The perils of 'international English'

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Le Baron
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The perils of 'international English'

Postby Le Baron » Tue Sep 13, 2022 2:55 pm

This afternoon I was listening to a podcast (in Dutch) about what they called the shadow pandemic of 'long Covid'. Of interest to me because I am one of its victims. Somewhere in the middle of it, when the presenter and the doctor were travelling in a car and talking, the discussion turned to the name. The doctor said that lots of people had dismissed the idea that they might be sufferers because there was nothing wrong with their lungs... :?

Of course 'long' in Dutch is a lung, and so a lot of people have simply assumed that this name refers to a version of Covid having a specific long-term effect only on the lungs. Like a so-called 'head cold' or the popular 'stomach flu'. And it's not a small number. It's completely understandable because you think in your own language first, not a foreign language. Increasingly though, here in NL especially, there's a tendency for the media to just adopt the English for things deemed to be of an 'international' nature. So when 'lockdowns' were put in place for Covid and the French press was talking about 'confinement' and Germany's about 'Abriegelungen', the Dutch were going about saying 'lockdown' this and 'lockdown' that in a heavily accented way. On the door of a shop at the time I saw a hand-written sign with:
Gesloten wegens luckdown'

This might be a Dutch thing in some ways, where people have an eagerness to adopt English phraseology and often misinterpret it. It's not only English though. For some reason 'inenting' (vaccination/inoculation) has been entirely superseded by 'vaccineren'. And evidently the word 'vaccin' came into Dutch from French, though a long while ago, because the word is said with an approximate French accent. Though you also hear 'vaccine' as 'vaccin-uh'. However I remember being at the hospital back in 2000 and the nurse asking if I was 'ingeënt tegen polio?' (inoculated against Polio). Whizz forward to now and when I joined the new doctor's practice near where I moved, the question became: 'ben je gevaccineerd tegen Polio?'

That last one is a separate issue perhaps, though over the years I've come across so many pop English phrases and then seen how they are completely misused or that they were floating about in the media and were misunderstood by sections of the public. And that in fact they were unnecessary, because there are perfectly good Dutch words which would cause no-one to be confused about anything. It's pretty silly.
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby rdearman » Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:17 pm

Why use a perfectly good word when you can invent something ridiculous?

Aubergine (Solanum melongena), is a plant of the family Solanaceae (also known as the nightshades) and genus Solanum. Aubergine is a perfectly good word for a vegetable (technically a fruit) so why would you call it an "egg plant", unless of course your purple chickens lay purple eggs?

Or how about the humble chickpea, an annual legume of the family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae. Chickpea seeds are high in protein. It is one of the earliest cultivated legumes, and 9500-year-old remains have been found in the Middle East. The chickpea is a key ingredient in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines, used in hummus, and, when ground into flour, falafel. Cultivated chickpeas are divided into 2 main groups, the Desi and the Kabuli groups. Desi seeds are small, darker coloured and smooth or wrinkled. Kabuli seeds are larger and cream-coloured. Kabuli seeds contain less fibre and cook faster than Desi seeds, and are thus more desirable for food. So what bloody idiot decided to call them "garbonzo beans"?

Or when you put things on a grill to cook, a normal person would say they are grilling something, WTF is "Broil" is that like dropping something in boiling oil? But wouldn't that be just deep frying?
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby iguanamon » Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:51 pm

rdearman wrote:Why use a perfectly good word when you can invent something ridiculous?

Aubergine (Solanum melongena), is a plant of the family Solanaceae (also known as the nightshades) and genus Solanum. Aubergine is a perfectly good word for a vegetable (technically a fruit) so why would you call it an "egg plant", unless of course your purple chickens lay purple eggs?

Or how about the humble chickpea, an annual legume of the family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae. Chickpea seeds are high in protein. It is one of the earliest cultivated legumes, and 9500-year-old remains have been found in the Middle East. The chickpea is a key ingredient in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines, used in hummus, and, when ground into flour, falafel. Cultivated chickpeas are divided into 2 main groups, the Desi and the Kabuli groups. Desi seeds are small, darker coloured and smooth or wrinkled. Kabuli seeds are larger and cream-coloured. Kabuli seeds contain less fibre and cook faster than Desi seeds, and are thus more desirable for food. So what bloody idiot decided to call them "garbonzo beans"?

Or when you put things on a grill to cook, a normal person would say they are grilling something, WTF is "Broil" is that like dropping something in boiling oil? But wouldn't that be just deep frying?

"Broil" came into English via Old French "bruller", as such, the word has no relation to the English word "boil". "Aubergine" obviously comes from French. It is used for the name of the vegetable we in North America call "Eggplant". The most common variety nowadays is purple and somewhat elongated. In the middle of the 18th Century, they were white and oval shaped, resembling goose eggs. The British adopted the word "aubergine" from the French... which came from Catalan... which came from Arabic... which came from Persian... which came from Sanskrit. It gets complicated. I saw some white eggplant at the farmers' market here a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, they weren't always purple, or striped- as you can see in the photo below.

Image

"Garbanzo" beans entered English through a borrowing from Spanish... from around the same 18th Century era- a lot of new fruits and vegetables being introduced then, apparently.

When, I lived in Northern England as an American Southerner, I accused the English of always choosing a fancy French word when an ordinary English word would do just fine- "aubergine"?! "Courgette" = "zucchini" in the US... American English borrowed the word from Italian... but that's another vegetable story.

To the OP, sorry for derailing the thread. I've been fascinated by etymology since early high school. My English teacher would start her class with a ten minute etymology lesson about the history of English words and where they came from.
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby tungemål » Tue Sep 13, 2022 4:08 pm

This thread could go in many directions. I agree with your first point, but: I'm in favour of international words.

I thought "vaccine" was such an international word, until I discovered that German uses "Impfung". (in Norwegian we use vaksine).

Other international words:
- Telephone. It used to be the same in all languages, but this word has unfortunately been replaced now by: cell phone (US), mobile (UK), "handy" (German)(this word makes me shudder).
- Concert. Only the Icelandic had to invent a native word for this: They call it "tónleikar".
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby tungemål » Tue Sep 13, 2022 4:30 pm

iguanamon: Aha, finally "eggplant" makes sense!
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby Le Baron » Tue Sep 13, 2022 5:10 pm

tungemål wrote:This thread could go in many directions. I agree with your first point, but: I'm in favour of international words.

I thought "vaccine" was such an international word, until I discovered that German uses "Impfung". (in Norwegian we use vaksine).

Other international words:
- Telephone. It used to be the same in all languages, but this word has unfortunately been replaced now by: cell phone (US), mobile (UK), "handy" (German)(this word makes me shudder).
- Concert. Only the Icelandic had to invent a native word for this: They call it "tónleikar".


I don't like international words that are based on vocabulary dominance from a dominant language. The problem I'm really alluding to is that the words might get adopted, but they are 1) sometimes wrongly-used and 2) some part of the local population doesn't understand them properly.

It's not that I think every country should e.g. have invented a local word for Karaoke, but that perfectly good existing local words get edged-out because of English-dominated and led global concerns. I don't like homogenisation.
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby rdearman » Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:44 pm

Le Baron wrote:The problem I'm really alluding to is that the words might get adopted, but they are 1) sometimes wrongly-used and 2) some part of the local population doesn't understand them properly.


French:
Le Jogging (Not the act of jogging, but the trousers you wear when you go Footing!) Footing = Jogging.
Pressing .... = Dry Cleaning.
:lol:
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby Erisnimi » Tue Sep 13, 2022 7:56 pm

tungemål wrote:Other international words:
- Telephone. It used to be the same in all languages, but this word has unfortunately been replaced now by: cell phone (US), mobile (UK), "handy" (German)(this word makes me shudder).


In Hebrew which I study, the common word for cellphone is "pelefon" (פלאפון) which literally means "miracle phone". What I didn't realize at first was that it was a brand name first, Pelephone, an Israeli mobile network operator. It's similar to the English "hoover" and such genericized trademarks then.

Related to telephone is a Hebrew verb I like, "letalpen" (לטלפן), to call on the telephone, derived from the word "telefon" (טלפון).

There are "native" newly-invented words for new inventions, introduced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language and then often ignored by the public. The Internet for example is "mirshetet" (מרשתת), derived from the word for net, "reshet" (רשת), but what people call it is "internet" (אינטרנט).

Finnish has a word for cellphone you might like. It's "kännykkä". "Känny" is a colloquial word for "hand" and that makes "kännykkä" something that fits in the hand, I suppose. Nowadays "känny", hand, often stands for cellphone all on its own.
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby Le Baron » Tue Sep 13, 2022 7:59 pm

rdearman wrote:French:
Le Jogging (Not the act of jogging, but the trousers you wear when you go Footing!) Footing = Jogging.
Pressing .... = Dry Cleaning.
:lol:

Dutch. A drink in a tall glass (called a slim Jim glass in UK) = 'longdrink'. Also one of my biggest bugbears, the use of 'total-loss' used as a noun to mean a right-off: 'Het is een total-loss'. Or even as one word: totalloss.

Horrid.
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Re: The perils of 'international English'

Postby ryanheise » Wed Sep 14, 2022 2:45 am

Another peril of international English is that in the UK, you can be banned on Facebook for using the word "fag", which in the US is a derogatory term, but in the UK is actually a common word for cigarette. And although you're not likely to get banned for this, the word "thong" in Australia (and in the US before the 80s) refers a common type of footwear we all wear at the beach, and it means something else entirely outside of Australia. If we eliminated all differences in language around the world, we would probably have to close down this forum!

But by the same token, when other languages borrow English words and reinvent them, such as "fighting" in Korean (which means "Good luck!"), then we still have some differences to celebrate, and a reason to keep this forum going :-)
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