2 ms·
When 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.
by tchaffee 3y ago
When 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.
- tchaffee 3y agoNo language is claiming the word. English uses German words. When my Austrian friend spoke German to his son this morning I understood the word kindergarten because I have a small German vocabulary like all English speakers do. Kindergarten is simply a German word that English speakers understand. There are absolutely genetic groupings of people. Any geneticist will tell you so. You can learn more here. https://medium.com/nautilus-magazine/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-about-race-732beb766f1c https://medium.com/nautilus-magazine/what-both-the-left-and-... Adiós amigo.
- nextaccountic 3y agoWhen English people in the 13th century spoke the word hotel they might be code switching between English and Old French (but that's debatable because it seems this word ultimately has a Latin root) However this word is part of the English lexicon today and require no knowledge of French, and as such isn't an example of code switching
- tchaffee 3y agoIn order to use and understand the word kindergarten I need to understand and speak at least one German word. That's knowledge of German, even if it's a tiny bit of knowledge. The fact that some English speakers aren't aware of their knowledge of German doesn't make kindergarten no longer a German word.