English influences on other languages besides vocabulary

[Monika]

Of course lots of words get taken over from English, but that's boring to talk about.

I recently noticed other types of borrowing/influence from English in German.

- In correct German, years are given without preposition, e.g. English "In 2011" translates to just "2011" in German. But recently I hear "In 2011" in German, too ... I have even seen it occasionally in print in newspapers. (I hate it.)

- "realisieren" used to mean "to make real" in the sense of putting into practice / effect. It's getting more used like English "realize" as in "he realized that ...". (I do that, too. Didn't even notice at first.)

(- Some people complain a lot that "es macht keinen Sinn" comes from English "it does not make sense", but actually it was already used in the 19th century.)

- I think that using "Mein Name ist" instead of "Ich heiße" is influenced by English "My name is", but I might be wrong.

There are others but I cannot think of them right now.

Did you notice similar influences by English to your respecive languages (or some other language you studied)?

Or if you want, by other languages to English or from language A to B.

[jaap]

- "realisieren" used to mean "to make real" in the sense of putting into practice / effect. It's getting more used like English "realize" as in "he realized that ...". (I do that, too. Didn't even notice at first.)

Do you mean that it is used in that sense without being reflexive (i.e. without mich or sich etc.)? In Dutch, and I think in German too, the reflexive form has had that meaning for a long time and is probably not influenced by English. If it is used non-reflexively you may have a point. If so, it is an interesting change, but it may also be happening for many other reasons of course.

[Makri]

"realisieren" as a transitive verb has always meant "to make real", with a reflexive as the anticausative, that is "sich realisieren" means "to become real". The English-influenced meaning is transitive: "to become aware of"

Another instance: Use of the preposition "in" with language names is something that I've been noticing. "in Deutsch" instead of "auf Deutsch" or "im Deutschen" (which mean two quite different things). This might have arisen also purely on the basis of a generalization from within German (because you say "in dieser Sprache" for" in this language", not "*auf dieser Sprache"), but English influence certainly facilitated it.

[Velifer]

Ahh, the sweet effects of cultural imperialism. The sun never sets on American television. I studied Latin--the time for much influence on that spoken language has passed. As for American English influence--the number of languages and cultures that have adopted a version of "Okay" and bent their grammar around it is mind-boggling.

[jaap]

"realisieren" as a transitive verb has always meant "to make real", with a reflexive as the anticausative, that is "sich realisieren" means "to become real". The English-influenced meaning is transitive: "to become aware of"

This is an odd difference between Dutch and German that I was not aware of. In Dutch, "ik realiseerde me" is perfectly normal in that meaning (and has been for at least 40 years), whereas in German it seems "realisierte mich" is only rarely used that way, even though the non-reflexive version seems common, also going back to at least the sixties.

I'm beginning to doubt that Monika's assertion that this is a recent change bears much scrutiny. It may be a case of the recency illusion.

[gmalivuk]

Is it? If you can't show that meaning in use before 1960, then it truly is pretty recent.

[Kizyr]

I've heard from folks from Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia that their languages are pretty dynamic and accommodating to English-language patterns--things like adding the "-ing" suffix to non-English-origin nouns or verbs to add a present-progressive sense to them. I only know a few isolated examples though; if anyone who knows Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Swahili, etc. can chime in then it might help. Bear in mind that this would probably fall in the realm of informal/slang/dialect, rather than formal spoken/written language. KF

[Grop]

French réaliser has the same two meanings. Apparently (French dictionary) some people here had the same discussion in the early 20th century .

Edited, because I was really unclear.

[Monika]

I was thinking more recently, like last 10 years (about realisieren). Zwiebelfisch, the column about words and grammar, said so, and it seemed to me like this, too, after thinking about it. But he also said this stupid stuff about "making [no] sense" . (This is very annoying, now everybody and their brother tries to correct when someone uses [keinen] Sinn machen. edit: Even in the same column: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zwiebelfis ... 38,00.html.)

"Okay" doesn't count, that's vocabulary.

[cybermutiny]

OP, not sure if this is what you have in mind, but I think the English language has a huge effect over other languages in the realm of computer science and the internet. I live in Korea and all website urls are romanized into English language versions. Also, most computer languages that I'm aware of are based in English, even though they are often developed by people whose primary language is not English. The QWERTY keyboard is based on English, and most foreign language keyboard have been forced to fit the same grid, even though in many cases their scripts have more than 26 letters. I believe the Chinese use some sort of computer program to help them types thousands of different characters from an original QWERTY-styled keyboard.

[Makri]

"Zwiebelfisch" is totally unreliable on linguistic matters.

I have a dictionary of foreign words in German from 1965 and it does not list the meaning of "realisieren" in question.
The Duden (the largest German dictionary) say that this meaning is borrowed from English and gives citations from two authors: Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) and Ziegler (1944-1987).

[Monika]

OP, not sure if this is what you have in mind, but I think the English language has a huge effect over other languages in the realm of computer science and the internet. I live in Korea and all website urls are romanized into English language versions. Also, most computer languages that I'm aware of are based in English, even though they are often developed by people whose primary language is not English. The QWERTY keyboard is based on English, and most foreign language keyboard have been forced to fit the same grid, even though in many cases their scripts have more than 26 letters.

Not quite what I had in mind.

I believe the Chinese use some sort of computer program to help them types thousands of different characters from an original QWERTY-styled keyboard.

Squeezing even the 1000 most common characters on the keyboard could get hard .

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

"Zwiebelfisch" is totally unreliable on linguistic matters.

I have a dictionary of foreign words in German from 1965 and it does not list the meaning of "realisieren" in question.
The Duden (the largest German dictionary) say that this meaning is borrowed from English and gives citations from two authors: Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) and Ziegler (1944-1987).

Okay, so definitely not only ten last years.

[hitausmomentti]

It's probably not just because of English, but spoken Finnish pretty much has a definite article nowadays, while the formal, written language doesn't. Getting them might be a normal thing to happen to a language, but it's probably sped up because everyone uses or at least hears and sees English so much.

A more direct English influence is probably the generic you that some Finnish speakers seem to have adopted. It's also mostly restricted to spoken language, and it doesn't really work that well. I sometimes misunderstand it if I'm not prepared to hear someone use it. It might be just that I'm a biased observer, but it seems to me that he people who use the generic you in Finnish generally mix up their languages more than others.

One feature that isn't used that much in the spoken language, but is sometimes used in formal speech or written language is the "future" tense, which was originally calqued from Swedish. While it's not proper Finnish, it's used in situations in which one generally uses a more "proper" register. Since most people don't speak Swedish here, I think the incentive to use it comes from English.

[Iulus Cofield]

OP, not sure if this is what you have in mind, but I think the English language has a huge effect over other languages in the realm of computer science and the internet. I live in Korea and all website urls are romanized into English language versions. Also, most computer languages that I'm aware of are based in English, even though they are often developed by people whose primary language is not English. The QWERTY keyboard is based on English, and most foreign language keyboard have been forced to fit the same grid, even though in many cases their scripts have more than 26 letters. I believe the Chinese use some sort of computer program to help them types thousands of different characters from an original QWERTY-styled keyboard.

This is a more valid complaint for some languages than others. For Japanese (and I'd be surprised to hear an argument against Chinese as well), the QWERTY keyboard + software works well. Since Japanese uses two 46 character syllabaries (plus voicing, palatization, and devoiced labial diacritics) and thousands of characters, a keyboard accommodating all these would be unwieldy. For scripts like Greek and Cyrillic, a QWERTY keyboard would be just Latocentric (Latinocrentic? Western-Eurocentric?). Does anyone know if keyboards in those countries use a QWERTY-like design with Greek or Cyrillic characters printed on them? I know you can input in those languages using a QWERTY where, for example the letter U outputs as Θ.

[Makri]

Does anyone know if keyboards in those countries use a QWERTY-like design with Greek or Cyrillic characters printed on them?

Yes, they do. Russian keyboards often have small Latin letters of a QWERTY-keyboard printed on the keys in addition to Cyrillic (since they will often be needed on the internet).

[cybermutiny]

Does anyone know if keyboards in those countries use a QWERTY-like design with Greek or Cyrillic characters printed on them?

Yes, they do. Russian keyboards often have small Latin letters of a QWERTY-keyboard printed on the keys in addition to Cyrillic (since they will often be needed on the internet).

Also, in Korea the Hangul script has 24 characters and they fit nicely on a Qwerty keyboard. Each key has both the latin alphabet and Hangul on it, and there is a handy button on the bottom of the keyboard that let's you switch between the two scripts. I've seen a similar setup for Thai and Laotian keyboards -- their scripts have less than 50 characters so this is manageable.

[gmalivuk]

Yeah, folks should keep in mind that we can already type 52 distinct alphabetic characters on a QWERTY keyboard. It's just that, in English (and other Latin/Greek-based alphabets), they happen to match up exactly in pairs of upper/lower case.

[Monika]

Our poor little ß has no upper-case sibling. (There is one suggested http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fes_%C3%9F but not implemented.)

Also on the thirty keys with letters on the German keyboard, I can type even more with the Alt Gr key:
(plain) abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzäöüß
(Shift) ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÄÖÜ?
(Alt Gr) æ“¢ð€đŋħ→łµ”øþ@¶ſŧ↓„ł«»←^˝¨\
(Alt Gr + Shift) Æ‘©Ð€ªŊĦıŁº’ØÞΩ®ẞŦ↑‚Ł‹›¥^˝¨¿ <-- oh wait, do I see a capital ß there after all?
(On Windows there are fewer, I think only € on e and µ on m.)

The compose key serves for çÇ ñÑ åÅ øØ ... but I haven't been able to find Dutch combined ij.

Uh, well, anyway, we were talking about English influences on other languages ...

[Meteorswarm]

(and I'd be surprised to hear an argument against Chinese as well)

There are numerous systems for entering Chinese, none of them obviously better than others, but it is obviously impractical to include 6000+ characters on a single keyboard, much less organize them sensibly. For foreign learners (particularly those who are familiar with the Latin script), pinyin* is a natural choice, since a lot of people learn pinyin before characters, but there are other methods. A native Chinese alphabet, called [urlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo]bopomofo[/url] has been around for over a century, and is used in a similar way to pinyin in Taiwan and elsewhere, and keyboards often have some sort of key to switch between bopomofo and Latin letters. These are all phonetic input methods, and there are a wide variety of them. There are lots of problems with this sort of input method, though, since Chinese is extremely homophone heavy. Even my condensed student's dictionary lists over ten distinct meanings for "shi" in the fourth tone, and many input systems don't distinguish tones. They have the advantage of context, but this rarely extends out more than a few syllables in modern implementations.

Early systems just used a number for each character, but that has obvious nasty memorization requirements. Other methods, like Cangjie geometrically decompose characters into fragments and have you enter those, and then uses some software to figure out what character you meant. Yet other systems map strokes** to letters and let you "spell" characters from them, which apparently works adequately.

There's also handwriting recognition, which is usually based off of stroke recognition as well, since Chinese OCR isn't there yet. This can be substantially more natural for fluent writers (I've heard of it used by gamers who don't have time to edit their character choices with a drop-down list when they need to communicate quickly)

They also experimented with GINORMOUS keyboards apparently. Wonder why those didn't sell.

I think that Western languages in general influenced the development and popularization of pinyin, but I'm not sure that you can really say it was *only* English, since it's more the concept of the alphabet than any particulars of the language.

TL;DR: there are hundreds of different entry methods for Chinese exploiting a range of properties. Pinyin is popular.

*Pinyin is the mainland standard way of rendering Standard Chinese into a Latin script, consisting of 26 letters (ü, but no v) and using diacritics to represent the 4 tones.
**Chinese defines a complete set of strokes which comprise all characters. Sometimes these definitions are fuzzy, but generally they're pretty unambiguous. There is also defined a "standard" stroke order for every character which allow you to "spell" the character in strokes, but humans have a hard time reconstructing the character from strokes, and also often learn characters with alternative stroke orders, which completely fouls entry for that character unless complex fuzzy input logic is built into the system.

[cntrational]

The Latin alphabet dominates in general thanks to (Western) Europe being influential through the years, I'd say.

Pinyin is probably preferred over bopomofo because you're going to need to input Latin characters anyway. Additionally, bopomofo hasn't been used much outside of Taiwan in decades.

[Meteorswarm]

The Latin alphabet dominates in general thanks to (Western) Europe being influential through the years, I'd say.

Pinyin is probably preferred over bopomofo because you're going to need to input Latin characters anyway. Additionally, bopomofo hasn't been used much outside of Taiwan in decades.

Sure, but it's still used extensively in Taiwan. My point was that there are other systems without substantial influence from the West, let alone English (bopomofo's influence is on the order of "an alphabet exists")

[Palomnik]

There's some interesting ones in Japanese:

Some loan words from various languages have been adapted into verbs, by using a る after the katakana shorthand for a word. Not many are springing to mind at the moment, but they can be quite nifty.

A subtle one, but modern Japanese usually uses a question mark at the end of a sentence, even after the interrogative particle か has already been used. This isn't always redundant, however; a sentence ending with a plain noun, or a positive or negative verb, that is meant as a question would have a distinctive rising inflection at the end in normal speech that shows it to be a question. In written Japanese, this can only really be recreated with a question mark.

And other than that, yes, there are loads of katakana loanwords. It annoys me because there's often a perfectly good Japanese word that the loan word is replacing. Not many young Japanese people know that there's a word for "pink" and "orange other than ピンク オレンジ (桃色 and 橙色 respectively).

[ZLVT]

Don't know whether it's been mentioned but in Hungary due to the abundance of american media, most of which is synchronised, we've begun using "PC" language. So while I grew up saying néger for black people, this is looked down upon by many today even though Hungary was not an active participant in the slave trade, and the black population would pretty much exclusively be immigrants from the last 20yrs since before then immigration to Hungary was either impossible or a really really bad idea.

In fact, given the absence of freed slaves, it seems American racial slurs and PC language preventing them have been taken wholesale and applied to gypsies. In the same way that negro was once normal in English, our word for gypsy cigány is seen as racist, the preferred term now being roma even though gypsies self identify with cigány. Even though our traditional slur against gypsies is füstös i.e. smokey, nigger is now being used to fill that same roll despite the fact that that word is a wholesale recent English loan with no roots in Hungarian.

[RabbitWho]

- "realisieren" used to mean "to make real" in the sense of putting into practice / effect. It's getting more used like English "realize" as in "he realized that ...". (I do that, too. Didn't even notice at first.)

To me there isn't much of a difference between the sense of realizing something inside your head and the concrete sense of finally realizing a plan or an ambition.

Either way before it was fragmented and now it is is a sort of complete reality.

Tis a nice word.

My Irish grammar is too shite to really notice mistranslated in that respect, but it always drives me up the walls to see translations of English phrasal verbs written on signs in airports and buses. I want to slap whoever made them. The whole point in putting the language in as many places as possible is to keep it alive, not to turn it into a code for English.

[Monika]

- "realisieren" used to mean "to make real" in the sense of putting into practice / effect. It's getting more used like English "realize" as in "he realized that ...". (I do that, too. Didn't even notice at first.)

To me there isn't much of a difference between the sense of realizing something inside your head and the concrete sense of finally realizing a plan or an ambition.

Either way before it was fragmented and now it is is a sort of complete reality.

Uh, not at all. "to realize" means just something like "to notice for the first time". If it's in your head, it's not real, and also it does not mean "to make whole thoughts from previously fragmented thoughts".

My Irish grammar is too shite to really notice mistranslated in that respect, but it always drives me up the walls to see translations of English phrasal verbs written on signs in airports and buses. I want to slap whoever made them. The whole point in putting the language in as many places as possible is to keep it alive, not to turn it into a code for English.

Can you give an example to make this more clear?

[Velifer]

Uh, not at all. "to realize" means just something like "to notice for the first time".

Oh yeah?
aerosol-ize: to make into an aerosol.
fertil-ize: to make fertile.
real-ize: to make real.
colon-ize: to make into an intestine.

[gmalivuk]

real-ize: to make real.

Sure. Except for most of the time.

[Monika]

Uh, not at all. "to realize" means just something like "to notice for the first time".

Oh yeah?
aerosol-ize: to make into an aerosol.
fertil-ize: to make fertile.
real-ize: to make real.
colon-ize: to make into an intestine.

And baby oil is made from babies.

[Meteorswarm]

And baby oil is made from babies.

Why do you think it tastes so good? You wouldn't drink motor oil!

[Grop]

Extra virgin baby oil, woo!

[gmalivuk]

Meh, that's just an advertising gimmick.

[klausok]

Danish has suffered several such influences. One is that it is now quite common to see an apostrophe before a genetive -s. E.g. a store front might have "John's Minimarked" in stead of the correct "Johns Minimarked".

Another, much more troublesome, is that you very often see compound nouns split into two words. Danish distinguishes, in pronounciation as well as in spelling, between e.g. "en tysk lærer" (tysk is an adjective), a German teacher, a teacher who is German whatever he may teach, and "en tysklærer" (tysk is a noun), a teacher of German, whatever his nationality.

Splitting these words might lead to very different meanings:
"et parforhold": a couple relationship, a common term in modern Danish -> "et par forhold" a couple of relationships
"en dyrlæge:" a vet -> "en dyr læge": an expensive doctor
"næstekærlighed": charity (in the biblical sense, neighbourly love) -> "næste kærlighed": next love

A third influence is that Danish seems to have aquired an equivalent of the English "please". The word "venligst", meaning "kindly", or very litterally "friendliest", has been pressed into service. It is often placed where "please" would go in an English sentence. So in stead of the corect "vær venlig at lukke døren" (lit. be friendly to close the door) or "luk venligst døren" you often see the grating "venligst luk døren".

[Monika]

The 's thing happens in German, too. But contrary to what most people believe it's not really coming from English. Up to the end of 19th century it was permitted in German spelling. Stores never removed it and new stores added it to look like existing stores, I guess. Maybe Danish is the same?

In German compound nouns are also written without spaces as in Danish. This is indeed starting to break apart due to English influences ... but mostly with words that have an English part.

[hitausmomentti]

Another, much more troublesome, is that you very often see compound nouns split into two words. Danish distinguishes, in pronounciation as well as in spelling, between e.g. "en tysk lærer" (tysk is an adjective), a German teacher, a teacher who is German whatever he may teach, and "en tysklærer" (tysk is a noun), a teacher of German, whatever his nationality.

I've been wondering if other languages have similar problems with compound words as Finnish does. I wouldn't really point fingers at English because the incorrect spelling is common with kids who don't know English yet and not much attention is paid to it in school, so many don't ever learn it properly. What to me seems new, is that people do the same error in speech too. For example some radio voices pronounce compound words as two separate words, which sounds quite jarring. Maybe its just a recency illusion, but I've only started noticing it in the last few years, and only with relatively young people.

[Iulus Cofield]

As for German compound word spacing, I think I remember reading that some German organization had issued a guideline to break up compound words to make reading easier for foreigners.

[Monika]

Well, this does still not allow putting spaces into nouns. It would mean to use hyphens.

[gmalivuk]

Danish distinguishes, in pronounciation as well as in spelling

You can't blame this on English, since we do the same with the spelling of many compounds, and the pronunciation of all of them. A greenhouse is different from a green house, and if you were listening you'd understand that not all brown bears (the color) are brown bears (the species) without needing the parenthetical notes.

[klausok]

Another thing that is happening in Danish is that many people now say "du" when they mean "man". "Du" means you (singular, nominative). "Man" refers to a generic person. There are those who will say "når du er gravid", when you are pregnant, to a man. Good English, but utterly absurd in Danish. Until recently, that is.

[Moose Hole]

About 10 years ago I was dealing with Spanish web pages. The "back" and "forward" buttons for the browser don't translate well into Spanish, and ended up becoming new words meaning "to back" and "to forward." I don't remember the actual words, and I'm not very good at Spanish, but some Mexican guy told me that.

[The Milkman]

I think in Modern Hebrew(and this might be because it was essentially a constructed language) the infinitive is formed by putting "-ל"-"to" as a particle added to a noun - in front of the word's base. In traditional/Biblical Hebrew, there isn't anything like that. So I'm going to assume that that practice was derived from the "to ___" formation of the infinitive in English.