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Tongue Kiss
Oct. 4th, 2005 07:45 pmRe-watching Robin of Sherwood, I was reminded of how proud I am of the hybrid vigour of my ancestry. The English are a mongrel race, the product of centuries of interbreeding between Celts, Angles, Saxons, Normans, etc etc, and our smashing language is even more of a mongrel, pinching words from any language which doesn't nail them down. I'm not proud of the track record of English when it comes to killing other languages - a project which, mercifully, tends to fail. But I do laff when, for example, the French try to keep their language pure and free of invading Anglicisms. As the language of business, English is spilling its seeds all over the Earth.
An interesting example of this process is English loanwords turning up in Hebrew. Like Greek, there's an ancient Hebrew (eg in the Bible) and a modern, growing, changing Hebrew, which has adapted words and phrases from English. A spot of Googling turned up some interesting examples. The English word generator entered Hebrew, with an altered pronunciation (a hard "g", a short "a"), even though there's a "proper" Hebrew word: m'cholel. Fascinatingly, English idioms such as "sit on the fence" and "break the ice" have been adopted by direct translation - the words are Hebrew, the idioms are still English.
(Yesterday, I read a brain-blistering analysis of word endings in the original Hebrew Genesis; single letters carried heavy theological meaning. It's odd to think that in Biblical times, Hebrew would have also been a growing, changing language - "classical" Hebrew became sort of frozen when written down as the Bible. Apparently Shakespeare did something similar for English.)
An interesting example of this process is English loanwords turning up in Hebrew. Like Greek, there's an ancient Hebrew (eg in the Bible) and a modern, growing, changing Hebrew, which has adapted words and phrases from English. A spot of Googling turned up some interesting examples. The English word generator entered Hebrew, with an altered pronunciation (a hard "g", a short "a"), even though there's a "proper" Hebrew word: m'cholel. Fascinatingly, English idioms such as "sit on the fence" and "break the ice" have been adopted by direct translation - the words are Hebrew, the idioms are still English.
(Yesterday, I read a brain-blistering analysis of word endings in the original Hebrew Genesis; single letters carried heavy theological meaning. It's odd to think that in Biblical times, Hebrew would have also been a growing, changing language - "classical" Hebrew became sort of frozen when written down as the Bible. Apparently Shakespeare did something similar for English.)
