The article mentions the "Association for the German Language", which seems to refer to the prescriptivist "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache".
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
> Complaining about "Elektronik" not meaning "electronics": moderate actual nazi
Fellow German native speaker here: Elektronik means electronics, doesn't it? At least dict.leo.org and the Oxford German Dictionary (which came with my Mac) seem to say it does.
Elektronik | elɛkˈtroːnɪk |
Fem. Elektronik
1 electronics sing., no art.
2 (Bestandteile) electronic parts pl. electronics pl.
Your other examples are spot on, so obviously I'm missing something in this case.
Yeah, Elektronik is a direct loan from English electronics.
The language nazis are complaining we already have the word Elektrik for that because in German that apparently includes what is colloquially called Elektronik.
It's mostly an argument based on word origins (i.e. they say Elektronik would have to be similar to Mechatronik in that it would specifically refer to electronic motors and such rather than typical consumer electronics).
Of course Elektronik does have a distinct meaning separate from Elektrik and the entire argument is based on a simplistic understanding of how human language works.
But like many of the more outlandish arguments this boils down to "foreign words are corrupting our Germanic language and ultimately destroying our culture" -- which of course is insane.
The entire "Germanize the German language" idea was pretty popular in the Nazi era, btw, giving rise to many failed word creations as well as a few that stuck around (I think "Bürgersteig" successfully replaced the French loan word "Trottoir").
I was amused to see a small glossary in the back of a volume of Novalis, giving such equivalences as "Verbesserung" for "Amelioration" and "Zerlegung" for "Analysis". I know too little of German to say whether the Latinate vocabulary was deliberately displaced, or whether Novalis was outside the main stream of the writers of his day.
There are still people who like to Latinise their vocabulary to make up for not really having anything worthwhile to say and I bet they'd pick up the word "Amelioration" if you showed it to them. There's a general trick that you can import Latinate English vocabulary into German and pronounce it German to sound obnoxiously pretentious (e.g. apparently the official German phrase for "lift boy" is "Elevatorführer" which sounds so pretentious to Germans that most people I've pointed this out to thought it was satire).
That said, "Analysis" is a distinct term in mathematics (I think the meaning is the same in English in that context). Outside of mathematics it is actually "Analyse" (such as when analysing a substance in chemistry or inspecting something in close detail in general). I don't think "Zerlegung" is particularly widely used in any context but it might be.
I was a bit confused when I began studying computer science in university because all my prior exposure to programming had been colloquial or in English. But German academia had actually created its own vocabulary for things like stacks ("Stapel") and arrays ("Felder"), which are mostly just exact translations. This seems particularly awkward when nearly all actual programming is done in English and the academic and practical vocabulary clashes so hard.
No, just like the language lawyering it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but the term is of course a bit fuzzy anyway.
I guess "xenophobic asshole" is a more accurate term but I thought "nazi" conveys enough meaning without resorting on language Americans might find offensive.
To clarify: there are valid arguments against immigration and there are especially valid criticisms on how immigration is handled (e.g. I would argue the German approach has for a long time largely consisted of hoping they either go away or magically assimilate on their own). But any argument that is based either on the requirement for immigrants to abandon their entire identity or on ethnicity alone is blatantly xenophobic and dehumanizing.
Hopefully someone interested will read this comment, since it might be buried at the bottom: there is a fun project called Anglish that works to make the English language free from any non-Germanic loan words, using old(er) English and even made up words inspired by German, Dutch etc when no others exist. It's not, as far as I can see, a militant effort, but more fun and an inspiring linguistic challenge.
Perhaps more interesting for a 5-minute distraction is "Uncleftish Beholding", a description of a well-known scientific theory written with no Romance-language words.
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".
Japan had several cell phone networks using an alternative to GSM called the Personal Handy-phone System. This was an urban only network with extremely small cells that let them make ridiculously small and inexpensive phones.
What's interesting is that in Europe, DECT was designed to work the same way, but it never caught on as anything aside from a home cordless phone standard. Wikipedia says there was even a public DECT network in Italy until 2001.
At least in Argentina (not sure about other Spanish-speaking countries) "handy" is used for walkie-talkies, but not cell phones. I wonder if it comes from the German use of that word, or if both languages borrowed it from somewhere else.
Checking the Wikipedia article for walkie-talkie just now, it seems the formal name for it is "handheld transceiver", so it makes sense that "handy" would derive from that.
Edit: I was too lazy, scrolling down a bit on the same article mentions and explains the term "hand[y|ie]".
I think most native speakers who aren't technical would pick something from that list which probably doesn't have "USB" in it and then wrap it with "little" and "thing" - eg. "little thumb drive thing".
> from the literal translation of the Chinese word
Well, they both refer to hands, I guess. The Chinese word is 手机 shouji "hand machine". "Phone" is 电话 dianhua "electric speech". Those two words aren't related.
Also interesting to me in this area was the emergence of the so-called IP卡 ("IP card") referring to pre-paid long distance telephone cards sold within mainland China. These were big business until the mid to late noughties.
Oh I love these. My favourite french one is "footing." No, "je vais faire du footing" doesn't mean, "I'm footing the bill," it means, "I'm going for a jog."
There's a ton of examples in France for some reason. Brushing as in the article, but also "pressing" for the dry cleaner.
In Chile they say all the time, "catchai'?", meaning "did you catch what I said?" Equivalent of "y'know?" It took me a while to realize that they conjugate it too.. To say, "I didn't understand," they'll say, "No catcho." Beautiful ;)
These are called wasabi eigo in Japanese, and there are enough to fill a dictionary, they change all the time.
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.
It would be impossible - the language already contains huge numbers of loan words.
All our eating meat words are French for instance (Beef, Mutton, Pork) whereas the animal words are "English" (Cow, Sheep, Pig) because the Norman invasion replaced all the old English aristocracy - the commoners raised the animals, the nobles ate them. That was just one conquest and we've had several - the Romans, Celts, Danes etc.
To say nothing of important words taken from German, Italian let alone Latin and Greek.
That's the reason it's such a mare to learn - it's accepted that we have more words than any other language.
There is no such thing as pure English - and a good thing too!
See also: "al fresco", which in England means "dining outdoors" and in Italy "being in prison". I wonder if it's because eating English food under the English weather can be considered punishment on the level of incarceration...?
> 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).
I don't think Russian "face control" is borrowed from English entirely. "Control" (контроль) is a proper Russian word, borrowed from French/German and in this context means "checking","verification".
It's a funny one. In English we say "passport control" and "border control", but we would mostly otherwise use the word "check". I've encountered Italian speakers saying "Have they controlled your ticket?" when they mean "checked" (or "inspected"), simply because "controllare" in Italian means "to check", and feels like it ought to make sense in English, but doesn't.
On a related note, I have yet to encounter a French speaker saying in English "Sorry to derange you", but I am hopeful it will one day happen.
"Border control" does arguably use the ordinary meaning of control: they control the border by checking passports.
But check also has an interesting etymology. Its many meanings include a type of payment note (aka "cheque"), to obstruct ("check somebody's progress", "body check"), to verify, to inspect; also checker (divide into small squares) and exchequer (the UK treasury)... all come from the Persian word shah, meaning king, through chess-related metaphors. (Also the word chess itself)
Thanks for posting this - I love a bit of etymology on a Sunday afternoon!
If "border control" means literally controlling the border, does that make "passport control" some sort of obtuse synecdoche, where they check the passport in order to control the border?
Face Control is about your face and it does differ from Dress Code.
Clubs that only enforce Dress Code will prohibit you from entering only if your clothes don't match the requirements.
Those clubs with Face Control will prohibit your entrance for whatever reason they want. Usually it's just an extortion (левак) and you have to bribe your way in (дать на лапу). Although sometimes, it's about the gender ratio or your sexual preferences. Clubs have to make sure that the party doesn't turn into a sausage party and keep away people who can cause problems.
Левак = money made on the left (on the side). Most likely illegal or against company's policy
Дать на лапу = to give (money) to someone's paw (hand)
Extortion makes no sense. Clubs are commercial venues. Everything that personnel extortions comes straight from owners' pocket. So they have huge incentive to figure it out, and I personally haven't experienced that kind of thing.
ЛEBAK, -а, м. (разговорное неодобр.). 1. Политический деятель крайне левых взглядов. 2. Работник, незаконно использующий рабочее время, орудия или продукты общественного труда для личной наживы. Купить! у левака, и прилагательное левацкий, -ая, -ое и лева-ческий, -ая.-ое.
Every guest who chooses to not participate won't spend money at the club. Every guest who chooses to participate will now spend less money at the club. If you're the club owner you'll definitely make sure that paying customers' entrance to the venue is unobstructed.
Russians like taking plurals of English words, add a Russian ending that denotes plural and attach a specific meaning to the newly minted word. For example, бутсы. It's pronounced "boots-y" where 'y' denotes plural. The word referes to these things https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%82%D1%81%D1%....
Also, "le week-end" comes to mind although it's not different from its English original. "Naan bread" is also interesting.
In German the grammatical rules are to take the English singular and then apply German inflection to it.
So for example "community, communities" becomes "die Community, die Communitys". I personally struggle with this rule, because I think the number of German people knowing the English plural "communities" is actually higher than those knowing the inflection rules for foreign words, making you look stupid when using the correct form.
Another one is that people do not get how to form compound nouns with English words. If you use it in German, "social media manager" becomes "(der) Social-Media-Manager". The rule is so simple: Write everything together, foreign words get a dash. As these words are very common in programming related fields, almost all of the agency websites get them wrong.
The gender of the word is derived from words of similar meaning or just similar sounding words, which sometimes creates conflicts about which gender a word has.
For example we are divided on whether a blog is male or neuter (der Blog/das Blog), we are only sure it is not female.
Fun fact: loan words can become "naturalized" as their usage increases. Originally "Computer" was a loan word but now it's considered standard German, so "Computerspiel" is fine now but would have been written as "Computer-Spiel" before.
I'm not sure how this distinction is made. As far as I can tell "Business" and "Software" aren't quite there yet ("Softwareentwickler" is something I see relatively frequently but as far as I know it's still considered non-standard).
Jep, was about to include that as well, but kept it out to make it clear how easy the rule actually is. I have only a vague understanding on how to do it in English so I mostly use spaces everywhere.
> I'm not sure how this distinction is made.
The distinction is being made just like every other German word has been created: By more and more people using them like that and authorities like the Duden recognizing that.
What I dislike about foreign words from English or French is that they are written differently than they are spoken, making you switch language pronunciation mid-sentence while reading. Historically foreign words at some point were also spelled German, I would like to see that done again. At first it will be weird, but a hundred years ago people also found it weird to write "Büro" instead of the original French "bureau", which in everyday live nobody recognizes as originally French anymore.
what we really like to do is to append a bunch of affectionate diminutive suffixes to English common and proper nouns. It's just soooo entertaining. You can do it all day. Here's a few examples:
Mr. Obama (Обама) -> Obamushka (Обамушка)
Mr. Trump (Трамп) -> Trumpuoshechka (Трампушечка)
My personal favorite:
Okay (Окэй) -> Okaayshki (Океюшки)
If you curious you can fire up Google Translate and make it say all these words :-)
Do you use them to make fun of them or just to make the words sound nice?
I think Russian makes heavy use of diminutives, doesn't it? I worked somewhere where two women were called Natalia and Natasha and I am still confused what their actual name were, because Natasha seems to be the diminutive form of Natalia and sometimes Natasha called Natalia "Natasha".
I do not think that there are any German names which are the diminutive of other names.
I can't think of any German diminutive names but there are cases where the "short form" is distinctly different from the long form as in English "Bob" vs "Robert" or "Dick" vs "Richard".
E.g. "Jupp" is short for "Joseph" and "Kalle" is short for "Karl" (or variants like "Karl-Heinz").
The name Gretchen is a fairly ordinary English name, but it looks like it was originally a German diminutive of Greta/Grete? Which are themselves nicknames for Margarete.
From what I know, it's Gretel. But both the name as well as the -el diminutive form are so long of style that they're practically not used anymore.
I think they have been popular in the generation of (and before) WW2 and Nazi Germany - though I don't know if there is actually a causal chain to the name vanishing.
Ha, yes. But I do not know if people were actually named Gretchen in Germany or just Gretas called this way. The name is also not currently given very much (or at all) in Germany, when used there is usually a "Oma"/grandma in front of it.
I guess "Benjamin" -> "Beni", "Daniel" -> "Dani" and so on are diminutives as well. But Gretchen is definitely rare for Germans that are not way past retirement age (might be more common in some regions but still "exotic").
Actually this holds true for many "German" names. East Germany generally has more "English" (and "French") names, e.g. Kevin, Justin, Steve and Jacqueline. Otherwise there seems to be a general trend towards more Nordic names (some jokingly blame it on IKEA: "naming kids after the furniture they were conceived on").
I'm not sure what it says about the English language that common given names also refer to genitalia, money, prostitutes' clients and toilets (e.g. dick, willy, john and so on).
Probably nothing, but still pretty awkward as a foreigner. You'd think these names would fall out of style but apparently everybody tries their best to be mature about it.
Russians do this to common nouns too. The short forms of the common nouns are less "common" (sorry for the tautology) in every day speech in English. Exceptions like mommy, daddy, granny, breakie, aside, of course.
Kinda like Dutch. I wonder if people from other related languages that don't do this think Russian sounds "cute" because of that (like how Germans often say everything sounds "cute" in Dutch).
"Natalia" would be the name she'd use in official documents like a birth certificate or passport.
"Natasha" is a less formal form of "Natalia". It's indeed a diminutive but I wouldn't call it an affectionate diminutive like "Robert -> Billy". If I'm good friends with "Natalia" I'd probably call her "Natasha".
If you drop the last "a", "Natash" sounds more affectionate.
If you are a 5yo and a neighbour girl from a house across the street hit you with a toy shovel in the head you would probably come back running to your mom/dad, "Mom, Dad "Natashka" ("Natka") hit me with a shovel! She's baaaaaaadddd" :-)
My personal favourite is sportsmenki which means female athletes. The corresponding word for male athletes is sportsmeny and the singular for a male athlete is sportsmen.
It could be used as a joke, but don't use that word seriously, it could offend. It's either businesswoman (with Russian pronunciation "бизнес-вумэн") or something like "предпренимательница" (enterpreneur-woman).
Thanks, I did not know that. My Russian is not very good, and this is a word that I've heard in a serious setting. I've never had opportunity or need to use it, though.
For non Japanese practicers who are curious: katakana is not used just for loan words. It is also used for some names, onomatopoeias, to make text stand out (the way we might use all caps/italics), some scientific terminology, etc.
If memory serves me right, it goes something like this:
Katakana was developed to annotate Chinese script with readings and became an alphabet used by males.
A secondary alphabet developed from cursive writing came to be as a script for women to write in. The tale of Genji is written entirely in hiragana, while contemporary male text would be written entirely using Chinese characters (kanji)
Later we get this merging of the 3 alphabets, with katakana relegated to mostly being used in loan words.
In a sense, it did originate to be used to describe foreign words.
English can use italics for pretty much all of those things (foreign words, onomatopoeia, emphasis, scientific names of species...) so it's a pretty close match :)
“The Japanese language has no exact word for the color blue. The term the Japanese use, ao, is ambiguous – best translated as blue-green. Ao has the connotations of immaturity and inexperience that the English word green has. When the Japanese wish to be exact – when describing the color of Siamese cats' eyes, for example – they will sometimes resort to the English word blue, which they pronounce "boo-roo."”
I don't think that passage came within ten feet of anyone who speaks Japanese. Ao doesn't mean blue-green, it's more of a word that spans both, with set usages for things we'd consider unambiguously one or the other (e.g. a cloudless sky, or the "go" part of a traffic light). In the context of eyes it always means blue though, so the example doesn't make much sense.
Yep - it's "midori". I'm no expert but according to wikipedia it all stems from a time when Japanese had only four color names (red, white, black and "ao"), whereas other more specific names came later.
I've heard aozora for blue sky many times, so it's true but not used as a substitute in every case.
One of my favorite confusing words is charenji, or "challenge", which essentially means "to try [doing something difficult]". So a Japanese tourist couple shows up at an American bungee jump and they tell the guys, "we want to challenge!" which sounds like a mistaken version of "we want _A_ challenge" in English.
So the junior bungee jump guy looks over at his boss, and says, "hey...these two say they want a challenge..." not realizing they just want to try a normal bungee jump.
Saying it's pronounced 'boo-roo' is sort of misleading. Japanese r's are almost like Spanish r's where it's almost an l sound or even a d sound. If you say it fast, it's not too far off of 'blue'.
All of these are exactly the same in French though (apart from puenting). Now I wonder if they actually came from English in parallel or if some came by cross the Spanish/French border instead.
There are no double entredre's in France because they never say anything that could mean two things or because, "double entendre" (double hear), literally doesn't make sense?
"double entendre" means "double to hear"; it's grammatically incorrect. Its a corruption of "double entente" (double meaning), though "double sens" is used these days.
French makes use of double entendres, they just don't call it that.
They can take the form of "sous-entendus" where the same sentence can be interpreted differently depending on the level of knowledge of the listeners for a particular context.
Play-on-words are also widespread, including the "contrepèterie" art form unique to French.
Various form of "argot" (slang) also use identical words bearing different meanings.
All of these are a big part of our second and third degree humour that elude so many foreigners.
This journalist from the BBC does not seem to be much aware of French culture at all.
I had to read that sentence twice, it wasn't very clear. I think the journalist meant that "double entendre" doesn't mean anything in French, not that French speaking people don't use double entendre.
I went and read that passage again, and I'm sorry but the phrasing is ambiguous.
"There is no double entendres in France" literally means that "double entendres" are nowhere to be found in France, which in itself makes no sense.
The sentence "there is no double entendres in French" would actually make sense but bears the meaning with which I credited it initially.
If the journalist meant "The expression double entendres is borrowed from French but not used in France where it has no meanings" he/she did a poor job phrasing it.
Read literally it's ambiguous - it could mean either that the concept doesn't exist or the term doesn't. But considering the article is one big list of borrowed phrases that aren't used in their native land, it's pretty clear what the author meant.
More the latter, although a French person hearing "double entendre" might understand that it means "double sens"; it's just not an expression that is used.
This confused me when I moved to America, because I thought it meant an appetizer. Then, when I visited France, it confused me again, because by that point I thought it meant a main course.
Same here, actually asked the waiter for the menu with the main dish. And same with "matinee", morning in french, but a daytime performance in english, which is typically taking place in the afternoon.
The Dominican Republic (and I think other Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands) has a lot of words they use that come from English but have been modified over the years, or were brand names that are now used to describe something Generic.
SUV is "Jipeta" or "Yipeta" sounding like "Jeep-eta",
Diaper is "Pampa" sounding a bit like "Pampers",
Trash-can is "Zafacón" coming from the English "Safety-can",
and my personal favorite is the word "boche" which is a bit like a scolding or reprimand but comes from "Bull shit."
Note that the academie francaise is way flexible to accept english words in the official vocabulary. In Quebec they literally have a french word to replace all common english expressions and prevent borrowing.
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 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. There is some research that suggests that certain American accents are closer to the British accents of the colonists than the modern British accent is.
> 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 Canada. The French in France don't need to worry about getting culturally absorbed in the way the Quebecois do.
If you have a chance, compare Pennsylvania Dutch to Modern High German. With a few exceptions it's mostly a preserved older German dialect. The same is true for the German spoken by German-Russians who returned to Germany during and after WW2.
It's not just language. I assume that it's because while the native population marches on naturally, the emigrants are trying to preserve the culture and language they brought with them, with no influence from their original home country. Being surrounded by a foreign language/culture probably also leads to emphasising the distinctions (e.g. to avoid loan words out of fear of watering down your identity).
In the day to day spoken french in Quebec, you can hear also a lot English words too: check, game, lang, weird...
There's a funny youtube video of a French Canadian girl who lives in France and compares the number of anglicisms in the movie "Starbucks" and its French remake (not sure why they did a remake) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Cw9ywW-TU
Video is in French but the movie Starbucks had way more anglicisms in it. Nothing scientific here but having lived many years in Montreal I can tell you that the French spoken in Quebec is far from being English free.
I'm originally from France but live in western Canada (which is predominantly english speaking).
My understanding, from spending a few days in Quebec, interacting with people from there, and listening to lots of shows about the french language, there are two school of thoughts in Quebec:
- one that french as to be pure, where pure means not a single word with roots that can be traced back to english.
- one that borrows a lot of words from modern english, which are pronounced with an english accent (as opposed to english word adopted in France, which are pronounced with a french accent).
I don't know where the line is drawn, if they are the same people in different context, or a social class, or just a conscious decision to adopt one vs the other, but all the jazz about language laws there seem to be coming from the first group.
Also note there isn't a single version of the french language in Canada, but several across the country which is based on where the original people came from in France, and what influence that language has had over the past 400 years.
Its not maybe used English free but I can tell you they have official french words for everything, while in French french there are many times no french equivalent words.
my two cents. I took a couple of French classes in Canada and I can vouch that those guys don't mess around; they are like French vocab nazis :-P so it's always "la fin de la semaine" and "courriel electronique". In contrast, one of my friends is "French" French. She got no issues saying "le weekend" or "e-mail."
When the French lost to the british in 177x-ish, people of Quebec were left to fend for themselves. They fought tooth and nail to preserve their culture and language and I think to this day there's still this inertia going on in the way modern French Canadians think.
Moreover, there has been a study/survey showing that isolated culturally homogeneous communities tend to heavy-handedly police (the US style) the use of their native languages. I wish I could find a link to that study :-(
As a native russian speaker living in the US i can actually confirm that the study seems to ring true; i dislike (very much so) when russian speakers start mixing in english words.
> it's always "la fin de la semaine" and "courriel electronique". In contrast, one of my friends is "French" French. She got no issues saying "le weekend" or "e-mail."
But on the other hand, your Québec friend will tell you that you can "plugger" your "laptop", he has "checké" that there is a "plug" that is "loose" on the nearby "powerstrip".
I lived there for a bit more than a year, and I'm pretty sure they use at least as many anglicisms in daily life as we do in France. However, we both pay more attention to the anglicisms used by the others when we're in their country because we're not used to them.
They avoid them a lot more than we do in written language though.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't know :-( I lived in Ontario where people mostly spoke English. A couple buddies of mine were from Quebec. When they spoke French they would never use an anglicism.
I suspect they were making a conscious effort to not to. I did say this in my reply above that expats do tend to get very protective of the use of their native language (present company included). Similarly, when they spoke English, you wouldn't know that they were from Quebec since they spoke in an Ontarian accent and used the exact same vocab you expect a native Torontotian to use. For example, they could say to me, could you close the lights please. "Close the lights" is a very common expression in Ontario and yet I've never heard anybody using it beyond that province.
Lol, I always felt jealous of them. They would just blend in with the crowd. In contrast, I have a very pronounced accent in English and don't even get me started on my French.
Wikipedia has a nice list [0]. In German pseudo-anglicisms are an often used method of word formation, e.g: Beamer (projector), No-Go (faux pas), Handy (mobile phone), Oldtimer (classic car), Streetworker, Barkeeper and (brand new) Shitstorm, etc. There are also pseudo-gallicisms in use (like "Blamage" for disgrace, or "Friseur" for coiffeur). Fun stuff.
My favourite German one is body bag for rucksack.
I mean we have this wonderful German word rucksack, it is so nice it even has been imported into English, then instead of just using it we import the wrong word from English.
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.
ln Spain, everyone refers to Facebook as el face, (with the English pronunciation of the word "face") which sounded pretty funny until I got used to it.
I don't know if Barcelona is really very representative of Spain. From my last visit, I got the impression that Barcelona is to Spain like Montreal is to Canada. That cool "other" city where people speak a different language and have a culture different enough that they kind of want to secede.
> And those Berliners who just can’t let the party end can carry on at _eine Afterhour_ until well after the sun comes up.
In Toronto’s nightlife, there were definitely establishments referred to in English as “After Hours’.”
In the days when liquor could not be served after 1am in Ontario, such places purported to serve only espresso and soft drinks, but there was nearly always some kind of nudge-nudge-wink-wink way to order some kind of alcoholic drink.
The entire 80s decade is a hazy blur to me for some reason or other, but I seem to recall places like “Le Tube” opening at around 11pm, but not getting going until 1:30am when everyone left the ordinary clubs.
(The building that housed Le Tube is now the home to a leather shop that has a large kink clientele. I believe that the things people wore to LeTube in its heyday were at least as risqué as the fetish items they buy in that location today.)
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Anyhow, absolutely these are loanwords from English into other languages like German, but I dispute that “After Hours” is not used in English.
I love these confused loan words (sometimes they are English-English as well, as Australian and American English can collide in my household).
My wife got an advertising postcard (for hair gel) from her sister with a picture of a woman whose hair was whipped into a swirl. The card said "Sei kein Blender" (don't be a "blender"). I was sure this was Dinglish for "don't look like you got your hair caught in a blender -- use our hair gel". But my wife informed me that it was the opposite: "Don't look like everyone else (i.e. blend in): use our hair gel to give yourself an absurd hairstyle"
There are also fun formations from ex pats, like the Franglais "callinsicker" I've heard French friends use in SF when we're speaking French; it literally means "to call in sick" (i.e. skyve off work).
In this case, they were quoting the article, but what about the spelling was Orientalist?
The only thing I could see would be the use of the pseudo-anglicism instead of the English phrase, but that just seems to be specifying the specific word that amused them, not exaggerating the English phrase we would associate with it for effect.
In Estonian Bluetooth is called
Sinihammas [1] which literally means "blue tooth", being non indoeuropean language is difficult when you want to loan words, it's often much easier to invent your own word that would follow the existing grammar than wreck your head around all the grammatical problems encountered when you use English words in Estonian sentences.
Actually, I'm curious about that. I understand that "anime" in japan is a blanket term for all kinds of drawn animation, including western-style - so the meaning is more similar to US "cartoon" or german "Zeichentrick".
But given that the distinct japanese style of animation and storytelling (what the west knows as "anime") has spawned a whole industry and subculture and has become part of japan's image in the world, it would seem to me to be too important to not give it a distinct name. So I wonder, is there a different term in japanese for it?
A weird detail is the Chinese transliteration of "karaoke":卡拉ＯＫ. It starts out with two Chinese characters pronounced "ka" and "la", and then tacks on the English "OK": ka-la-OK. So the English word "orchestra" turned into "OK" after two transliterations.
The associated list page is worth reading too, if only to see how much of the meaning you can guess just by looking at the first 3 columns of that table:
In Swedish, a portable cassette play is (or was, who uses these anymore?) called a "freestyle". I have no idea what the etymology of that one is.
Then there is the old word for baguette (the French type of bread) that was called "pain riche". This is from the first restaurant in Sweden to serve it which was called "Riche". I think everybody have heard stories about Swedes in the 80's trying to order that in France and the confused look from the French. These days people use the proper French word to describe it.
A lot of the ones mentioned in this video are also used in Japan. Check out the thread about wasei-eigo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716517 . It would be interesting to know if they came from one to the other, or from somewhere else.
Interesting, the Japanese and English nuances are similar. The Korean one is almost exclusively (from what I can gather) used as a comment on dating that is more physical than emotional, e.g. the English equivalent would be "they are just physical".
Well, "face control" in Russian has nothing to do with beauty of the people entering a club. The aim of "face control" is to make sure that no people that might possibly cause some trouble, or unable to pay, get into a nightclub or the like.
Not sure if explanations of the words from other languages are similarly misleading.
Norwegian has e.g. "light" instead of "diet" for diet products ("Diet Cokie" is "Coke Light" in Norway).
We also have e.g."vorspiel" and "nachspiel" for "pre party" (private party before going out, where you can get drunk cheaply...) and "after party" respectively.
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.
A "Beamer" is a digital projector, especially as distinct from overhead projectors (which are called "Overhead-Projektor" in German).
A "Projektor" is almost always analogue, except for cinemas (where the audience typically can't see the projector directly). It wouldn't be totally unexpected to refer to a "Beamer" as a "Projektor" but it might seem a bit weird or old-fashioned.
Hah, cool. I never really tried to figure it out but I always imagined it had something to do with the presenter "beaming" [1] after their successful, beautifully typeset presentation.
Apparently that's quite regional. I was corrected a few weeks ago because I called a pair of cross-trainers "tennis shoes" - where that person was from "tennis shoes" is much more specific than I understand it.
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