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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

cnn.com

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Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#451

Post by toyg »

stronglikedan wrote: post #423
antirez wrote: post #180

Please, don't think Italians are like that. It's just this stupid government. For instance in Italian, unlike Spanish, French, ..., there are no italianized words for all the computer science words, we just use English. In general there is not a big sentiment of culture self-defence. But this government is trying to do things that will appeal the dumb people voting for it.

The majority of folks don't really think people from any country are "like" their governments, except when it comes to other countries' perceptions of Americans, for some weird reason. But in reality, there's not very many governments left that represent their citizens, including the US. The citizens of the world have collectively lost control of their governments in the last couple of decades.

Not much lost control as just given up. The post-1989 alignment with the US on any substantial topic (economy, foreign policy...) has basically neutered the European political process.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#452

Post by unity1001 »

stametseater wrote: post #435
unity1001 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. > I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision. Let me provide one: A lot of Americans dont think that anyone could do a concerted, systematic sociopathy like the one I told in my post. Simply because they themselves wouldnt do such a thing, they think that those with whom they identify also wouldnt do that. Anything bad that happened to others or anything bad t…

I think a big part of the puzzle is the fact that American children are taught from a very young age that they are extremely fortunate to be born in America, and by implicit extension, everybody else is unfortunate to not be born in America. These narratives often start with immigrants teaching their first generation American children this way, who in turn teach the same to their children. So well-meaning Americans e…

Good analysis.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#453

Post by pkaye »

_vbnz wrote: post #33
hunglee2 wrote: post #14

I think we (Americans and Europeans alike) wholly underestimate how Americanised European culture is becoming. This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, politic…

Yeah, it was shocking here in Stockholm when there were BLM protests in 2020. It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.

I notice that foreign media tends to focus a lot of things that happen in US. In some countries its even used to distract for what is happening locally. Another thing is Europeans like to blame US for their own problems. For example the British complain that the NHS is getting privatized because of the US. The reality is they picked terrible politicians to run the country and they keep reelecting them.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#454

Post by Foobar8568 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #182
kuboble wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal hope is that the EU would make a plan to adopt English as the only official language. Now that UK is gone it can't be seen as unfairly promoting one country. I think the example of Switzerland shows that there is no problem if spoken language is different from official language.

> think the example of Switzerland shows that there is no problem if spoken language is different from official language. Most Swiss speak at least two of their four official languages. It's actually an example of how having multiple official languages isn't expensive nor hard to achieve (and the country is on top of most human index charts). But the EU should make Latin it's official language.

Most Swiss people don't speak two of their official language

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#455

Post by pmontra »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #374
pmontra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about a standard computer, accessories and concepts, there are no common Italian words for computer, mouse, touchpad, touchscreen, scanner, web, link, app, database, word processor, bit, byte and the defunct floppy disk. Everything else is commonly named in Italian. Keyboard, memory, disk (in general, but hard disk is in English), screen, pen drives, power unit, mother board (this is maybe 50-50), folders, i…

Calcolatore (my university teacher told me that. Nobody in Italy would use that), mouse, touchpad, schermo touch, scanner, web depends on how you use it: internet or "rete", collegamento, applicazione, base di dati (university course was named like that. Most people call it database professionally), no idea about word processor (I rarely use that in English too), bit, byte, floppy, hard disk is "disco rigido", scherm…

Power unit is alimentatore. All words in my second list are translated in Italian with the words you provided.

Yes, database is base di dati but it's seldom used as such. Calcolatore is the calculator app nowadays :-)

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#456

Post by pkaye »

pb7 wrote: post #192
hanniabu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed this is being downvoted. Do people really think that racism only exists in America?

Yes, many Europeans think that because they don’t talk about it and refuse to collect statistics to show it that racism doesn’t exist within their borders. Europe is just as, if not more, racist than the US. Just ask them what they think of the Roma people.

Interestingly US has a large Romani diaspora (1M) but I think they have integrated into the US culture over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Americans

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#457

Post by bombolo »

ghusto wrote: post #95

On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic. Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved. How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy? On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No of…

> suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.

Current italian government is 100% USA's puppet with no shame.

The provision in the proposal to force every public meeting to be held in italian is crazy… it'd kill holding scientific conferences in italy.

To be honest I'd want them to push it as an internal memo for the national tv. There is this trend to insert english words (mostly wrongly, just like americans use italian words mostly incorrectly as well) to sound cool. If this was eliminated from TV, I'd imagine it would go a long way already.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#458

Post by nindalf »

ur-whale wrote: post #389
vic-traill wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved A counter to this is the Académie Française [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise

> A counter to this is the Académie Française Which happens to be the laughing stock of the rest of the world, good call.

But without them, how would we have figured out if Covid was male or female?

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/le-la-covid-co...

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#459

Post by pb060 »

I don’t believe that this is populism, as others said. No one cares about English words in bureaucracy and probably few of their voters knew or cared about synthetic meat. I think that these people are nostalgic of the good old times and they can’t believe that after 100 years they are in power again. After staying put for few months they are revealing themselves for what they are.

As few of them have experience as leaders, all they can do is mimic fascism. I believe that many of these initiatives are personal, but no one is stopping them as these behaviors are praised in their environment. In the meantime they will lose money from the recovery and resiliency plan from Europe because of their incompetency, and they will fail to promote an European plan for immigration. They’ll probably even get more votes because of this as they master the art of choosing an enemy (Europe, immigrants) and ride people’s anger.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#460

Post by jamisteven »

ghusto wrote: post #95

On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic. Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved. How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy? On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No of…

I would argue that it is importation, rather than exportation.
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