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You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English.
by cool_dude85 3y ago
You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English.
- babelfish 3y agoThe doctor performed the Hippocratic Oath on the terrace.
- asveikau 3y agoImported vocabulary is not code switching.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoIs this gatekeeping?
- zirgs 3y agoWhat's the difference?
- samtho 3y agoCode-switching (linguistically) requires the speaker to be multilingual and it describes the process and patterns used to determine when words are spoken in one language versus the other. Imported vocabulary/borrowed words simply describes loanwords that make it into the common lexicon of speakers of the receiving language but not necessarily speakers of the donor language.
- tchaffee 3y agoYou're missing the point of how the vocabulary got imported. It was thanks to code switching.
- samtho 3y agoI don’t disagree with the idea that code-switchers introduce new vocabulary to the general public at all, in fact, the two terms describe a word or phrase at different phases of its journey to integration within a language. In other words, there exists a point in the history of the language or dialect, the use of word or phrase ceases to be code-switching and becomes widely accepted as imported vocabulary. There is a distinction, however, that not all words that are used via code-switching are going to become part of common enough vernacular that it would become accepted within a language, and likewise, there may be cases where loanwords do not enter a language via speakers that code-switch it into their daily vocabulary.
- tchaffee 3y agoI think a good analogy is imported cheese. It's still Italian cheese even if you grew up with mozzarella as an American and consider pizza an American food. So while these words might be completely familiar to an English speaker you are still using a foreign word and are speaking and understand a very tiny bit of a foreign language. I know a tiny bit of German thanks to kindergarten. A word my Austrian friend spoke in a German sentence this morning while speaking with his son. My very tiny set of German vocabulary along with the context made it easy enough to figure out where they are headed today.
- asveikau 3y agoI feel like German shouldn't count. The relatedness of these two languages is such that there are so many cognates and similar grammar, you could probably understand a lot of German sentences just by listening closely and being curious. But kindergarten is imported the whole world over. You can't say you know German based on that. Code-switchers understand the grammar of both languages, not just a few words. I do think the Normans entering England, or Germanic peoples mixing with Celts, or Celts being conquered by Romans for a brief time -- all of that probably produced code switchers in their moment in time, with lasting impact to our vocabular and grammar. But it's not code switching anymore. It's modern English now. Similar things happened in Spain with Celts, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Basques... Not to mention all the regional Romance languages that survive today (Galician, Catalan). They conquered the Americas and got some infusion of that vocabulary too. Castilian borrows vocabulary from all of these. But monolingual Castilian speakers do not "code switch".
- fknorangesite 3y agoBorrowed words is a totally different phenomenon.
- tchaffee 3y agoCan you explain the difference? They look identical to me.
- wccrawford 3y agoI don't necessarily agree with everyone above, but.. When the first person used "hotel" in an English sentence, they were struggling to find a suitable word and failed, and fell back to another language for it. Or possibly they thought it was a better word than the English equivalent for some reason. They thought of it as a French word, with all the implications of it in French, rather than English. When I use "hotel" in a sentence, it's just part of the language I grew up with. To me, it's an English word, not something I fell back on in another language. That said, the "Spanglish" referenced here is being learned from birth by people, so they aren't context switching either. They're just speaking how they learned to speak. Older people are probably still context switching, but younger people likely aren't.
- tchaffee 3y agoThe fact that's it's an English word to you doesn't make it no longer a French word. You simply aren't aware you're using a French word.
- mcswell 3y agoCode switching is when you're speaking language X, then switch over to language Y for one or more words. If there's another person present who knows X but doesn't know Y, they'll probably be lost when you do that. Borrowing might have started out as code switching, or something else, but when you use words borrowed a long time ago from Y in language X, people who know X but not necessarily Y will probably understand you. There are of course technical terms that you might use which not everyone will understand. Some of these will have been borrowed from another language, like electron or perigee or perihelion, while others might be words made up and not borrowed, like quark or boson or fermion. The fact that some were borrowed, and others not, does not make the one code switching and the other something else. And if you're code switching, you'll probably be pronouncing the words from language Y with the expected pronunciation of Y, whereas if you're using words borrowed from Y into X, they will probably be pronounced differently from how they would be pronounced if you were code switching into Y (or just speaking Y), and the semantics may have changed. Take the word 'mesa' in English, describing a flat-topped hill in the southwest. If you're a non-Spanish speaker, you'll probably pronounce that last vowel as a schwa, and only have the flat-topped hill meaning in mind. Whereas if you code switched into Spanish, that last vowel would probably sound like the /a/ in 'father', and you might be talking about a table.
- permo-w 3y agoyou don't, but there is an element of code-switching that goes on in English. given that French, Greek and Latin-origin words in English tend to have come down from the clergy or the aristocracy, there is a subconscious subtext of power and education - and on the flipside pretense and elitism - that can be given off with particular use or lack of use of those words. some people do this naturally and some people affect it - Boris Johnson is well-known for it - but, while not quite the same as switching between Spanish and English - it is a thing that occurs
- jorvi 3y ago“I gotta say, this kid really thinks he’s the alpha and the omega du jour”.
- asveikau 3y agoI think a lot of English speakers would not know what that phrase would mean. "Alpha and Omega" as used in English is a biblical reference, does not really have much to do with practical knowledge of Greek. Du jour would be understood on a restaurant menu for soup more than anything else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- floydnoel 3y agoi understood it just fine
- denton-scratch 3y agoNot me. It read to me as the kind of pretentious garble spoken by someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words they're uttering, and perhaps doesn't even know what thought they're trying to communicate.
- LouisSayers 3y agoYeah, kiwi here and I have no idea what "the omega du jour" means.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago"The omega du jour" means nothing. You're parsing the sentence wrong. The alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. It's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a Biblical reference to the Almighty. And then du jour means "of the day".
- tchaffee 3y agoWhen you say the word "energy" or "hotel" you are switching to French. After a few centuries of this you don't notice and consider it common English.
- leoedin 3y agoYou're not "switching to French", you're saying a word in English which happens to have a French root.
- tchaffee 3y agoThat's wrong. These words came directly from servents using the words of their Normandy ruling class in England. They are French words. The fact that you can no longer perceive that is my entire point.
- mcswell 3y agoExactly (although I would have used the word "etymology" rather than "root", which means s.t. else to a linguist). The fact that a word might have been borrowed into English nearly a thousand years ago does not mean that you're speaking French when you use it, any more than the fact that you might have had a French ancestor a thousand years ago makes you French.
- tchaffee 3y agoGenetically you are French if your ancestors are French. A word can be French and used in English as a common word. You're still saying a French word no matter how familiar it has become to you. Your claim seems to be that after an exact number of years of being used by English speakers a word is no longer French. Which doesn't hold up when you try to assign that exact number. Au revoir.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoNah there isn't an "identity function" for words like that, nor can a single language "claim" a word. When a language fully assimilates a word with its origin in another language, it also becomes fully a word in the assimilating language as well. The connotation, denotation, pronunciation, and/or orthography can each change, or not, in either language or both, and it is a different word from that point on regardless. Your point about "genetically french" is also wrong in almost exactly the same way so it provides an illustrative comparison. There's no single french ethnicity, just people who are french and some observable trends. Someone is french who has french citizenship, a word is english when it is widely spoken by native english speakers. I also need to point out that this is not a matter of opinion. Linguistics is an established field and consensus is clear on this. You are confidently asserting things that are well outside the mainstream of the science.
- lelanthran 3y ago> You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English. Challenge accepted: "The stoic young man bid us au revoir and left" The thing is, English borrows so much from other languages that it's not apparent to English speakers that the words are from other languages. ... et cetera (etc) id est (i.e.) videlicet (viz) sic and that's just Latin. Think about Schadenfreud, Bon appétit, Au revoir, Macho, Amigo, Kindergarten, Uber, Gesundheit, Smorgasbord, Apartheid, Trek... Honestly, the list goes on and on and on. English speakers use more "borrowed" phrases and words than any other language I can think of.
- smcl 3y agoYeah this is an interesting one. We don't really have a good English equivalent for "guten apetit" or "dobrou chuť" but bon appétit feels like the most well-known loan phrase that could stand in. "Enjoy your meal" appears to be sort of popular in restaurants (i.e. the server will say it to you) but it sounds so cold and weird to me. I really wish we just leaned into bon appétit instead.
- denton-scratch 3y agoI think "bon appétit" has more of a "tuck in" flavour than "Enjoy your meal".
- leoedin 3y agoI think the point of the parent comment is that, although English is full of borrowed words and phrases, you're not switching to speaking French/German/Latin while saying them. You're still speaking English, it's just a subset of English which was borrowed from somewhere.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vintermann 3y agoYou can define it that way, and sure, there's a certain difference when we borrow phrase bits from languages we don't actually understand and use them as an expression (inter alia, et cetera) and when we do. But the latter also happens when bilingualism is common. I won't actually consider these wholesale expression borrowings part of English until they spread to English speakers who don't speak the borrowed language.
- nl 3y agoAu contraire - it's practically a Deus ex machina that this discussion should allow such an elegant counterexample. Edit: That was such an eureka moment I feel like it should be something of a cliché. QED (Quod erat demonstrandum)