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Some guy on a black fuji at the doghouse in kennington. bumped my fuji on the racks ;)
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...a chap had a rummage around inside my foot with sharp object.
Ha! So competitive you had to stomp on Object. -
Serk. Last night.
Tooting.Hey! I wondered who that was. I remember thinking, "he was a pretty big guy so maybe Gav86?"
I did slow down to see if you were turning right but you went straight so I let you go. I was on my way home and hadn't had to unclip at that point. I thought perhaps the dream of a sub 1-hour Epsom-Peckham commute with no unclips would come true, but Camberwell struck again.
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Nah, it gains an actual one :-)
Cafe, restaurant, shadenfreude, doppelgenger, pasta, cummerbund, denim, chinos, brogue, pork, hotel, grape, abacus, alphabet, behemoth, apron, canister, avatar, hamburger, rucksack, abseil, ersatz, etc...
wouldn't you agree that the English language has been enhanced and enrichened beyond measure by these and other loan words, rather than weakened by them? The sheer variety of synonyms made possible by the adoption of words from all sorts of cultures is a big part of what makes English such a good language for poetry, song and prose. And that is what makes it such a widespread and successful language. The reluctance of the French to permit their language to grow organically and instead ban imported words in favour of "true" French alternatives is what, with the exception of the results of their imperial past, keeps it provincial and insular.
Well, since you asked ...
Yes, a language gets weakened by loan words. I'm not talking about the way in which large-scale borrowings from other languages, like the high preponderance of Latinate words in English, shape a language. Such borrowings have mostly already had their pronunciation adjusted to be more homogenuous within their 'new' linguistic environment. As these large-scale borrowings are often the result of political processes (e.g., what the 'upper class' used to speak), they don't have anything to do with any specific utility that these borrowings might have had, and they greatly diminished what the language on its own might have been capable of achieving. They merely contributed to the creation of a linguistic mish-mash.
On the subject more specifically of modern loan words, they definitely weaken a language, too, although of course not on such a large scale as, say, the invasion of Latin into English. More contemporary loan words are characterised by sticking out like a sore thumb phonetically, and you wouldn't be able to successfully use them in poetry in the same way that you can use older borrowings for which relatively cogent pronunciation rules exist. 'Schadenfreude', for instance, couldn't exist in a piece of English verse; it's just too clunky. (And, by the way, I'm not talking about contemporary 'poetry'. That's another subject for another rant. :) )
Loan words (of which there are very few in contemporary English, so I suspect that you may not be able to understand the scale and nature of the problem in German or French) don't have anything to do with the 'success' of English. That comes partly from the fact that England/the UK was previously very successful at imperialism, so that English was imposed in a lot of places and became a 'lingua franca' there, but mainly because the grammar of English is highly unsystematic. This means that it's very easy to learn very basic English, although learning English becomes progressively more difficult the better you try to learn it. It's the other way around in German--getting started is pretty difficult, but once you've got it, it becomes easier, owing to the considerable degree of systematicity in the grammar that still exists. As someone once said, the worst linguistic disease in the world is BSE--'Badly Spoken English'.
The French approach to their language by the Académie Française only appears 'insular' because it's not shared around the world. There are some silly examples of words that they've invented, but some I like a lot--'courriel' for e-mail is one of my favourite examples ('letter' is 'courrier' in French). It's a very fruitful approach that should be adopted more widely and that of course needs to be carried out by competent linguists. The history of every language will be rich enough to draw on a wealth of possible roots to enable this. In French as in other languages, the invasion of most English loan words is only a reflection of English-based trash culture. And yes, there is a certain élitisme in what the Académie do (and the last thing I will do is to defend established Frech elitism), but they're caught between a rock and a hard place.
(Another remark on what loan words are often adopted in German these days--a recent example is "das Event" (not 'DAS event' ;) ), which sounds shit in German and actually only enables people in speaking not to have to distinguish between two very different ideas: "Veranstaltung" (an organised event) and "Ereignis" (an event as in a volcanic eruption, for instance). It means that the quality of expression suffers and it's not only a pointless loan word, but also one that is quite damaging to the language. There are quite a few more recent examples of this.)
Again, "Rutschen" doesn't work for 'to skid'. It' has part of the idea, but not the whole.
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There's always a way to express it in German; all the complex words are constructed from combinations of simpler words. I've always thought this makes German a much more egalitarian language than English, because there's a chance for any reasonably intelligent German speaker to work out what any academic/philospher/whatever is talking about. Can't do that in English unless you have a classical education.
That's certainly partly true. Early language learning in German taxes German native speakers much more than native English speakers. I once read (but don't know if it's true) that the average age at which a German-speaking child speaks fluently is four, whereas for an English-speaking child it's two and a half.
However, let me assure you that among German 'intellectuals' and 'philosophers' there were and are other mechanisms for making their meaning obscure, such as using just that excellent capability of noun development to excess. A lot of that stuff is just overblown nothingness.
Also, as far as I can see, Latin (mass etc.) was used by the Catholic church as just the same tool of oppression in German-speaking countries, and there are of course likewise a very great number of Latinate borrowings in German.
What is certainly true is that German grammar in being more systematic has a closer affinity with systematicity of thought, which to my mind is undoubtedly a contributing cause to German philosophical rationalism, whereas in English the lack of systematicity historically meant a greater leaning towards empiricism.
I would also say that despite being a three-tier school system that sorts people into social layers from an early age, German education used to be much better than education in the UK. However, this is certainly changing, and I wouldn't know what it's like today, to a large extent owing to the introduction of reforms borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon world.
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One (German) word - "handy". The horror.
tl;dr
Why? Regal's post wasn't that long, surely? ;P
Yes, absolutely. "Handy" has been my least favourite word for more than a decade.
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Agreed. I think these words embiggen the English language and are perfectly cromulent.
I knew there had to be a way to say it easilyer.
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You are not precise enough!
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Hey! I wondered who that was. I remember thinking, "he was a pretty big guy so maybe Gav86?"
gun training working i guess - way to go dayyyyyyyyy moe!
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One Cornelius Blackfoot, Notting Hill Gate, en-route to flog some books
JAMIE
HatBeard
Brave
bq
Dammit
cyclotron3k
ChainBreaker
Brucy
serk
Oliver Schick
Regal
Sumo
kayaitch
rpm
Clara
TheorySwine
skydancer-
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@31trum
Agreed. I think these words embiggen the English language and are perfectly cromulent.