Re: [lojban] Naming: Borrowed versus Native

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Pierre
-- 
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.

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