Today I had a really … interesting paper from 1913 published by the National Council of Teachers of English. It mainly deals with the question if it is fair to call Latin and Old Greek “dead” languages. As the author of the paper, Walter Alison Edwards, pointed out: Just because nobody is speaking them actively, a “dead” language can still be an active influence on modern languages. So the topic of adaptation of foreign words, which was topic in my high school German class (mainly adaptation of English words in German), was already a topic in 1913. There it was the increasing amount of Latin and Old Greek words in English: words like “dynamic”, “habitat", “sanitary", “altruist", “nihilist”, “cyclone", “pessimism", “cosmic”, “egoism” and “agnostic”. The reason for that? Mainly new inventions which need new names to describe them. However, Edwards also discuss the increasing number of people speaking English and the fact that these people are scattered over a large portion of the earth as possible triggers for the need of new words. Nevertheless, the most important source of new words is that “We live in a period of extraordinary industrial and intellectual activity. Discoveries and inventions follow thick after one another and new theories abound in every department of human thought. “ I love this quote because even though it is meant to describe a certain time area, it is still true, as we are still living in a time of continuous technical advancement and new science methods and results. And also still true: “Scientists by general agreement draw upon the resources of Greek and Latin for new words to designate their discoveries and inventions”. So the "airship" is called “aeroplane” the “horseless carriages” are called ”automobiles”, the "shorthand writer” is a “stenographer" and the "talking machine” is a “phonograph”. Today, “automobiles” and “aeroplanes” are normal words and, therefore, this summary sounds crazy. Nevertheless, this paper maybe shows us that inventions which promote the adaption of words from different languages, is an old phenomena. "A Legacy from the Dead Languages."
Walter Alison Edwards The English Journal 2.9 (1913): 567-574.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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