Talk:Linguistic purism

High Icelandic

There is no such thing as High Icelandic. While there may be people who have personal enthusiasms for removing all foreign words from Icelandic, there is no popular movement to do so. There is an established language council that ensures Icelandic remains distinct and most foreign words are modified in Icelandic without a purist movement. There are no books or regular publications made in High Icelandic and it is not taught in any schools.

This comment was left by anonymous Wikipedian 85.197.195.235 on 13:15, 29 September 2005 and moved to its own thread on 10 June 2009. Header was not part of original comment.

Other forms

Should the "Other forms" be listed here at all? Judging from the article's history, it seems that they go back to Jozef Braekmans (User:Timburhelgi), who also seems to have invented them. Considering Wikipedia's No Original Research and Neutral Point Of View policies, and also considering that these terms do not seem to be used by anyone except Jozef Braekmans (and possibly his followers), I'd say that they don't belong in the article at all.

Thoughts? -- Schnee (cheeks clone) 02:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Go ahead and remove them, the worst thing that can happen is that User:Timurhelgi aka nl:User:Maximiliaan aka User:Fronkrakki aka a few anonymous IP's threatens you with death Special:Contributions/Fronkrakki... It is indeed Original Reseach, his own invention and a word he invented himself, so it should be removed from this article... --LimoWreck 13:49, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, one of the big things missing from this page is any coverage of the social expression of purism. There's no mention of purist groups and movements, the extent to which purism is official or unofficial, the whole sociology of purism. So, I don't think that High Icelandic is out of place because it doesn't belong, but because it's part of a side of the topic which isn't addressed. --Pfold 13:15, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I found the term 'regressive purism' on the following page. The term does exists. http://inet.dpb.dpu.dk/infodok/sprogforum/Espr19/Jogvan.pdf (see page 42 at the top of the page) And since High Icelandic is accepted by the Icelandic wiki community, ultrapurism exist and should be mentioned.

Icelandic never died

I'm surprised to see Icelandic categorized as "Archaizing purism" along with sanskrit, in my mind it would be closer to patriotism category. What is the basis behind that classification? --Stalfur 16:34, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Please add link to 'Language purification article'

See www.spirilogic.com for a concept article on language dynamics... Would be great to have a personal discussion on this topic... If you are interested as well, please send me an email: iwanjka@spirilogic.com Iwanjka —Preceding unsigned comment added by Iwanjka (talk • contribs) 22:54, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Article name

This side's name goes against the wear thought of what's being talked about. So that we may show the thought, should the name not be Cleanliness of speech? — ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ (talk) 12:17, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Yiddish and German

an Israeli could read out loud a Yiddish text to a German (who could not read Hebrew), who could understand it, while the Israeli could not

a wild oversimplification. while yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet many letters have different values, (not to mention the presence of vowels) without learning these differences would have no more chance of guessing the correct pronunciation as a frenchman reading aloud from a sample of swedish. also an average sample of yiddish text would have enough non-germanic elements to confuse the german-speaker, unless the sentence were very short and very simple. There is of course an element of truth, if the german & the isreali took a day or two of intensive language instruction, this experiment would work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.6.151.113 (talk) 21:17, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

It's such a vivid example. Could we introduce a line explaining that it's an exaggeration or joke? Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:12, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I removed it--it may be vivid, but it's an error rather than an exaggeration.

Yiddish uses the same letters, but very differently. Hebrew and Aramaic words retain their original spellings (without vowels), so the Israeli speaker could read those (though probably with some mispronunciations) while Germanic and other words use a fully phonetic alphabet that uses the consonants alef and ayin (silent in Ashkenazi Hebrew) as well as various combinations of vav and yud and diacritical marks for vowels. While (as noted above) a Hebrew speaker could probably learn these fairly quickly, their pronunciation would probably still not be very good. Whether a German could understand "correctly" pronounced Yiddish would probably depend on what German dialects they spoke as well as the geographic origin, linguistic register, and subject matter of the text - historically only about 70-75% of Yiddish vocabulary was of German origin and speakers in the US, Israel, and the USSR all borrowed a lot more words from other local languages in the 20th century.

Moreover, the causality is backwards. Yiddish uses a different writing system because it is/was spoken by a different population from German. Jews in German-speaking areas generally switched from Western Yiddish (which is now extinct) to the local dialect or standard German in the early 19th century despite the writing system, as did liberal middle-class Jews in mixed cities like Prague - the ones who kept speaking Yiddish were either living in non-German speaking areas or in ghettoized communities or self-segregated for religious reasons. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.92.84.50 (talk) 14:44, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Unclear line

France is known for its preference for coining words to borrowing English words.

What is meant here? It could mean "French is known for its tendency to coin words borrowed from English," or it could mean "English is known to coin 'new' words borrowed from French," or any of a half-dozen other things. Does anyone have a clear idea? Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

It means that instead of translating "computer" to computeur they coined the new word fr:ordinateur. Instead of using the word "software" untranslated they coined the word fr:logiciel. There are many counterexamples: fr:football is left untranslated; "mouse (computing)" is translated directly to fr:souris (informatique), instead of inventing a new term such as commande d'écran. Esmito (talk) 19:21, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Japanese

I'm surprised Japanese doesn't have a movement like this. I know it's a stereotype that the Japanese are nationalistic, but given how saturated the Japanese language is with foreign loanwords nowadays, you'd think somebody would've said something. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.216.226.30 (talk) 16:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Chinese

Should Chinese be included somewhere in here? Maybe revolutionary purism? It has relatively few loan-words, I notice. Gottistgut (talk) 05:35, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

The "simplified Chinese" characters were a revolutionary change indeed. Since then, there are two types of written Chinese. Mendelo (talk) 20:12, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Esperanto, …

… odd as it may seem, is a reasonably puristic language. 92.231.125.74 (talk) 10:28, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Discontinuous?

Although nothing has been altered at this talk page since 2 years, I have a question:

The article mentions the class Moderate, discontinuous purism. Is that correct? What is discontinuous about it? Or is it continuous? —Mendelo (talk) 20:10, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

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German

Why on Earth isn't there a section on purism in German?! It's one of the most successful purism movements in any major language! Fernsehen for television? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.4.129.255 (talk) 07:33, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

There is nothing inherently purist in choosing fernsehen instead of television (cognaes of fernsehen are by the way used across scandinavia). But if you can point to some literature on the apparently succesful purism movement it would be easier to write a section on it.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 07:37, 2 August 2016 (UTC).

Johann Georg Turmair

The text says usage of the German renaissance humanist Johann Georg Turmair who even translated the name of the ancient Roman general Fabius Cunctator into Zauderer Bohnenmaier (i. e. literally “Laggard Bean-Mayor”) but does not show referencies about that. I looked up for them in internet and I found nothing else than links to this page.

Romanian?

I'm thinking there should be a mention of Romanian, a language that was significantly altered in the 19th century with the addition of several thousand loanwords, mainly from French and occasionally Italian or literary Latin. Although the inherited core of the language remained largely similar (predominantly Romance), these words often pertained to more technical or complex domains or ideas that were not covered by the existing language at the time. However, many of these Romance/Latin loanwords came to replace existing Slavic or words of other origin in some cases, which became rare or fell out of use. The loans now account for around 43% of the total modern language's vocab, according to the article on the Romanian language; I think this article might have once had more on it in the past, too. It's true all the western Romance languages also added several thousand Latin learned words or borrowings earlier in the Renaissance or late Middle Ages (many of the same ones Romanian would later borrow), but this was happening as the vernacular languages first began to be used more in writing. In Romanian, since it happened later in recorded history, only within the last 200 years or less (earliest document in the language being 1512) the contrast could be stark; I think it's a pretty good example of linguistic purism. I remember reading a quote somewhere about likening the Romanian language to a patchwork cloth that had to be cleansed of the foreign elements which had accumulated over time from Slavic, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish, etc. Ion Heliade Rădulescu even proposed a more Italianate orthography which many found ridiculous, but gained traction among a few academics of the day during this Romanticist era. Today, the Romanian Academy is responsible for regulating the language. Word dewd544 (talk) 03:10, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Polish

Marginal purism: Purism never becomes at any stage a value-feature of the speech community. On the contrary, there is a certain openness to all sources of enrichment, at the same time characterized by a lack among the language elite of intellectual digestion of foreign influxes, or by a lack of such an elite as a whole. Examples: English, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Ancient Greek.

Why is Polish included there? Are you saying that Poles out of their stupidity, openly and gladly polluted their own language with loanwords??? Wtf is wrong with my nation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gość232 (talk • contribs) 20:23, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Basque

How does basque compare in this? Is linguistic purism increasing in Basque? Are they purging loanwords? You'd think that they would make an effort since I have heard that 50 percent of its vocabulary are loanwords. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.70.1.97 (talk) 17:51, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Armenian

It is also a remarkable thing in Armenia to purificate Armenian language. Cemyildiz (talk) 00:46, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

References