[Multilingual Monday] Linguistic purism, fake etymologies, minority languages

[aadroma]

Because it's the start of Eurovision season, I am often found on the weekend watching webcasts of various countries' selections live via the internet -- even if I can't understand it! This week I was watching a webcast from Iceland and realised how little Icelandic I understand! Though it is related to other Scandanavian languages, several

Comments

[kevynjacobs]

Norwegian's "telefon" and "elektrisitet" are English loanwords? I thought they were from Latin/Greek.

The ancient Greek root word, elektron, means “amber" -- so the Iceland calque makes sense.

Loan words are fun!

[dodgingwndshlds]

Loan words can have roots or origins in other languages. They are still classified as "loaned" from the language of direct contact. Unless "elektisitet" and "telefon" can be shown to have come from direct contact of Greek or Latin and Icelandic as opposed to contact with English, they would be correctly labeled as loaned from English. This is because while the roots of the loaned word may be Greek or Latin, the pronunciation, modern definitions, and usage of the word "electricity" is decidedly English and the Icelandic word comes from contact with the phonetics and contextual meanings of that English word and not the Greek or Latin root.

Re: Loan words are fun!

[kevynjacobs]

It's the "decidedly English" English part I'm questioning. I can see "Telephone" as being an English loanword, since the object was invented in North America, and the word coined in English. But "Electricity?" Is it verifiable that the word comes from English?

Re: Loan words are fun!

[dodgingwndshlds]

To be fair, the answer depends of which camp of linguistics you subscribe to. Sociolinguists (my camp... Go team, go!) would say yes, absolutely English. Theoretical linguists might argue roots... Especially since the word at one time in the comparatively recent past existed as primarily scientific jargon. (Before it was common to have control of electricity, it wouldn't have been part of the vernacular, I would think. Though I can't quantify that... It's an educated guess.)

[dodgingwndshlds]

I am looking at the literature on inter-sentential code switching in Native bilingual Spanish/English speakers in North America right now...(It's rule governed! With predictable rules that cross language pairs...squeeeee!!) I have a colleague in Panama right now, and she sent me a interesting example of another kind of contact phenomenon that she was interested in categorizing...As I am sure you can imagine, Panama's history gives opportunity for contact phenomenon between the local Spanish and several other languages, including American and British English.

In Panama right now, a popular greeting is "¿Que Xopa?" Xopa is an alternate, colloquial spelling of "sopa," obviously, which means "soup."

So, a direct translation gives us "What soup?"

If you were to say the American English phrase "What's up?" with a Spanish accent, you would say something that sounded like "what soup."

Best label we could come up with is "Lexicalized loan pun"

LOL!!

[muckefuck]

When I was a student in Germany, we did this all the time. "Hoch!" and "Einkauf!" for "Hi!" and "Bye!", "Was ist auf?" for "What is up?", "Geh ein Kopf!" for "Go ahead!" and so forth. None of these were "lexicalised" in the sense that this was our own argot and it was rather dynamic.

[muckefuck]

Icelandic is still a heavily declining language

This makes it sound like Icelandic is language that is rapidly going out of use! I know exactly what you mean, but "heavily-inflecting" would be a more felicitous way of putting it.

If anyone else has examples of "faux etymologies

When a strange word's form is changed to match a pre-existing one, we call this a "folk etymology". Examples from English include woodchuck (from Algonquikan wuchak) and bridgegroom (the second element represents OE gumu "man" and is not related to groom "someone who grooms horses").