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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
why [paraphrase? I said english, not american. english is spoken by more people every day, and it is the new international language of business (used to be french) and it DOES absorb any words from any language. this is all true man. half the words in the english language are lifted straight from french, german, spanish, chinese, whatever...
who said anything about rules and standards?
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French, as a language, is far from dying. French falls into the category of languages which, thanks to cultural imperialism/ imperialism proper, is pretty secure in its position. If you know French French culture, there is no way they would give up their beautiful language, or at least, no way they'd switch to English. The various points of contact with French imperialism (large slews of Africa, mostly) are unlikely to abandon one imposed language in favour of another, not without (yet more) bloodshed which, thankfully, is currently out of vogue (the regimes the west imposed have done a fine job of letting African countries kill themselves).
It's the same with German. There's no point reverting to English. You're right insofar as English is the language of trade, and, latterly, the language of the internet. Before anyone hops in to say that other language exists on the internet - yes, thanks, I am aware of that. English is the
dominant language of the internet, and is the
dominant language of international trade.
The point isn't about languages that are secure in their status. French may not have the fluidity of input that English has, but French is far from some ossified museum piece - the main distinction is that the OED (or Websters for the USA) is an independent, academic enterprise. The dictionary of France is (or possibly was - I haven't read about this this century) controlled by the government. A word, in France, doesn't require the legitimation of the dictionary to be used and understood by its speakers. No word requires official legitimation to be considered an 'orthodox' word of its language. It just so happens that the OED is a
descriptive and
analytical measure of English-users; the French dictionary is slightly more towards being
prescriptive, but this is by no means the same prescriptive as the one that is neccessary for dead languages like coptic or heiroglyphics.
I'd like to talk more about re-constructive languages like Hebrew, but I don't really know enough, unfortunately.