111–120 of 205 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pendrive is common across whole English and the non-English speaking world.
As a resident of the English speaking world I'm going to have to disagree with you.
When talking to some of the US customers they use it as well. It is not as popular as USB stick or Flash drive, but still quite common.
Reminds me of "handy", the German word for "cell phone". My German friend said "we just use the English word for that." I have yet to find an English speaker who calls a mobile phone a "handy".
"Handphone" is common in SE Asia, from the literal translation of the Chinese word.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Quebec they literally have a french word to replace all common english expressions and prevent borrowing. I met some ladies from Quebec while in France, and they were horrified at how tainted the French spoken by the natives had become. They said at one point they just started speaking exclusively in English because they couldn't stand hearing French butchered by the natives. It's apparently a common phenomenon th…
> It's apparently a common phenomenon that language continues to evolve and grow in the native country, while in colonies and former colonies, people tend to become more protective and orthodox about the language. Language continues to evolve and grow everywhere. What's going on isn't some impossible impulse in the Quebecois to conserve their language; they are trying to differentiate themselves from English-speaking…
But they still do, sorty of, in that France has some of the strictest laws pertaining to language use in Europe.
> risqué meaning ‘risked’ (a verb, not an adjective) No. "risqué" is also an adjective denoting that something involves risks (like "risky" in English) or that a statement is licentious, shocking (like "risqué" in English).
It's a past participle anyhow, stating it is “a verb, not an adjective” is strange given these are often both.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would have died on the spot if they went to Acadia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiac
Wow I did not know about that. The example sentences are hilarious!
If you use LaTeX for typesetting, the document class for slideshow presentations is called Beemer. My understanding is that this is a German psuedo-anglicism related to projectors.
It's important to understand that few Germans are even aware it exists and its conservative views are extremely unpopular and non-standard. Even the Council for German Orthography which regulates German orthography as taught in schools only has two Association representatives in its total of 18 German council members.
In practice Germans generally regard the Duden (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) as the ultimate authority on German orthography and vocabulary. And the Duden generally takes a descriptivist approach, adapting to language change rather than trying to halt it.
Additionally, there seems to be a strong correlation between Germans with strong opinions about loan words and Germans with strong opinions about immigrants (or more recently the loss of "occidental identity" via "Überfremdung").
There are of course people who feel strongly about language who aren't also nazis in the more literal sense but the kind of complaints people have about language use often gives you a relatively safe indicator of their political views:
Complaining about wrong apostrophe use: moderate grammar nazi
Complaining about excessive use of English loan words in office culture: red-blooded grammar nazi
Complaining about "Elektronik" not meaning "electronics": moderate actual nazi
Complaining about "Handy" or "Portemonnaie": red-blooded actual nazi
My favorite are ones like "left over"... a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for later.
English admits a ton of these as well. I'd be horrified if someone recommended a board to keep English pure from foreign influences though. It seems both futile and xenophobic.
Languages are like old shoes. They are going to get beat up with use, but are wasted if you just lock them away to prevent it. And maybe as you wear them around, they'll get more character and more comfortable.
Unsurprisingly the phenomenon also exits in English, for example Zeitgeist means something slightly different in German than in English and I wouldn't use in German in the same way I see it used in English.