Date: 10 Apr 2000 02:00:12 +0200 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Spellings Message-ID: <8cr5ic$2ed0$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <20000407233952.A1610@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> <8cq06a$1le0$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <20000410000149.B1241@theory8.physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> wrote:
> What I meant was, a word like "chauffeur" or "chandelier" is spelt the
> same way in English as in French (or say "lasagne" in Italian, and so
> on),
This is no different from German, French, Dutch, etc. Even Italian
has "whisky", although the letter "w" doesn't appear at all in
native words. Those that use a different script (Greek, Cyrillic)
obviously need to come up with a localized spelling immediately.
> and pronounced in a fairly similar manner,
The pronunciation is *approximated* using the phonetic inventory
of the destination language. The English version of "chauffeur" is
badly distorted from the French original. This can make for
interesting observations, e.g. French and German use different
replacements for the English vowel in "cut", although the vowel
chosen in the respectively other language would be available as
well.
> but I don't think that's true of other European languages: imported
> words change in spelling, or in pronunciation, or both.
Eventually, when a loan word has become solidly incorporated into
the language, its spelling is regularized. Examples from German:
French "bureau" -> "Büro",
French "café" -> "Kaffee"
English "cakes" -> "Keks",
English "strike" -> "Streik".
Some languages go more aggressively about this, some are more
conservative.
> English also has lots of imported non-European words: I've seen lists,
> but offhand can only recall Indian examples, eg bungalow, jungle,
> juggernaut, etc. In these cases, of course, the spelling is reasonably
> English-sounding since the original words were in a different script.
> I don't know how common these words are in other European languages.
German French Swedish
bungalow: Bungalow bungalow bungalow
jungle: Dschungel jungle djungel
Those were probably borrowed via English. "Juggernaut" seems to be
English only.
[reasons for language dominance]
> but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I believe France was
> no less dominant politically than England, and far more dominant
> culturally.
And French was just in a position similar to that of English today.
In the 17th/18th century, the court of the French kings was the
model for the European high aristocracy who spoke French in imitation,
and educated people at the time peppered their speech with gratuitous
French loanwords. It isn't as obvious in English due to its older
ties with French, but the European languages experienced in influx
of French loan words during those times.
French's dominant role continued until around the turn of the
century. French was the language used by diplomats. Note that even
today the postal service still uses French phrases in international
contexts (e.g. airmail stickers everywhere saying "par avion" along
with the same in the local language). International organizations
that are old enough carry French names. Think of the international
and European soccer associations: FIFA, UEFA.
The extension of English to other countries was a direct result of
colonization. Just the same for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Dutch.
In ancient times, Greek was spread around the Mediterranean by
merchants and settlers. Latin became dominant due to the sheer
power of the Roman Empire. Low German was a lingua franca around
the Baltic Sea (and influenced the Scandinavian languages as much
as French did English) on the heels of the rich Hanseatic merchants.
Let me drive this point home: There are many historical examples
and associated excellent reasons why a language can become preferred
for international communications or as a prestige language. None
of these reasons are related to the language itself.
If the Kalahari bushmen started to become economically, politically,
and/or culturally dominant in the world for some weird reason, we'd
all happily learn to meaningfully click our tongues in dozens of
different ways.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de
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