Thought this was briefly* interesting: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/...exting.ars

Purging the Queen's English of "tweet," "app," and "sexting"

Quote:One university wants to drop the banhammer on the worst terms of the last year. "App," "sexting," "friend" (as a verb), and "tweet" all made the cut. What tech terms would you add?

I'm with them regarding the word "tweet".

*Very briefly. Like, by the time I posted this comment I lost all interest, but I don't feel like deleting this now. Sigh.

So do the Japanese press go in for this sort of annual rant about neologisms, anybody know?
(it certainly seems to be a standard story-template for the UK press...)

pm215 Wrote:So do the Japanese press go in for this sort of annual rant about neologisms, anybody know?
(it certainly seems to be a standard story-template for the UK press...)

There's a retarded 和製英語 word made up every 30-seconds to the point that it's practically destroying the integrity of the language. They'd have a lot to rant about...

People that rant about the creation of new words to describe new things, actions and concepts are wasting their time. The entire purpose of language is to describe things, and when it fails to, new words are created.

'Destroying the (perceived) integrity of the language?' you should say. Would you care to explain yourself here. I find the fact that Japan is a dominant economic and scientific global power is because of the fact they so readily adapt new words into their language, it shows their humility in accepting new technologies and scientific theories.

The most ironic thing about these sort of integrity loss language debates is that half the people arguing it know near nothing about the history of the language. Because it was only roughly 50-150 years ago (Meiji -> Taisho -> Showa) that the Japanese language underwent HUGE modification. Huge is in caps here (oh dear! I'm using a word in capitals to emphasise my point instead of using a stronger word in my vocabulary, the Vocab Stick-up-their-arses legion of england are going to expel me from society) so as to emphasise that it is perhaps bigger than any other language modernisation I've studied (Arabic, English, and Korean).
And if these 'integrity' loss nut-cases are having a whine about a languages' (perceived) integrity being lost today, without seeing how much (perceived) integrity was 'lost' in the huge batches of modernisations that occured where billions of scholars were arguing for back in their day, some scholars wanted shit to remain the same, others wanted langauge to be something for the masses, then they are complete hypocrites who are just (nothing new here) repeating history.

For every one bit of idiom/expression or vocab or grammar or even (current 'standard') pronounciation that you use so frequently today I can assure you if enough research is done, you will find that centuries ago only vulgar, people-who-ate-their-own-shit, low class masses were using and were prohibited to use by every royal pom with 10 sticks-up-their-arse because it was 'lowly' and 'uneducated' for them to use.

Yet despite all this (perceived) loss of integrity, despite all teh stuff I said above, I can still prove any retarded grammarian/vocab warrior/and in general prescriptive (idiot) is to go read modern literature. The language clearly still flourishes despite all the change that happened a while back. People still write.

An analogy I made myself is to think of a language as a lush forest, with so much flora and fauna, so much colour and vibrance, so many smells and sounds. Then think of language modernisation as a big bulldozer bulldozing an entire forest, not unlike what occurs somewhere in the world today.
After bulldozed give the forest at least 1 generation and you will see a whole new bunch of trees, a whole new bunch of plants that evolve from almost nothing, This is what actually happens in real life (Read - The diversity of life E. O. Wilson) in places where land has been completely desecrated and flattened to the ground from natural events like volcanoes etc. And yes, before long you see new growth, different species of trees and plants thrive, (some are the same of course) different animals come into the story too.

Kinda off topic, but every prescriptive linguist shouldn't be calling themselves linguists, rather "unscientific dickheads". And all grammarians can go (try) get laid, (I doubt they will, god damn losers they are).

Respect to all people who (know) that language is (and can only be) descriptive.

WW2 got us rid of nazi's, i think WW3 should get us rid of unscientific bogans.


Ps happy new year

Javizy Wrote:There's a retarded 和製英語 word made up every 30-seconds to the point that it's practically destroying the integrity of the language.

Sorry, I don't think it's destroying the integrity of the language either. Example from German: "Bereich" means 'domain' in general, whereas the anglicism "Domain" means 'internet domain' specifically (something for which there was no word previously). I'm pretty sure many wasei-eigo words work somewhat like this in Japanese; my Japanese is too shoddy (and I'm too tired) to come up with good examples right now though. ;-)

Happy new year!

While I understand and value the creation of new words to communicate new ideas, I can seriously do without "webinar." This word was dreamed up by some marketing genius (leprechaun) somewhere to create a product out of a ridiculously simple idea. The Japanese shorten/combine English words because the individual words have no intrinsic meaning to them. But English speakers already know what "web seminar" means. I want to punch people in the face when they say webinar.

I don't understand why people complain about this sort of thing. All living languages change. This is a natural process. New words being coined or coming into a language is a big part of this change (and happens much faster than changes in grammar, for instance). But anyways, why does it matter? You decide how you speak and write. No one's forcing anyone to say "I friended you" instead of "I added you as a friend."

liosama Wrote:'Destroying the (perceived) integrity of the language?' you should say. Would you care to explain yourself here. I find the fact that Japan is a dominant economic and scientific global power is because of the fact they so readily adapt new words into their language, it shows their humility in accepting new technologies and scientific theories.

The most ironic thing about these sort of integrity loss language debates is that half the people arguing it know near nothing about the history of the language. Because it was only roughly 50-150 years ago (Meiji -> Taisho -> Showa) that the Japanese language underwent HUGE modification. Huge is in caps here (oh dear! I'm using a word in capitals to emphasise my point instead of using a stronger word in my vocabulary, the Vocab Stick-up-their-arses legion of england are going to expel me from society) so as to emphasise that it is perhaps bigger than any other language modernisation I've studied (Arabic, English, and Korean).
And if these 'integrity' loss nut-cases are having a whine about a languages' (perceived) integrity being lost today, without seeing how much (perceived) integrity was 'lost' in the huge batches of modernisations that occured where billions of scholars were arguing for back in their day, some scholars wanted shit to remain the same, others wanted langauge to be something for the masses, then they are complete hypocrites who are just (nothing new here) repeating history.

For every one bit of idiom/expression or vocab or grammar or even (current 'standard') pronounciation that you use so frequently today I can assure you if enough research is done, you will find that centuries ago only vulgar, people-who-ate-their-own-shit, low class masses were using and were prohibited to use by every royal pom with 10 sticks-up-their-arse because it was 'lowly' and 'uneducated' for them to use.

Yet despite all this (perceived) loss of integrity, despite all teh stuff I said above, I can still prove any retarded grammarian/vocab warrior/and in general prescriptive (idiot) is to go read modern literature. The language clearly still flourishes despite all the change that happened a while back. People still write.

An analogy I made myself is to think of a language as a lush forest, with so much flora and fauna, so much colour and vibrance, so many smells and sounds. Then think of language modernisation as a big bulldozer bulldozing an entire forest, not unlike what occurs somewhere in the world today.
After bulldozed give the forest at least 1 generation and you will see a whole new bunch of trees, a whole new bunch of plants that evolve from almost nothing, This is what actually happens in real life (Read - The diversity of life E. O. Wilson) in places where land has been completely desecrated and flattened to the ground from natural events like volcanoes etc. And yes, before long you see new growth, different species of trees and plants thrive, (some are the same of course) different animals come into the story too.

Kinda off topic, but every prescriptive linguist shouldn't be calling themselves linguists, rather "unscientific dickheads". And all grammarians can go (try) get laid, (I doubt they will, god damn losers they are).

Respect to all people who (know) that language is (and can only be) descriptive.

WW2 got us rid of nazi's, i think WW3 should get us rid of unscientific bogans.


Ps happy new year

I'm just an average Joe studying Japanese who gets irritated by pompous twats trying to sound clever by using words like インテレクチュアル and ドクター, when it actually sounds like they're spitting out a bunch of English phonemes that somebody took a massive shite upon after a painful fortnight of constipation. I was referring mainly to the sound when I used the word integrity. I also appreciate the need for evolution, but there is such a thing as excess.

The only problem I can think of for the influx of English words into Japanese is that there's no kanji for them and thus no way to distinguish homophones using only katakana. What may be more widely adopted in the future, and is already used in some places, is preserving the English spelling, with or without hurigana written alongside, and under the assumption that they will be pronounced "the Japanese way." This could certainly do the trick, but adds yet another complication to what's already the world's most convoluted and difficult-to-learn writing system.

Looking at Japan's history, present linguistic attitude, and the trends of their educational system, my money is on this eventually happening, though perhaps not with the most common 20-40% of them.

shirokuro Wrote:I don't understand why people complain about this sort of thing. All living languages change. This is a natural process. New words being coined or coming into a language is a big part of this change (and happens much faster than changes in grammar, for instance). But anyways, why does it matter? You decide how you speak and write. No one's forcing anyone to say "I friended you" instead of "I added you as a friend."

I can understand the attitude, I think, if I imagine myself living in England, where the language is much more diverse than it is in North America. Historically, anyway. Now they all understand the standard television dialect, but trying to understand someone with a thick accent from a corner of the country far from where you were born is much harder in England than it is in America. So I can understand how there have been people wanting to standardize and even fix the language in place (like Latin, the most prestigious of all languages) for the past hundreds of years, and why that would be important in their minds.

However, it's still retarded to complain about new words, especially those coined by young people, and especially those used for talking about new technology. There is literally nothing you can do to stop people from using the words, and a lot of the words fall into disuse after a few years anyway, so a lot of times you'd be wasting your breath complaining about something that just needs to run its course.