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Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

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Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#101

Post by denton-scratch »

chrisseaton wrote: post #68
leephillips wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.

Why are they fighting it? What’s the problem has to be fought against? What will happen if they don’t fight? Is it just a weird xenophobic thing?

It's not xenophobic, but it is nationalistic and atavistic.

There was a time when French had a chance of establishing itself as a "Lingua Franca" (sic); French is still considered the primary language of international law, I believe. The distaste for loanwords seems to be a sort of harking back to what might have been.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#102

Post by denton-scratch »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #12
BitwiseFool wrote: post #5

I like to think that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly and without an accent is The Queen. Edit: I am only joking.

That definition seems difficult to project into the past, when the King of England might not speak English at all.

The queen and her family (and by extension, many of the aristocracy) speak a dialect of English that is not any kind of regional dialect. It is not the form spoken by BBC announcers (who are often nowadays speakers of northern dialects, or even foreign pronunciations).

Their vowels are strangled, and they just sound weird to most native English speakers.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#103

Post by jraph »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #83
jraph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF)'s relatively nuanced take on it is here: http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=26557671 "On constate une hésitation dans le genre attribué au terme COVID-19" -- "One can sense some hesitation regarding the gender assigned to the term COVID-19" The feminine form ("la covid") might come (according to the OQLF, at least) from "la maladie à coronavirus 2019"…

The explanation is not unreasonable, but you have reasonable explanations for the masculine too. Wifi is a good counter-example: Fidelity is feminine, yet the masculine gender is widespread for Wifi. You can also justify the masculine form by metonymy (at the beginning of the pandemic we mostly said coronavirus, and we shifted to covid but kept the masculine of the former).

If you'd like some background on this (in French):

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3BfFPM3qI (France Inter, short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zykIohErTr8 (short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L78FkTtwKw4 (Linguisticae, longer)

In short: you cannot argue against the usage, even with the most logical explanation that goes against the usage. Natural languages are far from being formal, entirely consistent and completely logical.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#104

Post by DFHippie »

denton-scratch wrote: post #100
scythe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.

Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#105

Post by andrewzah »

unixhero wrote: post #92
andrewzah wrote: post #58

Really, it's for the better. Languages change naturally over time and institutions like for French or Korean have little bearing on that. It's better to have style -guides- than to try and enforce usages of a language that differ from how it's actually used in real life.

I have learnt Spanish in an academic setting and to have an Academia to refer to is invaluable.

I study Korean, which also has a similar institution, and it's not really that helpful.

Real language usage is completely different than what's taught in classroom or academic environments. They are always out of date, and don't teach casual/slang usage (aka real usage by real people, not textbook language). Regular dictionaries have been invaluable.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#106

Post by scythe »

denton-scratch wrote: post #100
scythe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.

Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#107

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Galaxity wrote: post #93
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the Spanish teachers do. The Americans? I still doubt it.

By Americans he means the locals. The (Latin) Americans.

I read his post as explicitly saying that he was not meaning that.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#108

Post by jefftk »

denton-scratch wrote: post #99
js2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that typical UK English?

It is. A "rooter" is a piece of network equipment; a "rauw-ter" is a machine for finishing a hole in a piece of work, such as a drill-hole. I'm perfectly willing to accept american pronunciation of technical terms in IT; IT tech-talk is a kind of jargon that most non-techs are bewildered by. There's little benefit in clinging to customary pronunciations. But the machine for cleaning holes isn't in that category. If I…

That's also my pronunciation of the two terms, and I'm from the US (Boston area)

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#109

Post by lovegoblin »

dqv wrote: post #16
neither_color wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But each English speaking country could form its own academy and work together, which is how Spanish speaking countries do it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_...

Right. I think people forget that there are many dialects of English.[0] I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English

> I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well.

You might be interested in "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch. McCulloch is a linguist, but it's a light/layperson's book. I really enjoyed it.

https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#110

Post by denton-scratch »

scythe wrote: post #106
denton-scratch wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.

Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.

I'm glad to have my ignorance dispelled :-)
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