You wouldn't bring in a loanword for something that we already have a word for.

Why? This is exactly what natural languages do! It would be interesting to develop Esperanto that way to more like worldlang

Oijos:

You wouldn't bring in a loanword for something that we already have a word for.

Why? This is exactly what natural languages do! It would be interesting to develop Esperanto that way to more like worldlang

Very true. This is exactly what natural languages do, some more than others. Unfortunately, while this adds depth and flavor to those languages, it also results in situations like people learning English as a second language having to figure out if they are happy, glad, pleased, or elated (or probably about ten other potential synonyms). To paraphrase one of the books I've been learning from: a horse, a stallion, a mare, and a colt are all the same animal...but in English, that is not readily apparent. Esperanto, however, has ĉevalo, virĉevalo, ĉevalino, and ĉevalido, the relationship between them being transparent.

Esperanto is a living language, but it is not a natural one, and that is part of why it works. Sometimes new roots are unavoidable, but the more that are added, the harder the language is for a newbie to parse.

erinja:It would obviously be too late to import it now, because "libro" is already in Esperanto. You wouldn't bring in a loanword for something that we already have a word for.

I was merely trying to make a point. What I meant by that was that if Esperanto needs a new word to describe a new concept, it's more likely to turn to some obscure Latin or Greek word or borrow it from English or French than assimilate a word that is already popular in several non-European cultures.

erinja:I've heard of a word "haŝioj" for chopsticks. It's a loanword from Japanese. There's no rule that says that loanwords have to come from a European language. "Bonzo" is another word from Japanese, and also "goo".

You don't need a rule to forbid words from Asian and African languages. Just look at how many of the Esperanto vocabulary (excluding Zamenhof's) borrows from Asian and African languages and compare that to the words borrowed from European (mainly English, French, Latin and Greek) languages. The trend is clear.

Timtim:

Breto:"Telephone", I believe, is one of those words we consider to be "international". I'm pretty sure this word is composed entirely of roots from Latin...which would be one single language. (Actually, the P-H at the beginning probably means Greek is involved, but work with me here.)

You need to write those sentences in reverse, Breto The word telephone is a portmanteau combining the Greek tele with French phone (originally fame in Old French).

Umm ... both morphemes in "telephone" are from Greek (τῆλε and φωνή).

For example, the (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française" by Léon Clédat, 1914) shows "téléphoner" as being derived from two Greek roots .. see attached image.

You can find links to many (older) French etymological dictionaries here.

Old French "fame" sounds like a folk etymology ... I don't suppose you have a reliable academic reference?

Incidentally, there are plenty of words that contain both a Greek and a Latin root/morphere -- e.g. television is half-Greek/half-Latin. An all-Greek version would have been something like "telebleptos" since "teleskopos" was already taken

erinja:For me, personally, I would require that a word exist not only in multiple languages but also in multiple families for me to consider adding it. Just because a word exists, for example, in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, I wouldn't add it. It would help if the word also had a similar form in a Germanic language and a Slavic language. English and French alone wouldn't cut it for me, personally, because though English is technically Germanic, it already has a vocabulary heavily influenced by French. I would look for the word to exist a wider range of languages than that before incorporating it.

Well, then you'd really like Interlingua ...

Interlingua defines rules for determining which words are "international" - viz. they must appear in three of the following languages : English, Spanish/Portuguese, French, Italian, OR in two of the aforementioned language AND in either German or Russian.

Reference (in Interlingua).

Amike,

Paul

How sad! When I tried to machine-translate the reference you gave, Pdenis, I saw the message - translation failed because unable to determine the original language. Must do better, Interlingua!

As much as I could see, in this matter of word origin, pdenisowski is the guy.... Very well done, pal...

pdenisowski:Interlingua defines rules for determining which words are "international" - viz. they must appear in three of the following languages : English, Spanish/Portuguese, French, Italian, OR in two of the aforementioned language AND in either German or Russian.

Reference (in Interlingua).

Honestly - if a word that I was thinking about importing via the 15th rule only met those minimum requirements that Interlingua requires, I wouldn't bring it in. I am generally extremely averse to importing words when I think something can be internally derived, so I look for wide consensus (wider than only two or three languages) before bringing something in. It really has to be quite a few languages before I'll consider it.

The one exception is location-related words, particularly foods characteristic of a location. If there is a food typical of a place and strongly identified by a place, I would probably use the 15th rule to identify that food. So a biryani from India, I would call a "birjanio" without hesitation (or perhaps "birjano"). Translating the meaning of it - rice casserole, perhaps? - just doesn't really cut it, because there are a zillion dishes from many cultures that could be described that way. Similarly, I'd call a muffin a "mufeno" without polling a bunch of languages to check first (though I happen to know that many languages have imported 'muffin' as a word, so I'd probably be on firm 15th rule grounds with that one regardless).

sudanglo:How sad! When I tried to machine-translate the reference you gave, Pdenis, I saw the message - translation failed because unable to determine the original language. Must do better, Interlingua!

Methinks a failed machine translation is a fault of the machine, not the source text.

Amike,

Paul