EU currency _Euro _which in Latvian becomes _eiro, _but the language committee recently was unsuccessfully trying to change to _eira _despite the fact that all banks and other people have been using the _eiro _form already for several years. Language should not be imposed on people by the government.



but some new words become part of language. What about *dators* (computer)? ok, some people are still using *kompjūters*, but it is less part.


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## juliet1982

Hello! I just want to say that I hate the fact that many English words are used in Argentina. I REALLY love English language, I don't know why, I must be something innate , because I haven't a good reason to explain it. However, I don't like English words to be used in my country, because of the simple fact that we are Spanish speakers. Lots of people use words like : look, sweater, sandwich, break, speech, training, personal trainer, timing, planning, ring tones, fifty-fifty, DVD (English spelling), OK, lobby, and so on. I ALWAYS try to avoid them, because is something that really annoys me. Thanks. Juliet.


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