as far as South Asian languages are concerned, however, i'm a linguistic purist at heart...i don't think this is hypocrisy, because there's certainly a complex linguistic hierarchy in Pakistan, and English is at the top.

i cringe, for instance, when an Urdu or Punjabi speaker says "car" instead of "gâRî" or "gaDDî," or "book" instead of "kitâb"...however, there are a few examples of bastardised English words in Urdu that harmonise interestingly with the Persianate roots of the Urdu tashakhkhus or character. three examples:

darâz. a corruption from the English "drawers." this is the term i've always used, and it's always sounded perfectly shâyasta ("polite," "genteel")--in fact i was surprised to learn of its etymology. the neat thing is that it happens to match the (Persianate) Urdu word darâz, meaning "long, tall, extended, stretched out." drawers after all, are meant to be "stretched out."

rasîd. this one could be either a corruption of the English "receipt," which is what it means, or it may actually be Persian in origin, if you trust Platts. the Persian verb is "rasidan."

sitambar. this is my favourite, a corruption of "September." Zehra and i were discussing this in that month. if there were such a word in Persian, "sitam-bar" would be a compound meaning...*drumroll*..."bringer of oppression."

anyhow, what do you folks think of purism, bastardism, etc? i'm rather impressed that the French managed to popularise "ordinateur" for "computer"--the Persian coinage "rânande" never really caught on--i recently learned the standard Arabic coinage, though: "hâsib," which is quite elegant, i think.

the Persians haven't managed to do much with "telephone" either, and "tîlîfûn" remains the common Arabic word, although "hâtif" (another very nice word) seems to be making some headway. the Urdu purist coinage sounds ridiculous to me as an Urdu speaker: "dûr go" ("distant talker"). use that word in Pakistan and they'll think you're from the moon. the prevalent "fon" or "fûn" is nice, although i imagine it will cause problems when they try to coin "tele-" words...if they ever get around to that.

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i could rant on this subject for ages, so i'll keep it short to the point.

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Likewise, to both.

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as far as the English language is concerned, i believe that we ought to muck around with it as much as possible...

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Agreed.

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which isn't to say that not a stickler for spelling and grammar in the proper situations, but the Standard Englishes are going to have to make way for their bastard third-world cousins eventually.

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Agreed II.

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anyhow, what do you folks think of purism, bastardism, etc?

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Dislike the first intensely, thoroughly approve of the second.

(Say, when you talk about "drawers," do you mean as in a "chest of drawers," or as in "underwear"? Which could, of course, be in a chest of drawers...)

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Speaking of French, heard a fellow lecturing on Islamic history the other night on "Ideas" (no, not the benighted Bernard Lewis). He said in passing that the old Islamic trading system had had such a sophisticated system of credit that a merchant could draw a cheque on a bank (or whatever) in Basra (present-day Iraq) and cash it in Morocco. This system so much predated any European equivalent that the Arabic or Persian words passed into European languages -- both cheque and "douane" (the French for "customs") are of, er, Arabic or Persian origin (didn't catch which was which).

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On "Ideas" last week, Bernard Lewis said the exact same thing, verbatim.

'lance, I found Bernard Lewis' perspective quite refreshing and his discussion of the decline of the Arab civilization vis-a-vis Western "civilization" intriguing.

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(Say, when you talk about "drawers," do you mean as in a "chest of drawers," or as in "underwear"? Which could, of course, be in a chest of drawers...)

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a chest of drawers.

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I don't think that English has ever been "pure,"

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yeah, this is the major problem with purism.

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I don't think the South Asian varieties of English are "bastardised" - in French we'd talk about "métissage culturel"

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well, i don't mean it in a negative sense. i learnt it from Rushdie, and i remember an interview in which Gayatri Spivak spoke in more or less the same terms. the argument goes that Indian English, for example, is the "bastard child" of English imperialism in the sense that the encounter with South Asia was a "rape." you're right, of course, to question this; the sense, as you suggest, is of "hybridity." but it's consistent with the postcolonial/minority tendency to embrace derogatory terms.

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I don't think there is anything wrong with "purism" as an attempt to conserve language and culture. In an increasingly globalized world, conservative currents help preserve diversity. But language is contantly evolving regardless of how anyone tries to steer it.

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precisely; i agree with both points. i can't impose my ideas about Punjabi, Urdu or English on other people, even if not doing so leads to their decline. at the same time, it's painful for me to see a language stagnate and know that ultimately i can't directly change the situation. a friend of mine suggested to me that the best thing to do is not to harrass others about the way they speak, but to "represent"--that is, to speak and write the language the way i want to, regardless of the response. this means that i speak a very bookish sort of Urdu, but at least my family and especially my girlfriend are catching on.

it creates a problem too, when you're thinking about what you're going to do when you have kids. do i teach them TheTh ("pure") Punjabi, or should i just teach them English? what use would they have for Punjabi? immersed in a world of English, wouldn't they forget it eventually? my feeling, though, is that as long as they're compelled to speak to me, they'll retain it.

what really saddens me about Urdu is its stagnation after independence. there seems to be very little creativity happening anymore, and this is partially because of the position of English, and partly because of the inanity of the purist movement itself. Urdu neologisms don't seem to appear anymore, because if an Urdu speaker wants to translate "anthropology," they'll just use the English word. meanwhile the purists are fighting over whether to use a Persianate term ("âdam shinâsî") or an Arabic one ("âdamiyyât"). mucking around with words from other relevant sources--Sanskrit, English, or other South Asian languages--is just out of the question.

this all has to do, of course, with the character of Pakistan; the nation always has to maintain a difference from its "Hindu" neighbour India and tends at a certain level to cast its gaze towards the Islamic utopia of the Middle East, while at a higher level it's still controlled by a small Westernised elite who invariably have their children educated in English.

creativity isn't dead; in the past 50-60 years a few interesting words have been formed, such as "bainu'l-aqwâmî" for "international." it's made up of Arabic words, but i don't believe it's a borrowing; rather, it's a neat construction along Arabic lines (i think the Sanskrit prefix "antar-" is convenient as well--antar-qaumî?). in English we seem to be able to convert practically anything into a verb. in Urdu simple verbs never seem to get formed, which is a shame; compound verbs are always used. a few exceptions include "filmânâ" for "to film" instead of "film karnâ" and "qaumiyânâ" for "to nationalise" instead of "qaumî banânâ."

they could learn something from their madly Sanskritising neighbours as well. for instance, the Urdu equivalents for "-ism and -ist" don't quite work. for instance, when i say "feminism" in Urdu--i.e., "nuswâniyyat--it could easily mean "femininity" as well. the Hindi/E. Punjabi solution is nice: "-wâd and -wâdî" for "-ism" and "-ism." i could say "mârkswâdî" for "Marxism" and "mârksî" for "Marxian." or...um..."pas-isti`mârwâdî" for "postcolonialism" and "pas-isti`mâriyyat" for "postcoloniality"....

Misspellings drive me nuts. Misuse of words ("comprise" for "compose," corporate neologisms, homonym confusion) irritate the hell out of me. And too often, IMHO, the rhetoric of flexibility and growth is used by unilingual Anglophones to justify their own laziness and stupidity.

Muck about all you like. Only, remember that the purpose of language is communication. If you want someone to understand you, it helps to use vocabulary, spelling, grammar and syntax that other people recognize.

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"Muck about", how, exactly?
For some people, this means that they can turn a verb into a noun, and adverb into an adjective, an adjective into verb. For some, it means that any word that sounds vaguely like the one they want will do. For some, it mean creative spelling. For some, it means that "any word I use is correct in any way I want to use it".

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Indeed. If Dante hadn't placed such people somewhere within one of his rings, he must have at least thought about it.

I don't mind throwing in a foreign word for effect now and again.

That famous story of Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech comes to mind. Every word in the speech but "surrender," which comes from French, is supposed to have had an Old English root.

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What do you think about Eric Blair's admonition that we avoid the use of foreign words, phrases et cetera when an English word can be used?

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I think that's a good policy, on the whole. Cuts down on the pretension.

I think English is in a different position from many other languages, as people are worried that English will eat the other languages and no one is seriously afraid that other languages will eat English. But when your language only has a few million speakers, well, you start feeling protective.

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For some, it means that "any word I use is correct in any way I want to use it".

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AAUAUGH!

For some, it apparently means that dictionaries are now obsolete.

I was recently on a website whose author posted his hate mail, including several messages informing him that he'd misspelled the word "insane." Because he'd referred to something as "inane," and these people weren't familiar with that word, so rather than taking three seconds to go to dictionary.com and type it in, they just fired off e-mails to this guy telling him his spelling was bad...I hate people...

[ November 05, 2002: Message edited by: Smith ]

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I'm on the fence about English. I'm fine with taking words from other languages - we always have, that's what this language is - but the "flexibility" movement kind of skeeves me out.
Misspellings drive me nuts. Misuse of words ("comprise" for "compose," corporate neologisms, homonym confusion) irritate the hell out of me. And too often, IMHO, the rhetoric of flexibility and growth is used by unilingual Anglophones to justify their own laziness and stupidity.

We have rules, especially in written English. We have those rules for a reason. I don't care about purity of source, but purity of output is another thing entirely.

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I loath the misuse of homonyms, though I am loathe to take people up on it , as it is widely viewed as pretentious.

Why, oh why did a supposedly literate Babble muck-a-muck write " This topic is comprised of??!!! For one thing, "This topic comprises" is not only indicative of fluency, but it's SHORTER.

It's like carpentry: countersink your nails and fill. Rake your grass after you mow it. If you're a CBC radio announcer, for example, learn to speak the friggin' language! If you're a newspaper columnist, confidence in the cogency of your arguments is not encouraged by a complete ignorance of grammar, nor by an encyclopedic command of malapropisms.

Whew! I feel better!Thanks for the opportunity to get that off my chest; that "is comprised of "grates every time I see it.

It's an example of that disease called "talking pretty", a term coined by the author of "In Defence of Plain English", whose name I forget, but whose book is an impassioned plea to save trhe subtlety of expression that is being gradually sucked out of the English language as George Orwell predicted.

BTW, maybe you can shed some light on this. The people I work with whose French is what I would consider the "best", by that I mean closer to the standard European dialect (I remember being told that the "purest" French comes from the area of Tours), all seem to come from the area of Trois -Rivieres. Is this coincidence, or is there a dialectical particularity associated with that region of Quebec?

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I read Mohamad's use of "muck about" to mean adopting and adapting words from other languages.

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yeah, this is basically what i mean.

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I find it interesting that Mohamad Khan makes a distinction between what should be done to different languages. I suppose we each try to protect the one we love.

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you're right...but then, i love English too--i'm majoring in English Lit, after all--misspellings drive and such things drive me nuts as well, though i'm not overweening enough to lash out at people on this board for that reason. but, for example, there's a certain variant of English...variants, i should say...that are used in South Asia for South Asian audiences to overcome language barriers (not that there aren't other languages that have the same function). Indian Englishes often have clearly distinct vocabularies, phonological and morphological patterns, and grammars, which are nonetheless very logical in their own right. the status of English in South Asia is problematic, as i've said, but i believe that such Englishes do have an important niche to fill, particularly in "postcolonial" nations.

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That's never been a problem, from scimitar to pizza. Here is the rule: If you encounter something new that your language doesn't have a name for, use the name it comes with.

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well, see, this is the problem that many non-European languages face: modernity is often conflated with Westernisation, therefore the vast majority of new terms that speakers of South Asian languages are confronted with are of European (usually English) origin, so much so that most people can barely hold a five minute conversation without having at least one English word in every other sentence. here's a paragraph from my sister's biology textbook, first in English, then translated into the language of a Westernised Punjabi (in which words are borrowed), and finally in "TheTh" Punjabi (in which equivalents are used):

the body organization of the other bilaterally symmetrical animals differs from the solid worms in an important way: all the other bilaterally symmetrical animals possess an internal body cavity. the evolution of an internal body cavity made possible a significant advance in animal architecture.

dûje bilaterally symmetrical jânwarâñ dî body organization solid worms toñ ik ahm qism dâ farq rakhdâ hai: sab dûje bilaterally symmetrical jânwarâñ dî ik internal body cavity hundî hai. internal body cavity dî evolution ne animal architecture wic ik baRâ significant advance nûñ mumkin kîtâ.

dûje dutarfî mutanâsib jânwarâñ dâ badanî jatheband Thos kîTâñ toñ ik ahm qism dâ farq rakhdâ hai: sab dûje dutarfî mutanâsib jânwarâñ dâ ik andarlâ badanî pol hundâ hai. andarle badanî pol dâ irtiqâ’ ne jânwarî mi`mârî wic ik baRâ pur-ahmiyyat câle nûñ mumkin kîtâ.