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I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality an

by smhost 5y ago

I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event. I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.

deleted 5y ago
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whatshisface 5y ago
The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...
- oconnor663 5y ago
  I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia: > The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.
dheera 5y ago
Yes, likewise with almost all colonial areas. Asking the Japanese to stop eating curry, or the Hong Kongers to stop drinking milk tea, or the people of Qingdao to stop making beer, or asking all of China to stop eating egg tarts, would only wreak havoc on culture. After a generation or two such things become assimilated and a part of local culture. The people alive today were born with these things, and they consider them their own.
mannerheim 5y ago
There have been successful (depending on your point of view) attempts of ridding languages of foreign influences. For example, Icelandic, which in the 19th century had speakers who worked on replacing Danish loanwords with Icelandic neologisms, and today a good amount of effort is put into coining Icelandic words rather than loaning English ones. Norwegian had something similar albeit with less success. There are two official written standards for Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål retains more Danish influence, and reflects Norwegian dialects with more Danish influence (especially urban centres like Oslo), while Nynorsk is more 'pure' Norwegian, favouring more traditional grammar. Notably, the three gender system features more prominently in Nynorsk, where it is mandatory, as opposed to Bokmål, where the feminine can optionally be given masculine determiners, which is similar to how Swedish and Danish have collapsed the masculine/feminine genders into a single common gender. The movement for Nynorsk was also in the 19th century, powered by Norwegian nationalism, but only about 10-15% of Norwegians use it. Notably, though, in both cases the efforts to revert foreign influences on the language came from a grassroots, bottom-up approach, rather than a change from the top. And for the more successful case of Icelandic, well, linguistic reform is probably easier if only 300,000 people (probably much less a hundred years ago) speak it.
yongjik 5y ago
I think there's a middle ground - as a Korean speaker, it's pretty easy to find linguistic purists lecturing everyone, and also cringey writers making sentences entirely out of English words barely strung together by Korean suffixes. In the end, I believe we should consider each word separately. If a loanword is used by select few, they only hinder communication. (In the worst case, imagine a legal document that's inscrutable to most people.) On the other hand, if a loanword is already understood by everyone, there's no point in removing it: trying to removing it will in fact make communication harder.

by smhost 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whatshisface 5y ago

The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...

oconnor663 5y ago
I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia: > The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

dheera 5y ago

Yes, likewise with almost all colonial areas. Asking the Japanese to stop eating curry, or the Hong Kongers to stop drinking milk tea, or the people of Qingdao to stop making beer, or asking all of China to stop eating egg tarts, would only wreak havoc on culture. After a generation or two such things become assimilated and a part of local culture. The people alive today were born with these things, and they consider them their own.

mannerheim 5y ago

There have been successful (depending on your point of view) attempts of ridding languages of foreign influences. For example, Icelandic, which in the 19th century had speakers who worked on replacing Danish loanwords with Icelandic neologisms, and today a good amount of effort is put into coining Icelandic words rather than loaning English ones. Norwegian had something similar albeit with less success. There are two official written standards for Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål retains more Danish influence, and reflects Norwegian dialects with more Danish influence (especially urban centres like Oslo), while Nynorsk is more 'pure' Norwegian, favouring more traditional grammar. Notably, the three gender system features more prominently in Nynorsk, where it is mandatory, as opposed to Bokmål, where the feminine can optionally be given masculine determiners, which is similar to how Swedish and Danish have collapsed the masculine/feminine genders into a single common gender. The movement for Nynorsk was also in the 19th century, powered by Norwegian nationalism, but only about 10-15% of Norwegians use it. Notably, though, in both cases the efforts to revert foreign influences on the language came from a grassroots, bottom-up approach, rather than a change from the top. And for the more successful case of Icelandic, well, linguistic reform is probably easier if only 300,000 people (probably much less a hundred years ago) speak it.

yongjik 5y ago

I think there's a middle ground - as a Korean speaker, it's pretty easy to find linguistic purists lecturing everyone, and also cringey writers making sentences entirely out of English words barely strung together by Korean suffixes. In the end, I believe we should consider each word separately. If a loanword is used by select few, they only hinder communication. (In the worst case, imagine a legal document that's inscrutable to most people.) On the other hand, if a loanword is already understood by everyone, there's no point in removing it: trying to removing it will in fact make communication harder.