In a fight against "Denglish," language advocacy groups in Germany are fighting the growing incursion of English terms into the German language. The use of English for tech terms like "texting" and "email" is widespread in languages around the world and while national language associations fight to create equivalents in the native tongue, the general public tends to prefer English terms. Read this article to learn about efforts to reduce the use of Anglicisms by German companies and by the public.
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Ruckizuckifutti as a substitute for “fast food” says it all. Come on -like “fast food” is going to prostitute the German language. Having lived there for many many years let me assure the purists that you cannot get along in Germany without learning German- a minimum of 5000 words are need for everyday conversation compared with 1000 (or less) in English. Don’t see purist English getting excited about Kindergarten or Gesundheit or gemutlich. English just happens to be the language of the technical world.
I think every country should protect their language and try to make new words also for technical terms.
It’s not fair to have to use terms in another language in your own language. For example, German is a language by itself implying foreign words makes it so UNGERMAN!!!
Oldaele,
Your comments, while using the English language, combined many foreign languages (for a game try spotting all the Latin, French, Germanic, etc. words used). Languages borrow each others’ vocabulary all the time. They are living things.
Whats the problem?
After all, English is a Germanic language!!
Whats the problem??
Afetr all, English is a Germanic language!!
When Hengist and Horsa went to what we now call England they were not very interested in inflections. The English Language evolved.. They found that to say “the old man” we didn’t need to inflect it into 8 slight variations depending on case and number, anyway you slice it, in English “the old man.” or OK maybe men.
There are primitive languages today that are so highly inflected that outsiders can hardly learn them.. Nobody speaks Latin today. The French and the Spanish (and more) made it into a quite usable language. Back, way back, when I was a student it was thought that to understand English well one had to learn the Latin cases. What a bunch of baloney.
Germans ought to do what English speaking nations do. If a foreign word is useful, adopt it and thenceforth call it your own. Can you say “fair play” in German?, or “sprint car” in Italian?
Saving German from English, saving a language from ‘incursion’, is like saving your health by sterilizising the environment. This leads to dead. Every effort to ‘save’ a language from getting dirty is piffling. What do they expect? To change the way people talking to each other? France has tried to stop the use of English expressions by law. Ridiculous. Do they hope to make it a question of political correctness?
Try to imagine you meet one who speaks like 100 years ago – even 50 would enough to let him sound silly – listen to old radio shows. Language is not someting separable from the rest of life. Everything is constantly changing. What do these people have in mind? Stopping the time?
There is an ad in German running for years “Ich will so bleiben wie ich bin.” ” Du darfst!” – it’s just impossible.
There is only one thing one could do to improve the use of language – MORE AND BETTER EDUCATION. All these movements always have, at least, a touch of snootiness. Other people shall follow my advice. Don’t they realize how arrogant it is, or are they aware?
max_meer@yahoo.de