3 ms·
Sure, languages steal words. It makes perfect sense when you're trying to explain something that is a completely new concept, or at least one that has no close
by breischl 13y ago
Sure, languages steal words. It makes perfect sense when you're trying to explain something that is a completely new concept, or at least one that has no close analogue already in the language.
The English language didn't have any concept for "the out of focus area of a photograph" so you might as well import that one. But when a language already has a closely related concept it is still much easier to analogize that rather than import a word from another language.
The French already had a word for "search", so why should they ignore that? Perhaps they could have called it an "engine de recherche" but that's just silly. Would you also suggest that they just use the entire phrase "Google Book Search" unchanged, rather than translating the individual words?