Icelandic Continues to Battle Extinction.

Icelandic dying now?

Checked ethnic groups info for Iceland.

89% Icelandic; 5% Polish; 1% Lithuanian; 5% other.

OK, so the Poles and Lithuanians are taking over both Ireland and Iceland…

the second one is stupid: borrowed words do not threaten the existence of a language. Obvious case in point: English, which is so full of loans you have to work to compose a sentence that’s free of them.

Apples and oranges. English absorbed the bulk of its loans in very different times and very different conditions from Iceland in the 21st century. For example, 99% of Icelanders today are taught English, whereas in late-medieval England, when English was acquiring much of its Latin vocabulary, 90-99% of English speakers were illiterate even in English, let alone Latin. Latin, French, etc. never penetrated into the home and daily life of Anglophones the way English does today in Iceland (among other places) thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, smartphones, etc. As English absorbed most of its foreign loans, it did so under conditions where the tiny literate bilingual minority introduced loanwords that made their way to those who did not speak the prestige language–an absolute majority of the population–and therefore were at no risk of abandoning their own language for the prestige language.

If anything, trying to force people not to use the words that come naturally to them will decrease the likelihood the language will survive.

The language planners in the video (who, by the way, say nothing about forcing people to do one thing or another) suggest that if people feel they have to rely on English to discuss important topics, they “start to look at the language as not complete.” Would you disagree that such an attitude (that is, that Icelandic is only good for discussing sheep and rocks and if you want to talk about technology or finance, you might as well switch to English entirely) contributes to language death?

I’m not some purist ideologically opposed to loanwords, but the argument that languages have always borrowed words and therefore “borrowed words do not threaten the existence of a language” strikes me as awfully similar to the argument that the climate has always been changing and therefore climate change does not threaten human existence. In both cases, the arguments are predicated upon ignoring the differences in historical conditions between the past and the present.

{thinking} a case could be made that Greenlandic Norse went extinct due to climate change.

a case could be made that Greenlandic Norse went extinct due to climate change.

But not because the climate changed Norse, but because it drove the Norse-speaking Greenlandic population away, lest their asses freeze up. The substrate of people went extinct, the language went with them as a secondary effect.

Language issues (including language extinction) contribute to the climate change by producing a lot of hot air.

Actually, there are lots of extinct languages and a lot of languages on the brink of extinction. How many of them went (or a going) dodo because of the loanwords?

On the fifth hand, maybe language is like wine. Objective facts are just distraction and it is personal feel that matters. New words is the easiest thing to notice and people of conservative disposition rail against them. It doesn’t matter how illegal immigration happens, just build that wall (and get Brexit done while you are at it).

It’s true that surrendering certain domains completely to another language can lead to language death (though I think loanwords are irrelevant to this, and actually work against it). But it can also lead to stable di- or multiglossia (and see the links to Lameen’s). An Algerian can’t talk about, much less write about, car repair in Darja because it lacks the terminology, nor in Standard Arabic because nobody knows those words even though they exist. But they can do it in French.

I’m not sure the purpose of language project such as the I Icelandic one is to force anyone to anything, rather it has several other purposes.
1. To give legitimacy to the standard language. English has other types of language standardisation projects, such as the OED and various style guides. Iceland has this project.
2. Create media interest. Making up new words and send press releases is a common method to gather media interest in the standard languange. A similar example would be the Nyordslista in Sweden. (The words in that list often are short-lived too.)
3. It’s true that the internet is dominated by the English language. Many services require English, to the annoyance of non-English speakers. However, I think that this annoyance is more common among speakers of strong standard languages, such as Swedish. When you’re used to all information being in the standard language, it’s annoying when suddenly there are things you can’t access without English.

Apples and oranges. Using words borrowed from English in the context of an Icelandic sentence is not equivalent to using English to discuss things. I can’t believe that’s such a difficult distinction to make.

I agree with you. But I also think lots of ordinary people find it a difficult distinction to make–hence all of these articles about language death, written by laypeople who don’t understand that distinction. Lacking words that feel native (however unscientific that might be) for modern terms contributes to the feeling that one’s language is backwards, not modern, or otherwise not useful. I don’t think loanwords alone causes language death, but they can contribute to attitudes L1 speakers have about their language (as others have pointed out) which do impact language death.

Are all the languages that use words similar to television, telephone, and computer on their way to death (though it’s not clear what language they’re surrendering to)? Creating sjónvarp, sími, and tölvu might be fun, but does it really help anything?

And Icelandic is a Serbo-Croatian surname.

is clearly an Armenian surname

Try the list of Roman emperors.

They were all Armenians, I tell you.

Octavian, Valerian, Domitian, Gordian, Numerian, Diocletian, Justinian, Kardashian….

The thing about Icelandic is that the use of calquing rather than loanwords for new vocabulary has long been a matter of deliberate language policy. There is nothing new about this policy, and the “language death” thing is a complete red herring; this is more analogous to things like Atatürk’s policy of replacing Arabic and Persian loans in Turkish.

eventually the locals were just speaking Russian with a weird accent and slightly weird grammar, while insisting that they were actually talking in Aleut.

Delhi Punjabi is like this: speakers are talking Hindi except for a few characteristic Punjabi grammatical particles. This is not like Yinglish or Angloromani, which are mostly about content words.

It’s true that it’s easier to borrow into English than most languages, but light verbs analogous to English do allow verbs to be borrowed as nouns, which is usually easier (indeclinable nouns are common, unconjugatable verbs are not). In any case, nothing linguistic can account for the acceptance of loanwords in Standard Serbian and their rejection from Standard Croatian.

Different languages borrow differently. English is very unlucky in this regard, with most declensions long dead, and few really productive morphological features.

(Just wanted to introduce some balance.)

In any case, nothing linguistic can account for the acceptance of loanwords in Standard Serbian and their rejection from Standard Croatian.

Nothing linguistic can account for Standard Serbian and Standards Croatian. 🙂

In any case, I wouldn’t let the Serbs off the hook that easily. For one, they’re extremely allergic to Bosnian (Turkish, they would say, as if the words haven’t been thorougly Slavicized) and/or Montenegrin words or forms. And they regard Croatian Slavicized neologisms as inherently ridiculous despite having adopted a good number of them (časopis, vodopod, etc). Plus Serbian officialdom keeps insisting on Cyrillic for reasons that can only be explained in terms of purism.

Slovenian is an interesting case – the standard language is nearly free of foreign loanwords, while the everyday vernacular is so thoroughly Germanized that it’s almost a southern Yiddish. Of course it’s still replete with Serbo-Croatian borrowings but those are basically impossible to identify and even if you could what would you replace them with? It’s like BCSM is the Scylla and German is the Charybdis.

In each language at any time, some speakers can be observed simplifying it, each in their own way, whether deliberately or otherwise. This surely is one of the main driving forces behind the complexity and fascination of languages. That’s because there is a counter driving force, the people who resist the simplifiers.

Similar phenomena may exist in other vocalizing species such as dogs and birds. Recording technology has not been around long enough to provide reliable data for analysis. Of course the productions of Mr. Ed The Talking Horse over the years may have already been phonemically analyzed.

There too we have the countervailing forces of you-must-do-this (academies, copyeditors, pundits, language teachers) and you-may-do-pretty-much-as-you-please (everybody else). The conflict itself contributes to complexity. If it had no effect on anything, why bring it up ?

@David: 1. Cyrillic is definitely in spontaneous use but I believe that the official documents of the Government of Serbia are published in Cyrillic only which…come on. For my generation anyway Cyrillic was always a kind of as joke, an inexplicable but benign archaism. Writing English in Cyrillic was a popular gag even when I was a kid – I can’t explain why but there’s just something inherently hilarious about it.

2. Well I should specify I learned it na Štajerskem, in Maribor to be precise. It’s distant enough from standard speech that it’s a bit like learning English as a second language in, like, Jamaica. The Štajerski (ie Styrian) is a world unto itself within Slovenian with phrases like “Si že auf” (Are you up yet?). There’s a fantastic instagram page called “stajerskiargo” that mines the local dialect for comic gold.

Irish and Scots Gaelic on the other hand work much better in Cyrillic. The current system requires that soft consonants have front vowels on both sides (or on the only side if initial or final) and hard consonants have back vowels adjacent in the same way. This means that you simply have to know (or sometimes guess) how a vowel digraph is pronounced. For example, in the standard language ao is pronounced /eː/, but it has hard consonants on both sides. The Cyrillic system of two sets of vowels that affect only the preceding consonant, plus a soft sign, is far easier to understand.

As an example, spelling Gaelach ‘Gaelic (adj.)’ as Гэ́лах and Gaeilge ‘Irish language’ as Гэ́лге is a lot clearer. (You don’t need a soft sign after л, because clusters are either all-hard or all-soft.) The accent is for vowel length and is required.

“nothing linguistic can account for the acceptance of loanwords in Standard Serbian and their rejection from Standard Croatian”

Depends on your definition of “linguistic”.

“Croatian linguists have been fighting a losing battle against “foreign” words but even the coercive machinery of the state has not been able to make their prescriptivist approach work. ”

I can’t think of one example where this has happened. The last time I checked Croatia is a democracy, and the government has other issues on its plate, rather than setting up a ‘coercive machinery’ to govern words.

There is a language institute, with functions similar to the Academy in France and in other European countries. Certainly Bosnia & Hercegovina, Montenegro and Serbia all have similar institutions. This institute publishes lists recommending Croatian equivalents for foreign loanwords. Sometimes these gain traction and sometimes they don’t.

Here are some examples of recommendations from the bolje.hr website:

– “vrhunski, najbolji, najtraženiji, najaktualniji” rather than English “top”. “Top” also means “cannon” in Croatian. The suggested equivalents mean “supreme, best, most wanted, most current”. I don’t think that this one will go far because top has been used in its English sense for a few decades and there is no one word equivalent for it.

– “dizajnerski hotel” rather than the English “design hotel”. This one has merit because the sequence “gn” does not occur at the end of Croatian words, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. |The spelling pronunciation of |design| is unpronouncable in Croatian, while the Croatian “dizajn” pron. |dizajn| has almost no resemblance to the English spelling. The Germanic collocation of two nouns also has been colloquially adopted in Croatia, especially by w*nkers and marketers who want to sound cool. But I like the grammatically correct adjective+noun combination that has been proposed. I’d adopt this recommendation.

– “(dokumentarni) film o snimanju” rather than the English “making of”. The Croatian equivalent literally means “film about the filming of”. “Making of” would be pronounced as |making of| or |mejking ov| in Croatian. I would use this unless I am talking about a film that is actually called “Making of something”.

Hardly fundamentalist purism. in any event most people translate in conversation.

final t after a palatalising vowel is always soft

It’s not in eg ряд.

“They regard Croatian Slavicized neologisms as inherently ridiculous despite having adopted a good number of them (časopis, vodopod, etc).”

časopis was originally coined in Czech (as a transparent calque of German Zeitschrift). I assume that it was borrowed directly from Czech by Serbian intellectuals during the 19th-century Pan-Slavism vogue. Interesting that Serbians today would think it a specifically Croatian thing.

Hey, my posting is back! Thanks much, Your Hatness.

I think restoring the dot but placing it below works best for Gaelics-in-Cyrillic. I’m also switching to doubled letters a la Mongolian for vowel length, because of its critical importance; in addition, no diacritic above looks very good with Cyrillic capitals. So I now write Гээлак̣ ‘Gaelic (adj.)’. That reduces the alphabet to “а аа б б̣ г г̣ д д̣ е ее ё ёё и ии к к̣ л м м̣ н о оо п п̣ р с с̣ т т̣ у уу ф ф̣ х ь ы ыы э ээ ю юю я яя”, though whether the long vowels count as separate letters (they don’t in Irish Latin spelling) is a separate issue.

Note that х is used for the marginal consonant /h/, and the soft sign is used only finally. Typographically ф̣ looks bad but raising the dot doesn’t help either: reviving the pre-1917 ѳ is probably the best thing despite its irregularity. Just adopting random Cyrillic letters breaks the morphophonemic spelling pattern and falls down on dh, gh which are pronounced the same but are related to d, g respectively; likewise sh, th, h have the same sound (only in the standard language) but pattern very differently. For the same reasons, vowel reduction is not noted and is very different from Russian vowel reduction: pretty much everything becomes schwa when unstressed, including even ё.

And blah, and blah, and lorem ipsum, and let’s hope there’s enough Latin text to keep the bot happy.

But people are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves which words to borrow as is and which to calque or replace in some other way; they have, after all, been borrowing words for millennia without benefit of learned bodies.

What ‘people’? Most people passively accept what others (early adopters, pioneers, authoritative figures, authors, etc.) have decided. What choice do people have in naming the elements of the periodic table? What choice do people have in deciding scientific terminology? What choice do people have in deciding legal technology? It’s nonsense to say that “people are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves which words to borrow as is, which to calque,” etc. This notion of some kind of “democratic process” doesn’t take into account the complex realities of vocabulary formation and adoption.

Why did English borrow an inordinate amount of Latinate and Hellenistic vocabulary? You can be assured it wasn’t some natural, organic process that “just happened”. It was decided by “fashion” at the time, especially among the writing classes. Nobody has a choice. It’s forced on them by their culture — or one part of their culture. Resistance to inkhorn terms continues today as a sociological phenomenon in the form of disdain for “big words” among a segment of the population.

If the Icelanders have a culture of purism and accepting decision-making by a learned elite, that is one of the multifarious ways that new vocabulary comes about. It’s not some abnormality or enormity. It’s just a more regular, disciplined process adopted by a small community for deciding what vocabulary it will use to describe the bewildering variety of new phenomena that are being thrown at it. It’s time to stop castigating Icelandic as some kind of aberration and see it as just one more example of the many ways that vocabulary is created and/or adopted by different languages. Extolling the English way is just another kind of prescriptivism.

Fulminating against efforts to bring about regular vocabulary formation is ridiculous. As a first step towards eliminating the artificial development and propagation of vocabulary, we should be eliminating universal education. That would really return us to the decentred process that you seem to prefer.

I am also mystified by the attitude that the wholesale adoption of foreign vocabulary is somehow superior to the use of native elements to form new vocabulary. There is no doubt a great deal of romance in tracing the origins of words (etymologists love this sort of thing), but there is also a great deal of satisfaction in seeing how vocabulary can be built as opposed to borrowing it indiscriminately.

You’re claiming that a government bureaucracy is not a group of “relevant” people ? The “relevance” in all the cases mentioned is self-attributed or arrogated. That includes “people … perfectly capable of deciding for themselves”. This is the pretension of unpretentiousness with an agenda.

I agree with Bademantel: This notion of some kind of “democratic process” doesn’t take into account the complex realities of vocabulary formation and adoption.

January First-of-May: I vaguely recall an anecdote (which I originally encountered on LH) about how an Aleutian language in far eastern Russia acquired so many Russian loans over time that eventually the locals were just speaking Russian with a weird accent and slightly weird grammar, while insisting that they were actually talking in Aleut.

I think this is not Copper Island Aleut but some comments from SFReader on Siberian languages, here and also here:

Vakhtin described the end result – a conversation between two speakers of Siberian Eskimo language which he believed was in Russian (all words being Russian with a few Eskimo inflections inserted).

But the speakers – mother and daughter – insisted that it was in Siberian Eskimo.

Is the objection only to government bureaucracies? What about academic associations?

In 1998, the Korean Chemical Society came up with new Korean renderings of a host of chemical terms, including basic ones such as the names of elements, and in the 2000s they successfully lobbied the National Institute of the Korean Language to accept these as standard despite controversy. Now they are used in textbooks, and a whole generation of Koreans is growing up learning these names.

They changed these terms without consulting the general public, disrupting a system that had broadly been in place a century. Terms that had been previously rendered based on German pronunciation (intermediated by Japanese) are now rendered in partial imitation of English pronunciation. Manganese, which used to be 망간 manggan (cf. German Mangan is now 망가니즈 mangganijeu (applying the full guidelines for transcribing the English pronunciation would have given 맹거니즈 maenggeonijeu). For now, the language authorities are accepting both forms as standard, but the Korean Chemical Society will likely keep pushing to abolish the older forms as they have already done internally.

As you might expect, many people who are used to the old names see the whole enterprise as unnecessary and misguided. It has met opposition from other scientists as well, such as biologists. The renaming may make code-switching easier for Korean chemists talking at international conferences in English, but offers little benefit for the general public.

Yet the public doesn’t get much choice in these decisions. People may rail against the renaming, but students today are already growing up learning these new names. One could argue that the role of the language authorities should be to rein in specialist groups like the Korean Chemical Society when they decide to get in on some language planning of their own, but in this case the National Institute of the Korean Language proved to be a pushover.

@J W Brewer

I wasn’t maintaining that universal education is a good thing. Merely pointing out that if you don’t like government interference in language, you should be opposed to universal education, too. It is an official outside force that has had a huge impact on language.

@ Jongseong Park

Is the objection only to government bureaucracies? What about academic associations?

I suspect that our amiable host hasn’t thought this through very deeply. He is merely giving voice to a peeve that he appears to have held for many decades: that setting up academies to regulate language is a “bad thing”.

In the case of Iceland, if (1) there is an established tradition of linguistic purism, (2) the people agree with this tradition, (3) both the government and the learned establishment feel they have a mission to uphold it in practice, and (4) the people of the community support them in their efforts, the opinions of an outsider who believes that this approach to language is wrong “in principle” can be freely ignored.

On the other hand, Bathrobe surely is right on this occasion.

Myself, I often don’t think things through at all, let alone deeply. Perfectly nice dogma-free people point this out to me on occasion, not all of them close relatives.

I have yet to find a Russian source for дороож, although I have been routinely told it is Russian.

Presuming that it is definitely Russian, I would guess дорожка, as in ковровая дорожка “carpet strip”, though if so, I’m surprised that the “strip” word was borrowed instead of the actual “carpet” word.

That said, with no further information, I would consider it far more plausible that the word is not actually of (recent) Russian origin.

That’s very odd statement. Are there countries where they don’t teach their language in schools?

IIRC, in some countries it is permissible to have schools for minority language speakers (especially in areas dominated by such) that do not technically actually teach the main official language; e.g., if the UK was such a country (I’m not sure if it is), there could have been a school in Wales that taught Welsh but not English.
(It helps if there are multiple official languages, but, IIRC, exceptions exist even outside that case.)

Alternately, they’re trying to say that the language of education has to be Icelandic; I’m not sure if that’s true, but it certainly seems plausible.

There is a difference between (various kinds of) standardization and creating new vocab ex nihilo.

Though it is also likely they will become obsolete before they make it into dictionaries.

There is, or I think, was, a Mongolian term “maniul” which means “handcrank”.

Obviously it is not used anymore since cars which required it are no longer on the road.

It’s origin remained mystery since there is nothing even remotely similar in Russian and it is clearly not Mongolian.

After some contemplation, I decided it belongs to the oldest layer of Mongolian car terminology and as such was borrowed not from Russian, but from English directly (first car in Mongolia was American Ford-T, bought by Mongolian ruler Bogdo-Gegen in 1914)

So I have strong suspicion that “maniul” comes from English word “manual”.

Perhaps before American usage settled on hand-crank there were other variants.

“Manual start” for example.

This Mongolized Russian reminds me of Japanified English.

Are there countries where they don’t teach their language in schools? Like reading, writing, grammar and stuff like that?

Sure, as long as you are counting private schools. It is perfectly feasible to educate a child in Vienna in English with only marginal exposure to German. In fact the American International School here just dropped compulsory German instruction in middle school because parents complained it was a waste of time.

Icelandic anxiety is presumably mostly about immigrants similarly deciding that there is no economic value in having their kids learn Icelandic when they could be improving their English, math skills, etc.

people who are interested in using these specialized words who decide what they want to use

The fact that they are “interested” does not automatically confer on them a right to determine “correct vocabulary”. I’m afraid I’m rather cynical about the process. Ornithologists are a case in point. There is interminable wrangling over the “common names” of species in English, with different authorities coming up with different names.

In Mongolia I have met the man who effectively has the power to set the Mongolian “common names” of bird species, which are then set in stone with government approval. He told me that since names in common usage aren’t clear as to genus or species, he can assign existing names to genera as he sees fit. This has resulted in musical chairs among existing generic names (e.g., among the owls) and the creation of slightly (and artificially) differentiated names for different genera of crane. I’ve also watched him in action conjuring closely related names for certain American genera out of thin air.

Perhaps this is peculiar to small countries / languages like Mongolia(n), but it’s not really that different from the wrangling that goes on over English-language names.

If we’re talking about terms for more modern concepts like ‘troll’, ‘hacker’ or ‘cyberbullying’, these are less contentious since they are totally new concepts and arise out of communities that are involved in these fields. This is perhaps more in the vein of what Hat was discussing.

水銀 suigin ‘liquid silver’

Hg stands for an apparently barely attested hydrargyrum.

@Bathrobe: I have probably mentioned before that at MIT (where the term originated), using “hacker” to refer to a programmer is considered a solecism, a clear marker of an outsider to Institute culture.

Well, we will have to agree to disagree. I don’t think that borrowing words from other languages results in “language death”. That is ridiculous. But the insistence that any influence on a language is acceptable as long as it is not conscious, officially backed language planning strikes me as overly rigid. That appears to be the only difference between us.

My position is that there is language planning and language planning, and not all of it is inherently bad. Nor are “unplanned” situations as free from control and manipulation as you seem to be suggesting.

But I guess this is akin to arguing about “democracy” as an ideology, which is probably an inherently futile exercise.

I remember reading that in Tahiti, a ruler once died and according to ancient custom, all words which were part of the name of the deceased ruler became taboo and had to be avoided in speech.

Unfortunately, the long name of the ruler in question included very widespread verb meaning “to stand”.

It must have been hard to replace such a common word, but the Tahitians managed.

Taboo is taboo.

No exceptions.

And now you can complain about language academies.

Vanya:

There’s been an International School in Iceland for 60 years but it’s primarily for children whose parents are on temporary assignment in Iceland. Non-Icelandic citizens, that is to say. I´m sure this holds true for most International Schools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_School_of_Iceland.

There’s a “Polish School “in Iceland but classes are only held on Saturdays when kids don’t attend regular school. The Grand Mosque of Iceland similarly holds classes in Arabic for kids on Saturdays.

I’m sure Poles in Iceland who are still Polish citizens (the majority of them are) could found a real school where the language of education is Polish. But I think Poles who have acquired Icelandic citizenship are required to send their kids to regular school.

“Icelandic anxiety is presumably mostly about immigrants similarly deciding that there is no economic value in having their kids learn Icelandic when they could be improving their English, math skills, etc.”

Children of immigrants do poorly in school in Iceland. This is really anxiety inducing for the educational authorities for sure but I think ordinary Icelanders worry more about their own kids. Especially kids who spend practically every waking hour online. Like, gaming. Kids whose social lives revolve around interactive games, say, where English is the lingua franca. Eventually they come to believe that they are more proficient in English than Icelandic simply because they communicate with such ease with their online buddies (many of whom aren’t even native English speakers). In reality their command of English is pretty limited because the English language world they inhabit is so small.

I think parents in Iceland worry about bilingualism if it simply means kids become bad at two languages.

Slovenian is an interesting case – the standard language is nearly free of foreign loanwords, while the everyday vernacular is so thoroughly Germanized that it’s almost a southern Yiddish.

Forgot to add… I get what you mean, but this description is a bit misleading. As with any variety with considerable foreign vocab, people tend to overestimate the actual amount of it in Slovenian dialects (other examples that immediately come to my mind are people commonly describing Chakavian as mostly using Italian words, or Chiac being thought of as a 50:50 mix).

Also, agree with zyxt on the extent of modern Croatian purism. It was kind of a thing in the early 90s (though even then very far from the exaggerated myths about it), but it’s basically a non-factor today.

It’s very much a factor today – just a few weeks ago, three young linguists published the book “Jeziku je svejedno” (“It’s all the same to language”) – a kind of manifesto against the omnipresent purism choking the Croatian language. The authors rely on modern linguistic science to inform their views on language use and policy, and that this approach is considered unusual (even radical) tells you that the purism issue is very much an ongoing and unresolved one in Croatia. Of course, the root causes of this phenomenon are not entirely linguistic, which is also why it’s such a sensitive subject.

@Athel Cornish-Bowden: American English can be written entirely without diacritical marks. I know, because I do it all the time. Both of the examples you mention can be written without accent marks, although the marks are sometimes used. “Cafe,” in particular, is totally fine without it, which is probably partially enabled by the fact that there is no tradition in America of pronouncing the word with only one syllable.

At a conference a few years ago, I told some colleagues that my personal preference would be to write everything without diacritics. My former boss (who I still collaborate with) asked, in mock indignation, whether I was saying that he, who writes his name with a “ý,” did not know how to spell his own name. I told him, no, you are just writing it in a different alphabet than I prefer to use.

American English can be written entirely without diacritical marks

Yes and it is my preference as well. But there is a big difference between can and is.
This is especially true for English which doesn’t have a single prescriptive body and leaves by grown order. Even a cursory search for “jalapeño” shows that English writers like to use the diacritics.

It’s true that Serbian Cyrillic has no diacritics but then again Croatian doesn’t either – č, ć, dž, đ, š, and ž are all members of the alphabet in their own right. A native speaker does not perceive ć as a “modified c” the way English speakers do with é.

This is, of course, also true for Russian Cyrillic – letter names nonwithstanding, native Russian speakers don’t really perceive й as a modified и, and usually don’t perceive ё as a modified е either.
(The latter had actually slipped down a bit with the common replacement of ё by е, but I think they’re still perceived as different letters rather than variants of the same one.)

“TECHNICIÄNS ÖF SPÅCE SHIP EÅRTH THIS IS YÖÜR CÄPTÅIN SPEÄKING YÖÜR ØÅPTÅIN IS DEA̋D.” Of course that’s an eccentric variety of BrEng (with possible SAfEng interference) rather than any sort of AmEng.

It’s their editors who like to use them, belike.

In any case, there is a difference between French é, which is not a separate letter of the alphabet, and Icelandic é, which is. A French person will say the alphabet has 26 letters, two of which (K, W) are not used in French; an Icelander will say there are 32 letters (26 minus C, Q, W, Z plus six vowels with acute plus Ð, Þ, Æ, Ö), all of which are used in Icelandic. Unicode of course doesn’t give a hoot.

Naturally, unassimilated loanwords and proper names break these rules, but most languages do that, Serbian being the big exception. Here’s a nice illustration from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, anno MMIX Geolmonað xxx d. (the latest entry available to me): “Her ond in æfterdagum aswulton .lxxvi. oððe maran þurh horhslidunga in Brazile”, enve though there was no Z in Old English.

I would like to abolish apostrophes because they’re a constant irritation in mobile telephone messaging (‘Will it remember to add one this time?’) as well as being a time-waster. But I’m not going to be the first person to stop using them.

The fear that Icelanders might stop speaking Icelandic and switch to American is just worrying about nothing. It’s a rich country, it ain’t gonna happen, there are plenty of more important linguistic things for them to think about. For example, the chain of cheapo frozen-food supermarkets in Britain called Iceland. How would Britons like it if Iceland started a chain of shoddy shops selling cold rain and called it The United Kingdom? One peculiar thing about the teenagers who claim to have learnt English from watching Friends (why are children watching a 1990s tv show about 20-somethings?) and playing video games is why don’t they acquire the slightest bit of an American accent?

I love the diversity of South Slavic viewpoints. I also love that you (pl.) are willing to go out on a limb and overstate a case. It brings the issue to attention, and the following discussion is usually very enlightening. Keep it up, all of you.

e[ven] though there was no Z in Old English

Though of course even the contemporary Anglo-Saxons used the Z when they had to deal with foreign names that required it, such as ða burh Ȝaza (the city of Gaza) in Genesis 10:19 (as given in Wikisource).
[EDIT: I think they would still have been fine with in Brasile, though, especially since the Brasilians spell it with an S anyway.]

…And as far as jalapeñ(n)o is concerned, perhaps the really interesting question is the frequency of habañero (which should of course be habanero even in Spanish).

habañero

And its relative the Scotch boññet pepper.

nemanja says: A native speaker does not perceive ć as a “modified c”

This is an interesting statement. Has any research been done on this?
For my part, I definitely see the connection between c č and ć; n and nj etc.

Agree with Andrej Bjelaković that what we are discussing here is prescriptivism rather than purism.
Example 1: Both sport and šport are words of non-Slavic origin. Surely if it was question of purism rather than prescriptivism, then Croatian would have used a Croatian alternative. These are two pronunciations of the same word. The situation is akin to the two pronunciations of “schedule” or of the word “either” in English.

“šport” was the normal Croatian word until the middle of the 20th century and it had an alternative pronunciation “sport”. There are a number of words with the “s” / “š” alternation in the same bucket: študent, škandal, špekulacija etc. Because the Serbian language preferred the “s” variant, in the interests of “brotherhood and unity” or Serbian hegemony, the “š” variant became marked as undesirable. It continued in the spoken language of the older generation though until after the fall of Yugoslavia.

Example 2: Croatian seems to be held up us a poster child for linguistic purism here. But is this more of a gut feeling or has anyone actually sifted through the evidence?

Here is evidence of Croatian happily accepting the “international” terminology:
Croatian: film; Spanish: pelicula
Croatian: televizor; German: Fernseher
Croatian: kino; Hungarian: mozi
Why aren’t Spanish, German, Hungarian etc. condemned for their purism as well? And why is there a need to condemn anyone for purism anyway? If the speakers of another language want to invent a word for something, let them do it – who cares.

Maybe it’s the choice of words you choose to submit to purism.

Spanish – fútbol
German – Fußball
Hungarian – futball
Russian – futbol
Croatian – nogomet

That’s more than enough to ridicule Croatian forever

But that’s what communication is, as Luhmann discusses in great detail – a system that operates, maintains and reproduces itself.

“Society is an autopoietic system based on meaningful communication. It consists of communications, it consists only of communications, it consists of all communications. It reproduces communication through communication…. Society is therefore a closed and an open system at the same time, and communication is the form of the elementary operation that constantly makes this combination and reproduces it.”

(My translation of Luhmann (1998), or at least, 10% me and 90% Google Translate, but checked by a German colleague.)

For some reason Niklas Luhmann is regarded a great thinker by some sociologists, but his whole book is little more than a waffling expansion of the bit I quoted (“great detail” is le mot juste). The claim that he applied autopoiesis to sociology is not accepted by Humberto Maturana (2002), who originated it:

“We living systems are molecular systems that exist in the molecular domain spontaneously without external processes driving them. As I say this I also claim that autopoiesis occurs only in the molecular domain.”

That doesn’t make Maturana right, of course: the inventor of a theory is not its owner. Nonetheless, in this case I think he’s right. Most attempts to broaden autopoiesis (such as Dollens, D., 2014. Alan Turing’s drawings, autopoiesis and can buildings think? Leonardo, 47(3), 249–253. doi: 10.1162/leon a 00766) would be candidates for discussion in a future edition of Impostures Intellectuelles.

One medium-sized waffle by him is Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität [1968], about the differences between function and purpose. It hasn’t been translated into English, so far as I know. But here it is in Spanish, which I know you can deal with: Fin y racionalidad en los sistemas

@Athel:

This year I have been very struck by the differences in register (vocabulary, syntax) between the kinds of Spanish coming from different souces: Spanish newspapers and podcasts (cienciaes com) or the online RAE, Mexican newspapers and radio, Texmex in Austin. Although my Spanish is pretty good, every time I read a definition in the RAE I feel transported to Andromeda – so superior Spanish, my dears, that it might be a different language. If I wore a hat I would doff it.

Luhmann’s prose (and that of many high-end German Denker) is comparable to that of RAE definitions. Either you get into the flow, or not. It takes a while.

I reluctantly admit that the same might be true of high-end French Denker. Trouble is, I always feel they’re not trying very hard (which can’t be said of Luhmann). They swish around in furs and bling, something even a low-end drag queen can do without thinking.

OMG. That’s one of the very few I haven’t read, along with Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (I ain’t particularly innarested in art, nor in economics). I admire your courage, but maybe you should try a Spanish translation of something else with a less narrow focus, in particular Fin y racionalidad. If it hasn’t all been spoiled for you by now. Or indeed Sistemas Sociales.

Of course the diacritical letters are ‘perceived’ as separate letters. That is what you learn at school. For the purposes of dictionaries and alphabetisation they are treated as separate letters. They stand for different sounds.

The assertion, however, was that they are perceived as somehow not having diacritics. Is there any evidence for this assertion?

To continue with football example (from the national FA names):
Denmark: boldspil
Finland: palloliito
Italy: calcio
Poland: pilki nożny
Hungary: labdarúgo
Cyprus: podosferu
Estonia: jalgpalli
USA: soccer

Which reminds me of the end of an indignant letter about a review by Julian Barnes of Degas and His Model, from the TLS letter section of 8 February 2018

The beginning of the letter is also interesting to read (though not from the point of view of language in general or translation in particular).

In 2009 there was an exhibition of paintings at the Musée Cantini in Marseilles. When we visited it my wife and I agreed that Degas’s Les Choristes was the only one we would like to have hanging in our apartment. That night the gallery was broken into and Les Choristes was the only painting stolen (not by us!). Evidently the thieves had the same judgement as we did about which had the highest value (though they probably had resale value in mind rather than artistic value). abcNews (found with Wikipedia) informs me that it was found last year in a bus in “Marne-la-Vallee, a French town located about 15 miles east of Paris”. I’m surprised that they refer to Marne-la-Vallée rather than to Disneyland, which must surely be the best known thing in Marne-la-Vallée for people who don’t live in Marne-la-Vallée.

It’s OK Cornish-Bowden, you aren’t doing the asserting.

Now regarding the assertion itself: For example, a counterfactual could be to examine what occurred in the days of ascii mobile phone texting and emails. The substitutes for eg. ž and dž respectively were zz and dz. If ž and dž were truly perceived as not having diacritics then you would expect other substitutes to be used, rather than relying on the base letter Z.

Thanks Hans. The words are straight out of the name of the relevant FA. I’d expect the others to be in cases other than the nominative too, or to be adjectives not nouns.

@hans
https://www.schoenes-polen.de/romane-und-geschichten/von-dem-gluck-hrdlak-gekannt-zu-haben-janosch
This book has a rather nasty “German” character Herr Pelka. So in English he would be Mr. Ball?

It might be more interesting to see what happens with sport names that aren’t obvious compounds…

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pujottelu

The verb it’s formed on:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pujotella
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pujottaa

This book has a rather nasty “German” character Herr Pelka. So in English he would be Mr. Ball?
Possible. But I don’t know much about the Upper Silesian dialect of Polish.

This topic is discussed somewhere else here at the Hattery in quite a lot of detail…

I was about to say that sure Icelandic has a Z, but it turns out to have been abolished in 1973. God I’m old.

Thanks, Brett. I wonder how the name came about. From US servicemen in playing it Germany, maybe?

OED, s.v. Foosball (note capital F — why??):

It’s a genericized trademark, presumably applied by the original U.S. manufacturer. Checking, it has now been abandoned, so anyone can use it for anything.

The Cyprus FA is called Κυπριακή Ομοσπονδία Ποδοσφαίρου in Greek (calque) and Kıbrıs Futbol Federasyonu in Turkish (borrowing, which fortunately already has vowel harmony).

One of the complaints against Webster’s Third was that “the only word capitalized [was] God“. Earlier dictionaries scrupulously capitalized trademarks, not just because of the preference of the trademark holders, but (I think) because they were accounted proper names. Aspirin wasn’t just any old acetylsalicylic acid tablets, it was Bayer’s specifically, in the same way that the White House isn’t just any old white house. It’s only genericized in the U.S. now because the trademark was seized during WWII by the Alien Property Custodian as valuable property owned by an enemy alien corporation, and by the time BASF was able to try to reassert the trademark, it was widely used generically. (Capitalization has no legal bearing on a trademark’s status.)

Your spellchecker is probably founded on pre-1923 word lists out of an abundance of caution.

As for foosball tables as-we-know-them, they were invented, as far as is known, in the U.K. in 1921; the name foosball was intended to mimic the uses of similar words in other Germanic languages, but a direct connection to German cannot be proved. It was reinvented in France in the 1930s (babyfoot) and in Spain in 1937 (futbolín); they were first sold in the U.S. in the 1950s and caught on in the 1970s it is the Spanish version of the tables that is used today.

The international federation, the ITSF calls it table soccer; despite the English name and acronym, they are a French company and so must have a French name, but their website has no French option I can find and WP.en knows of none. The French NB is called “Fédération française de football de table”, as you’d expect; the British and U.S. NBs use foosball in their names. The ITSF is recognized as the governing body and has observer status at the IOC, but table soccer is not yet an Olympic sport. (FIDE, after all, has bid to make chess official in 2024 after an exhibition at the 2000 games.)

I think it’s stupid to capitalize “internet” as well.

That’s because you don’t go back to the time when the Internet was just one of many (unlinked or minimally linked) internets, though even then the largest and most prominent.

You may note from time to time that I capitalize Hell (and Heaven): to quote Bill Safire, “It’s a place, like Scarsdale.” But not in “run like hell” (or “my blue heaven”).

Oh, I know you were around personally in 1974, but were you familiar with the uses of internet/Internet then?

Hat: I personally think it’s stupid to capitalize any noun that has entered the common vocabulary, and the hell with the preferences of trademark holders.

And even more so with their hyphenation and mid-caps! This bugs me in “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr., in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990):

As we clamber into the Bonanza, I see the girl has what could be an attractive body if there was any spark at all. There isn’t. Captain Estéban folds a serape to sit on so he can see over the cowling and runs a meticulous check-down. And then we’re up and trundling over the turquoise Jell-O of the Caribbean into a stiff south wind.

It was “Jello” in Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Ballantine, 1975), so I wonder if somebody at Arkham House was excessively deferential to a trademark. Would the story’s narrator be so meticulous? Certainly not, and it’s a famous and influential story because of how brilliantly it uses the narrator’s voice. This is a character who conceals everything about himself, but his voice says it all, the voice of a past-middle-age manly man who would never have bought a package of Jell-O himself.

And it’s so close in the story to a capitalization choice of utter genius:

Estéban yells some more into his set, flying a falling plane. He is doing one jesus job, too—as the water rushes up at us he dives into a hair-raising turn and hangs us into the wind—with a long pale ridge of sandbar in front of our nose.

Lowercase jesus! As an attributive! Perfect, and I can’t think of any other writer who could come up with that.

Arkham House did a beautiful job of typography and design, of course; I just disagree with this one copyedit. Tiptree must have been a challenge to edit, what with Spanish words and places, sf words, real and made-up slang, lots of small-caps SHOUTING and so on.

Well, c’mon, you’re not meeting my point. Proper names are capitalized as a rule, and Internet is a proper name in my book (it has never been a trademark, so that’s irrelephant). “Did you read that in the New York Times?” “No, I saw it on the Internet.” Both with caps and for the same reason.

(Of course, nowadays you can do both at the same time.)

“soccer”, (…) short for “association [football]”

Huh. Why the /k/ then…? It’s even spelled as if to still suggest /s/.

Trying to edit garbled comment. Giving up now.

Who put the d in bold?

irrelephant

I beg to differ: there are plenty of elephants on the Internet.

Huh. Why the /k/ then…? It’s even spelled as if to still suggest /s/.

From an Oxford-or-something tradition of turning abbreviations (Assoc.) into nicknames by reading them aloud and adding -er or -ers, with adjustments to the spelling to preserve vowel shortness but not anything else. It’s all in a thread here somewhere.

As in “I was simply aghast to see the New Staggers falling for the Tory line on Jeremy.”

Ingsoc I remember, ingdoc I don’t. Interesting question. I mentally pronounced it as in soccer, but maybe “ingsosh” (as in soshialism) was intended.

Who put the d in bold?

Proto-Germanic, generally speaking, but it’s complicated. PIE *bʰel- ‘blow, swell up’ (one of several apparently unrelated ones) gave a doublet in Proto-Germanic: *balþaz ‘strong, bold’ and balluz ‘ball’. To be bold is to be a blowhard, and a ball is something that’s been blown up. (Strangely, they merged again in Gothic as balþs.)

With uncommon uniformity, the first one became bold, bald in North and West Germanic That includes English: why was it beald in OE and not bealþ > bolth? I have no idea. In Old East Norse, however, it was replaced by móðugr > Da No modig (Icelandic has several words, none of which look related). This happened much later further south, giving Du moedig, G mutig. (G bald ‘almost; soon is said to be from OHG id. ‘bold’, but if so, what happened to the Second Sound Shift?) But with bald completely gone from North Germanic, there was room for ….

Anyway, what about balluz? No reason that shouldn’t be bal(l)- everywhere, and so it is. Except Danish, where there’s not only bold ‘ball’ but also balde ‘buttock; ball (of the foot or hand)’. Perhaps because there was room for it, an l could pop up here and here only. (But what do I know?)

Ball got into Finnic, but also into Mediaeval Latin > French > Spanish and Italian; in the latter it picked up an augmentative and went > French > English balloon, the thing that’s so swelled up, it rises. Which reminds me that the non-Germanic cognate of these words is phallos.

“Soc” as a clipping of “Society” [in names] or “Sociology” [in university course codes*] is invariably /k/ in IrE and I assume BrE. cf. also “bicycle”>”bike”.

I had friends studying sociology; dunno if they clipped the name of the subject among themselves, but they didn’t when talking to me. Hypothesis: US highschool/college students shorten class&activity names more than cispondians. Evidence: soc, trig, track, crew, …hmm, maybe just those.

G bald ‘almost; soon is said to be from OHG id. ‘bold’, but if so, what happened to the Second Sound Shift?

The simplest explanation is that this is the *þ form.

But apparently the “courage” meaning in “balls” is much more direct and straighforward.

You still need the metaphor at least to explain the plural; but I suppose the direct meaning could have helped in the creation of the metaphor (which is, for instance, much rarer in German).

“Emily Thornberry was aghast to see Corbbers fall for the Tory line on when to hold it.”

What, she expected him to wet himself? (Cf. Tycho, who died of uremia after he had refused to leave the King’s banquet on the grounds that it would be a breach of etiquette.)

And I thought balls as in “he’s got balls” metaphorically refer to testicles

Just so, and although women can be said to have balls, and ballsy is actually female by default, men often look like they feel a little funny saying “She’s got balls.” (It’s not a metaphor I myself use.)

The simplest explanation is that [ModG bald] is the *þ form.

That’s workable. Now the next thing to wonder is how the semantic shift happened. It seems singularly unmotivated to me.

One of the people quoted in the video is Ross Perlin, a linguist who is Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance and who has featured at LH more than once (e.g., 2014, 2016); the Alliance has published a map of 637 languages of New York City. It’s got some odd entries (nobody speaks Old Church Slavonic or Koine Greek, even in NYC)

If you look closely (even enlarged, some of the characters are still small), there are asterisks by some of those odd entries, and a legend near the top right:

*=Historical
**=Reviving
†=Liturgical
‡=Taught

OCS and Koine are used liturgically, as are other languages. Ancient Egyptian(!), Manchu (!!), and Akkadian (!!!) are taught.

OCS and Koine are used liturgically,
I’d be interested to know who uses OCS liturgically; what you normally find in liturgical use is Church Slavic in its national (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian) variants. As mentioned here at LH before, OCS is only the language of the oldest documents from the 9th – early 11th century.
But it’s possible that OCS is among the languages taught at NYC universities.

Since the map shows the OCS used on the Upper East Side section of Manhattan, I searched for [“upper east side” slavonic] and found:

https://www.joinmychurch.org/churches/Christ-the-Saviour-Church-New-York-New-York-United-States/70611

The history of the Church suggests why they differ from other Orthodox Churches.

Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Manhattan was founded in 1924, the same year the Russian Metropolia in North America proclaimed its canonical independence at the Council in Detroit.
Both events constituted the response of the Orthodox faithful in America to the violent advances of the so-called “Living Church” in Russia, which was inspired and backed by the Bolshevik Regime. The “Living Church” claimed, rather successfully, the properties of the American Metropolia. Thus in New York City, by a court trial, the “Living Church” gained St. Nicholas’ church, the pontifical cathedral of the Metropolia. It is to replace this loss that a group of Russian immigrants led by Metropolitan Platon, the head of the American Metropolia, founded the parish of Christ the Savior. From 1924 to 1970, the church was located in Harlem, where, in the 1930s-40s, it became the biggest Russian church in the city, providing various community services and activities and even lending space for the classes of St. Vladimir Theological Seminary founded in NYC in 1938. In 1948, Metropolitan Theophilus and the Synod of bishops elevated Christ the Savior Church to the status of cathedral.
[. . .]
Today the church celebrates liturgy in Slavonic and English

The mappers might have been mistaken in specifically writing Old Church Slavonic.

I also found a creepy account of a modern, cheerful, well-to-do Stalin apologist.

Engels was a millionaire and his views were extremely radical. Likely he would have been as bad as Stalin if he ever managed to become German dictator.

There’s a German expression das ist der Hammer meaning “this is so very astounding” (usually in a good way). Hammer? What hammer?

Pretty sure “the shit” is drug culture slang. “Good shit” => “good drugs” => “the good time had at a party with good drugs” => “good time” (generally).

Come to think of it, “[the] bomb” (in the positive sense) is probably from drug culture slang as well; “sudden rapid drug high”.

I’m guessing, though. All I actually know of drug culture is depictions in media.

I wonder how drug theory would explain “sex bomb”.

once you commit to apologizing for blatant criminality you’re going to accept a lot of stupid ideas to prop up your central idiocy.

Well said.