On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Pierre Abbat
<phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
On Thursday 16 September 2010 23:21:19 Jonathan Jones wrote:
> Unless, you're talking about the Stone Age, I'd say you're argument doesn't
> hold water. Tell me what you are referring to by "chalk era", and I'll tell
> you if a fluent English speaker who is ignorant of geology and paleontology
> (i.e., me) will understand it in English.
Cretaceous.
No.
> Thank you for pointing out that not all Linnean names are Latin derived. I
> hereby retract the ", in the Latin language" clause from my statement. Now,
> to the point of 3), can you provide examples of Linnaen names that are
> *not* descriptive. (For the record, I consider something like "*Verreaux's
> Eagle*( *Aquila verreauxii*)" to be descriptive.)
I did already. "Selmes" didn't mean anything until someone decided to call a
mousebird fossil that. Another is Sio, named for the Scripps Institute of
Oceanography.
So it's the "Selmes mousebird"? And I'd say the Sio is an inventive name, but no less a descriptive name than my eagle example.
> That's actually really interesting. I'm told that French is rather zealous
> about not borrowing words as well, to the point of having an official
> governmental department with the charge of proscribing French and figuring
> out what to call new things. (I'm also told that the French /people/ don't
> care nearly as much as the French /government/, but that's OT IMO.)
The AF is resisting the influx of English words into French. It apparently has
no problem with French borrowing words from Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, and lots
of other languages.
Ah, so they just hate English. I don't blame them.
> My question is, are you mentioning this merely to mention it, or are you
> mentioning it with the intention of providing an argument?
I'm arguing that even highly conservative languages cannot avoid borrowing
words, so it makes no sense to always prefer native descriptive words.
Probably there's only one language totally devoid of foreign words, namely
Sentinelese.
I disagree that the inevitability of having to borrow is a reason against preferring not to.
Pierre
--
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.