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>our language is being steadily eroded. If it were any other language being abused, there would be campaigns to stop it happening. I disagree and vehemently. T

>our language is being steadily eroded. If it were any other language being abused, there would be campaigns to stop it happening. I disagree and vehemently. The strength of the English language is its ability to change and absorb words from other languages. Your proposal to have campaigns restricting change leads to the decay of a language and to oddities like "courriel" instead of email in Quebec French which - mind you - tries to keep itself free of English borrowings. See also the needlessly long compound words in languages like Dutch and German. Even Finnish has "speaking box" instead of telephone. This is a road you won't like. I think you should accept that English is no longer "your" language. It belongs to everyone now.

rswail 6y ago
tele-phone... tele, greek for "far", phone, from the greek for "voice". German for telephone: Fernsprecher, or "far speaking" So how is that better or worse than "speaking box". Finnish is a weird outlier that is similar to Hungarian but different to most other Germanic/Latin/Greek derived European languages.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I completely agree with your point against the GP that compound words are not at all seen as "needlessly long" by speakers of those languages. But with regard to Finnish, while Finnish is a Uralic language and not an Indo-European one, the Finnish language today is replete with calques on Swedish and German, because those were the prestige languages in the region when the modern Finnish literary standard was being created and new words coined.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  das Telefon is much more common than Fernsprecher in my non-native experience
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    Most people would probably not even understand "Fernsprecher" at this point. It's really old-fashioned.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Finnish puhelin ‘telephone’ is not ‘speaking box’ but ‘speaking device’, and it is derived by morphology, not compounding.
eMSF 6y ago
I'm not sure what Finnish word you are referring to. The word for telephone, however, is not a compound word, and it's even quite succinct. You can see the etymology here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-in#Etymology_6 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-in#Etymology_6
seszett 6y ago
How is courriel an oddity though? It's just the same thing as email, a shortening of "electronic mail". Also, many of the "needlessly long" compound words in Dutch and German are just the same as in English and French, except those languages use equally long Greek or Latin compound words instead.

rswail 6y ago

tele-phone... tele, greek for "far", phone, from the greek for "voice". German for telephone: Fernsprecher, or "far speaking" So how is that better or worse than "speaking box". Finnish is a weird outlier that is similar to Hungarian but different to most other Germanic/Latin/Greek derived European languages.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I completely agree with your point against the GP that compound words are not at all seen as "needlessly long" by speakers of those languages. But with regard to Finnish, while Finnish is a Uralic language and not an Indo-European one, the Finnish language today is replete with calques on Swedish and German, because those were the prestige languages in the region when the modern Finnish literary standard was being created and new words coined.
tomjakubowski 6y ago
das Telefon is much more common than Fernsprecher in my non-native experience
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Most people would probably not even understand "Fernsprecher" at this point. It's really old-fashioned.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Finnish puhelin ‘telephone’ is not ‘speaking box’ but ‘speaking device’, and it is derived by morphology, not compounding.

eMSF 6y ago

I'm not sure what Finnish word you are referring to. The word for telephone, however, is not a compound word, and it's even quite succinct. You can see the etymology here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-in#Etymology_6 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-in#Etymology_6

seszett 6y ago

How is courriel an oddity though? It's just the same thing as email, a shortening of "electronic mail". Also, many of the "needlessly long" compound words in Dutch and German are just the same as in English and French, except those languages use equally long Greek or Latin compound words instead.