Purism and personality

[janus]

I study psychology and am interested in what differentiates people who are language purists and those who are anti-purism. Could someone share their thoughts and maybe litterature on this subject?

Thanks
Janus

[janus]

Is it okay to use loan words or should new words be coined from roots of one's own language?

George Orwell:
"Bad writers—especially scientific, political, and sociological writers—are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones."

John Cheke:
"I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."

Do you agree or disagree?

[Levike]

Is it okay to use loan words or should new words be coined from roots of one's own language?

Do you agree or disagree?

I prefer the second option.

I'm kind of a purist. I like a language to be as "unique" as possible and to preserve its "own" traits.

[IpseDixit]

My humble opinion is that loanwords are ok when they enrich the language bringing new concepts which were previously unexpressed/unexpressable.

I can't stand loanwords when they cover a meaning that is already covered by a word of the language in question. For example I can't stand the use of "weekend" instead of the Italian word fine-settimana.

Moreover I usually have a bad mental association with loanwords because they're often (probably most of the time) used in a pretentious way by people who try to appear sophisticated, or even worse, because they're used in order to make things harder to understand, or to "sweeten the pill" like in the case of politicians.

Another thing that I don't like much is that the source of 99.9% of nowadays' loanwords is just one language: English. I think I'd be more open-minded if the sources were more motley.

[vijayjohn]

I honestly do not consider myself a purist at all and don't think there's anything wrong with languages adopting words, grammatical constructions, etc. from other languages per se. It's a perfectly natural outcome of language contact. What I do have something against is when there's an inferiority complex that helps motivate that process; for example, as I see it, a huge part of the motivation for Malayalees to use English words when speaking their own language (Malayalam) is the idea that they, their language, and their culture are somehow inferior to Westerners, the English language, and Western culture, respectively. Even then, though, I don't try to tell other Malayalees not to use English loanwords; I just try to avoid doing so myself (to the extent that I can, really, without sounding completely unnatural).

[linguoboy]

Pretty much any time someone posits a simple binary like this, it's guaranteed to rub me the wrong way. "Purism" operates on many axes and, as vijayjohn points out, has a lot of social dimensions as well, so it has very different meanings in different languages. My attitudes toward purism in my native language, English, are completely different than they are for other languages I speak.

To take one example: loanwords are the most conspicuous target for purists. When they retain their original orthography, they can literally change the entire appearance of the language. But, from another point of view, they also represent the most superficial type of contact-induced language change. This phenomenon is often faddish and loanwords borrowed during one period of influence (e.g. the Alamodewesen of early modern German) are easily displaced during another (e.g. the current age of "Denglish").

As a result, one of the most fervent purists I've encountred--an Irish learner who based his usage on that of a Catholic priest who died just short of a century ago--actually had more of a problem with neologisms formed from entirely native morphemes than straight-up borrowings from English. His reasoning includes the fact that the borrowings tend to arise naturally in the speech of native speakers whereas pure-Irish terminology is manufactured by L2-speakers in Dublin and that most of the new terms don't respect historical precedent (many being formed by compounding on the Germanic model, a relatively rare process in the Celtic languages).

So I really think to make any headway on answering the question, you need to get more specific about the kind of purism you have in mind and the circumstances under which it arises. It's way more complicated than there being puristic and anti-puristic personality types or something of that sort.

[janus]

Thank you for answering, sorry for writing back so late (work/family/study)

My aim is to understand the issue. I didn't start out trying capture all of life's intricacies in this theme, but rather to contrast two opposite oppinions that I perceive in order to understand how they come about. I understand linguoboy's concern about simplifying things. My aim is not to simplify per se and I am aware of the regrettable outcomes of dichotomizing issues. However, one way of trying to gain understanding about an issue is to compare and contrast different oppinions. I value all of your input.

My background: I come from the Faroe Islands. Danes outlawed faroese in schools, churches and official documents after the reformation and the result was that faroese almost died out. My father was a boy when faroese replaced danish as the official school language and church language. Today a lot of danish words are still in the language and I myself often struggle to find the correct faroese words when talking because my parents and surroundings always used lots of danish words. Right now there is a discussion about adding foreign letters to the alphabeth and as I see it people are divided along purism lines.

Without understanding why, I find myself leaning towards the more puristic outlook like f.ex. IpseDixit and Levike.
I'm an undergraduate psych student at Uni of Derby and right now we're supposed to connect a chosen theme to personality. Since I've started getting interested in language I'm thinkin about if people, with some form of a puristic attitude, share some personality trait f.ex. being high on conscientiousness in the Big Five Personality traits.

But linguoboy, you suggest I should focus on a specific kind of purism. I will try to think more about how to narrow it down. Thanks for your input

[linguoboy]

Here's something to ruminate on, janus: How conscious are you of Danish structures in Faroese and how much do those bother you? Do you take the same pains to discover and use the native equivalents? What about shifts in the meaning of existing Faroese words? Are you conscious of those and does this consciousness influence your usage?

[Levike]

Without understanding why, I find myself leaning towards the more puristic outlook like f.ex. IpseDixit and Levike.

My neighbour and I both have our own houses. I want to paint my house green, he wants to paint his house blue. I don't want to see blue paint on my green house.

That's my oversimplification on the issue. What's mine shall remain mine, what's his shall remain his.

[linguoboy]

Without understanding why, I find myself leaning towards the more puristic outlook like f.ex. IpseDixit and Levike.

My neighbour and I both have our own houses. I want to paint my house green, he wants to paint his house blue. I don't want to see blue paint on my green house.

That's my oversimplification on the issue. What's mine shall remain mine, what's his shall remain his.

But language isn't just yours; it's fundamentally a social phenomenon. You can speak as puristically as you like, but if your neighbour can't understand you, then what's the point?

[Levike]

That's my oversimplification on the issue. What's mine shall remain mine, what's his shall remain his.

But language isn't just yours; it's fundamentally a social phenomenon. You can speak as puristically as you like, but if your neighbour can't understand you, then what's the point?

Yes, it depends on the whole society, but luckily the Hungarian society for example is more on the puristic side.
So you just have to convince your neighbour.

Note: By the 2 neighbours I first meant 2 different languages that should not come in contact.

[linguoboy]

Note: By the 2 neighbours I first meant 2 different languages that should not come in contact.

Where does this "should" come from? Is it taboo for neighbours to communicate with each other in Hungary?

[Levike]

Where does this "should" come from? Is it taboo for neighbours to communicate with each other in Hungary?

You kind of misunderstood what I meant to say.

William has a blue house. Albert has a green house.
Albert doesn't want to see blue paint on his green house, because he intended it to remain green.

William and Albert do communicate and are good neighbours, but Albert likes to keep his property in a certain way.

Overall idea: It's a question of preference.

The Hungarian society happens to be more puristic.
When I was in school the chemistry teacher told us that there were proposals to rename a couple of elements from the periodic table since their current names are "Latin" and not Hungarian.

On the other hand the Romanian society is not that puristic.

[linguoboy]

William has a blue house. Albert has a green house.
Albert doesn't want to see blue paint on his green house, because he intended it to remain green.

William and Albert do communicate and are good neighbours, but Albert likes to keep his property in a certain way.

Overall idea: It's a question of preference.

I get that, but almost every part of the analogy fails in some way for me.

A house is something you own. But who "owns" a language? It doesn't have a single proprietor who makes all the decisions concerning it. To the extent it can be likened to a house, that house would have to be a commune, which is naturally going to have some residents who are more open to making modifications than others. People will come and leave, which will also change the balance of opinions.

A house is static and immobile, but a language is dynamic. It only exists in the form of interaction between different people, so the idea of one person having the ultimate say on the form of it makes no sense because--as I said--if another person doesn't understand what you say, then it's failed to perform its most basic function.

You couldn't make a language one colour if you tried. Every language is motley, since they've all borrowed from others over the years. Even Atatürk realised eventually he couldn't purse all non-Turkic elements from the language.

I could go on, but you get the point. You can only strain an analogy so far before it falls to pieces.

[Levike]

A house is something you own. But who "owns" a language?

Its native speakers. And they can decide on certain aspects of the language.
So it only depends on the majority's mentality and willingness.

A house is static and immobile, but a language is dynamic.

A house can also get a repaint, as well as a new garage or a new roof.

Romanian itself has a lot of artificially borrowed Latin words that replaced some Slavic words.
They saw this "repaint" of Romanian fit so they did it. Some people agreed, some didn't, but in the end it worked.

That's the point, a language is dynamic and its native speakers can have some influence on how to shape it.

Sometimes it works, like the way Hungarian got rid of dialects or the way Romanian imported its neo-neo-Latin words and sometimes it fails, like the Greek Katharevousa.

[vijayjohn]

I'd just like to say that to some extent, at least, the speakers of a language (any language) don't really have control over which languages they come into contact with. Also, it seems ironic to me that you seem to be portraying Hungarians as purists given the variety of languages that Hungarian has (often plenty of) loanwords from, including Romanian.

Romanian itself has a lot of artificially borrowed Latin words that replaced some Slavic words.

Yeah, and Romanian also has a ton of Slavic words that were never replaced, including the word for 'yes'.

[Levike]

Compared to Romanians Hungarians are purists.

Also there are different levels of purism, we're not like let's-kathatrevousa-the-language purists.

Romanian itself has a lot of artificially borrowed Latin words that replaced some Slavic words.

Yeah, and Romanian also has a ton of Slavic words that were never replaced, including the word for 'yes'.

They didn't even try...

Trust me, it's a good thing that they didn't replace it, the Transylvanian dialect has another word alongside "da" and its horrible.

But hey, a 50% success rate is still something.

[linguoboy]

A house is something you own. But who "owns" a language?

Its native speakers. And they can decide on certain aspects of the language.

Why only native speakers? They're not the only ones using the language. It's not like they did anything to create it; they just happened to be born in communities where it was a dominant form of communication.

[Levike]

A house is something you own. But who "owns" a language?

Its native speakers. And they can decide on certain aspects of the language.

Why only native speakers?

They are mostly the ones actively using it.

[vijayjohn]

A house is something you own. But who "owns" a language?

Its native speakers. And they can decide on certain aspects of the language.

Why only native speakers?

They are mostly the ones actively using it.

Depends on which language you're talking about. For Hungarian and Romanian maybe, but there are some languages (such as English) for which that's not true.