Wednesday September 26, 2007
The case against English
By RALPH BERRY
English is swallowing foreign languages and some are not happy.
THE English language has always devoured foreign words, like a whale snacking on plankton. I suppose it all started when Old English had to accept French – the Norman conquerors insisted – and after that reckoned that if English could swallow French, it could swallow anything, even if the digestive process lasted for 300 years.
This is well known; less widely known is that other languages are complaining bitterly about what English is doing to them, a kind of reverse Norman Conquest.
The extent of this process still takes me by surprise. Sometime ago, I saw the front cover of an Austrian magazine, devoted to Natascha Kampusch (the girl enslaved in a cellar for years). Headline: “das grosse Interview”. Surely, I thought, German has a word for “interview”?
Another headline referred to “neues Fairness”, a word that has sailed from its national harbour and now influences people overseas.
I cherish the memory of an event just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. An apparatchik of the East German regime faced a mob baying for its rights, votes for women or the like. His face darkening, the official clenched his fists and roared back, “Das ist – unacceptable!”
Sport, of course, is a special case. The British may not be much good at sport – frankly, they’re not – but they pretty well invented most of it that counts (baseball was left to the Americans, a sport all but left stranded in the USA). The Victorians laid down the laws and rules for their sports, and there, in vocabulary terms, they stay.
Just as the French seem to have been in at the creation of automobiles and aircraft (chassis, chauffeur, fuselage, aileron), so sport (above all football, rugby, cricket, lawn tennis) remains the linguistic legacy of the 19th century. Golf we can pass over. The Scots are generally credited with inventing it, no doubt as a relief from living in the Middle Ages.
But the process has gone very far. The French have long complained at the Anglo-Saxon return match, which is filling the French language with unwanted immigrants. Its borders are open. The most recent dictionary of the Academie Francaise admitted about 6,000 new words, but did not include le jogging, aftershave, le know-how, le weekend, le parking, and many other words in everyday use.
As usual, the illegal immigrants outnumber the legal. The bastion of traditional French known to me is Quebec. There, the road sign is ARRET, which even in France is STOP!
The Italians are now increasingly disturbed by this tendency. It is especially painful for them, because as early as the 16th century, the Accademia della Crusca was founded to safeguard the purity of the Italian language.
Michele Cortelazzo of the University of Padua (Galileo’s university) has recently sounded the alarm over the “infiltration” of his language by English terms. It’s a tendency that exists in all European languages: “In Italy, however, there has been a massive influx of English words, even when there is a perfectly adequate and usable Italian equivalent.”
Prime examples that he gives include flop, instead of the Italian fiasco. This strikes me as odd, because fiasco was absorbed into English long ago.
The Italian tendenza is giving way to trend. (Note the difference in current English between trend, a neutral word, and trendy, which means “fashionable”, often with a slight implication of distaste.) Often, the English (Anglo-American) term is shorter, and this makes its own appeal. Go shopping is quicker than fare un giro di acquisti.
The Corriere della Sera, a major newspaper, says that the list of commonly used loan words is becoming longer by the day. It includes meeting, manager, happy hour, babysitter, personal trainer, team, fitness, cocktail, pub.
Stress, which I used to think a uniquely British ailment, has now caught on in Italy. No one can do anything about fax, CD and DVD.
The invasion of English terms is irreversible. Hence the ironic question posed in The Times: “What’s Italian for ‘A fitness team is meeting in the pub’?” The answer is the same key words, strung together with a little Italian.
There can’t be a convincing solution to the main problem, which is the infiltration by English into other languages. It is with Italian-English as with English-American: a new word sounds more appealing, more smart and knowing, if it comes from that source.
Italians are urged to use foreign imports correctly. They point out that English often mangles Italian terms. Latte is Italian for “milk”, but in general English has come to mean “coffee with milk” (Starbucks, Frasier).
I fear that language is beginning to resemble a soup in which the ingredients taste vaguely of something else. The Germans have a perfectly good word for “queen”, Konigin, but always refer to Queen Elizabeth II as “die Queen”.
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