| Title: | The Joy of Lex |
| Notice: | A Notes File even your grammar could love |
| Moderator: | THEBAY::SYSTEM |
| Created: | Fri Feb 28 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Mon Jun 02 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1192 |
| Total number of notes: | 42769 |
This topic is for compiling a list of loan words in the making, namely foreign words or phrases whose english translations are still in common use. The examples I've though of are these: thought experiment vs. gedankenexperiment (?sp -eksperiment) pen name vs. nom de plume Mexican-American vs. Chicano restructuring vs. peristroika openness vs. glasnost The question is whether these foreign words will completely replace their english counterparts or just cause new shades of meaning to develop. This process is exemplified by the introduction of many French words after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Wook
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 771.1 | BOOKIE::DAVEY | Thu Feb 01 1990 18:25 | 8 | ||
> pen name vs. nom de plume
"nom de plume" is a "Frenchified" English phrase, i.e. the original
was "pen name" and someone way back turned this into "nom de plume",
which is not a phrase the French use. They use "nom de guerre",
literally "war name".
John
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| 771.2 | overlap and absorption | TLE::RANDALL | living on another planet | Thu Feb 08 1990 14:35 | 16 |
English seldom borrows a word to replace an existing one -- if the
loan word overlaps with an existing phrase, different shades of
meaning develop. The classic example of this is the way we
absorbed the Norman French words for farm animals -- boeuf,
mouton, etc. The anglo-celtic-saxons already had perfectly good
words like cow and sheep, so the foreign words took on the meaning
of "cooked cow" (beef), "cooked sheep" (mutton), and so on.
If the foreign word represents a useful concept, it will either be
absorbed and treated as an English word -- peristroika might
develop a verb, perstroikize -- or its translation will be more
commonly used, as with thought experiment. You'd see the form
"gedankeneksperiment" only in articles attempting to impress their
readers with their academic seriousness.
--bonnie
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