Is this economy of language or a linguistic fad?
"Italians are quite used to feeling "lo stress", looking forward to "il weekend" or trying to look "cool".
But now an influential cultural institute has asked Italians to protect the language and reject "Anglitaliano".
The Dante Alighieri Society asked people for examples of over-used foreign words and "il weekend" emerged as the worst offender."
Read all here.
graph per bbc
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6 comments:
I agree with this kind of intervention by the Academy. I also found the efforts by the French Academy a while back quite sensical. Sometimes, language needs some human intervention.
Language will do its thing anyway but some regulation can't hurt. I mean, Italian is not English, so trying to keep it like that makes sense to me. At the same time, in a global society, borrowings and loan translations are bound to happen.
I am definitely FOR some regulation. Italian is too beautiful of a language to be spoiled by Anglitaliano. The same should be done for German-too much english influence. Though borrowings are bound to happen they can be kept to a minimum.
Language will do its own thing. The old prescriptive vs descriptive business, no?
What's so bad about language borrowing? Eventually loan words become part of the language they are loaned into anyway. Sometimes the spelling of such words is even amended to conform to its new language. This is natural and fighting against it is like fighting the tide: you can't win.
i'm always torn on this topic. why should any person or entity feel they have the responsibility to stop linguistic evolution? the fact is language isn't static. it's malleable and ever growing. language is of the people, and the words people use should be considered true words in their own right, even when those words are borrowed from other languages, truncated, twisted, redefined, alternately spelled, etc... language probably exists more online than anywhere else at this point, at least in the industrialised world, so email, chat and forum language is the new frontier, and yes, even text (sms) language is valid in its own right. hell, redefining the word "text" in and of itself is a huge leap. it's almost certain that language evolves exponentially more quickly than it used to, just as everything else in our lives changes so rapidly now with the advent of so much technology and the world becoming smaller and more interdependent, but i can't see the benefit in linguistic ludditism. "ludditism" may be the neologism of the day, but that's okay, because language is and should forever be malleable...
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