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Comment by yock | Hacker News Reader

The link is to the BBC, but this story is in the US newspapers today as well. The irony there is that plenty of Americans seem to want exactly this, and perhaps more, from their government as well. Yet it's portrayed as a negative in the English-speaking press.

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I don't think so, English incorporates words from other languages all the time. I think there are Americans that are against things being written in foreign languages, but not against incorporating foreign words as part of the English vocabulary.

Indeed, the linguist Ronald Wardhaugh shows in his historical studies that one of the reasons English has won out over French as a world language is that English makes no attempt to be "pure" but rather adapts to how speakers use it, making it more user-friendly as a second language for speakers around the world.

Some countries have a linguistic policy that limits this, European Portuguese (this is not generally the case in Brazilian Portuguese), Icelandic and French for example.

There are people in the USA who push for English as a national language, not the removal of loan words.

Given that English in its earliest intelligible form is a merger between Old English and Norman French, I'm not really sure what English with loan words removed would sound like. Probably like Beowulf, and I'm sure I couldn't understand it.

English is a great language (though a very hard one to learn) precisely because it's cobbled together from bits of other languages. If another language has a word for a concept we're missing then we just acquire the word.

So if your friend gets drunk on tequila and vodka and eats too much foie gras and winds up with a tattoo of a voodoo shaman holding a katana in a sauna dancing the hula with a walrus then by all means you can feel schadenfreude about it.

> I'm not really sure what English with loan words removed would sound like

Perhaps like this: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/6... (An essay by Poul Anderson explaining nuclear physics using only Germanic words)

> > I'm not really sure what English with loan words removed would sound like

My friend, run, do not walk, to http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Headside

(Example article: http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Banded_Folkdoms_of_Americkslan... )

Which is all very well until you're playing Scrabble and your letters spell all sorts of pronouncable wordshaped sequences which you are sure must mean something to someone... but then they aren't allowed. :-/

Correct, even as a national language, the first amendment would clearly disallow a ban on usage of other languages by private citizens and media.

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