Language purists think that English is a weed that keeps on popping up in the linguistic garden that is their native tongue. Take for instance, the Italians:
From 'il weekend' to 'lo stress' and 'le leadership', Italians increasingly sprinkle their conversations with English terms, some of them comically mangled and bizarre sounding to a native English speaker. [...]
As with the French and their use of Franglais, Italians sometimes throw in English words to appear worldly and cosmopolitan, and at other times to describe things slightly alien to the Italian mindset, from 'il fitness' to 'il full immersion training'.
But now the Dante Alighieri Society, the cultural guardian of Italy, wanted the "Anglitaliano" to stop. Their first step was to determine the ugliest English words that had infected lingua Italiana:
Over the last four months the society, named after the Florentine poet Dante, author of The Divine Comedy and regarded as the father of the Italian language, asked visitors to its website to nominate their least favourite Anglicisms.
The results judge the ugliest imports to be 'weekend', 'welfare' and 'OK', followed by 'briefing', 'mission', 'know how', 'shampoo' and 'cool'.
The worlds of business and politics contribute many of the alien words, from 'question time' to 'premier' and 'bipartisan'.
Language changes. It evolves. If a word works, it works. If not, people won't use it.
This is why these campagns never work, English is a big tart of a language and has no problems about adding new words.
The french havce a campaign against this too, I think it is by the Acadamie Francaise, to ban "le Scotch on the rocks" and "l'hamburger", but if your language has no word for hamburger they'd rather concoct some souless construct than admit the English word.
Which is hilarious as it was welcomed into English from the German language, to describe a thing that English had no word for.
This tickles me no end.
For example, the Divine Comedy was written between 1308 and 1321 while Ovid's Amores was written at around 13 v.Chr, in Latin.
Oh wait.
Americano.
Nevermind, I'm terribly sorry then.
--TwoDragons
Things change, time to get over it and go with the flow.
or
le fin de semaine
?
They mean the same thing, much in the same way that Spade and soil invertion and relaocation appartaus can mean the samwe thing.
Two Dragons.
It's not only American English I was refering to. English English is made up of all sorts of crazy influences.
We are basic Fresian,geographically in the Netherlands, over laid with Saxon then Angle then norse then French.Not to mention the influences of several hundred years of Emirial/Colonial adventuring which brought thousands of more word in .
Melvyn Bragg wrote a marvellous book on the subject called "The Adventure of English" which I would recommend to anyone.
How am i supposed to call an hamburger?
The only italian word for it is "svizzera"
(referred to the meat patty, not the whole sandwich),
that means "swiss".
It mantains some sort of exotic appeal, but doesn't
work as well as "hamburger"(it seems like the way
you spell it resembles the way you eat it, or maybe
i'm just hungry..).
That was a really nicely measured post.
A Proud Italian enough to love your language , worldly enough to laugh into your svizzera at the nonsense.
Salut!