SC - spelling please

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Adamantius wrote:
>
>If, on the other hand, the language was full of English vocabulary, and
>still attempts were made to deny any foreign contribution and to
>"cleanse" the language of foreign impurity, even to the extent of
>creating new terms for foreign technical achievements in order to
>downplay their foreign-ness, then that would be somewhat hypocritical.


Yes, but that's exactly what we do ...
We have borrowed quite a lot of English and international words and terms,
although we usually Icelandicize the spelling and change the endings to fit
our grammar. But ...
We don't say "computer", we say "tölva".
We don't say "telephone", we say "sími".
We don't say "helicopter", we say "þyrla".
We don't say "television" or "radio", we say "sjónvarp" and "útvarp".
And so on. This is to downplay the foreign-ness not of what the words are
used to describe, but of the words themselves. "Computer" or
"kompúter/kompjúter" definitely does not sound right in Icelandic; "tölva"
(a combination of "tölur" (numbers) and "völva" (Old Norse term for seeress)
on the other hand does.

The main reason these words are used instead of the English/international
terms is that people liked them and wanted to use them, not because someone
told them to. We do have Icelandic words that could replace almost all the
loanwords but they haven't gained acceptance. It is, after all, not a
committee but the users of a language who decide how it changes (or does not
change). The committee can make suggestions about new words but if people
don't like them, they simply will not be used.

As an example (a food-related one): "Glóaldin" (glowing fruit) was coined
70-80 years ago as a translation of "orange". It is a nice word that has
never been widely used. "Orange" doesn't fit in and has never been used for
the fruit. We use "appelsína", a Danish (originally German) loanword,
appelsin - we just added an -a ending and everyone is happy with that - even
most of the hard-core purists. When I was writing my book and had to chose
between two or more terms, the most important question for me was not "is
this an Icelandic word?" but "has this been accepted by people, or has a
good chance of becoming accepted?"

I don't think the French will have much luck in their purifying attempts. We
are moderately successful, but then, we've been doing it for 200 years.

Nanna