Seeing as how my brother is enrolled in a Japanese class in college, it is not easy to evade his frequent culture and language "reports." On one occasion, I actually paid attention and learned that the three "alphabets" of Japanese- kanji, hiragana, and katakana- are quite unique from an English-speaker's perspective, besides the utilization of a different set of symbols for words. In fact, one of them, katakana, is used almost exclusively in the communication of foreign words, such as 'America' or 'television.' I found it fascinating to compare the use of foreign words in our language to those of Japanese. What I realized is that our foreign vocabulary is extremely limited and serves only a handful of functions.
It seems to me that the only reason why we, as English speakers, use foreign words is to express a very specific thought or to sound "fancy." Turning to 'Seinfeld' again, in one episode George is dating a woman who always refers to paper mache as "papier maché" (literally meaning 'mashed paper' in French). I don't want to get too off topic, but the gist of this example is that her usage of a foreign words greatly annoyed George. When we use these terms, we often sound very pretentious; why is that? Why is it that the English language is so "close-minded" when it comes to using foreign words? Are there any other languages that do this?
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Hey, it's Erin. This is a little off-topic, but I think that once you are forced to learn something, it is no longer an enjoyable task. If you choose to learn something, you will put more effort into mastering it and have fun as you go. I mean, I'm probably the only one, but didn't you ever want to learn a language just for the fun of it? (Some language, of course, that isn't a choice in school). I think that the difference between choosing and forcing is the difference between learning and acquiring subsistence knowledge (just enough to get by and that is it).
It always amuses me that in Spanish, television is television (can't put the accents in there) and jeans are los jeans and shorts are los shorts, etc. (That's probably where we get spanglish from, just adding "el" to the front and "o" at the end). Anyway, I think that a lot of languages are like that; they contain the influences of other languages. English does as well. I mean, our English isn't the same as the people's in England, and both languages have influences from Latin or French or others. That's why learning Latin roots of words is so helpful.
I do have to agree that foreign vocabulary is used either to impress or when a word is very specific (if you watch the Food Network, they'll say "tapas" because it is a specific concept - is julienne the same thing; it sounds French, but half of the time I'm wrong). I guess that people like to hear their native language; sometimes it's hard enough to understand by itself.
Sorry for the long, rambling comment :)
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