Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage. Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.

We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.

Difficult to find a word for 'snow globe' too ..

from my perspective given my English background, I like English spelling. Sensibility says I should just give it all up and adhere to the dominant language form (en-US) for the sake of clarity.... and yet.... I shall not.

> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication

But also one might consider, or seek the word, that certain way of spitting, tells some peeps we fam.

Language isn't just about communicating meaning but also cultural content, identity and social markers. This is part of what drives its frequent development and also part of why some people want to preserve their way of speaking even if its merely a creole or a "dying" language.

Yeah but this stuff get pushed as a higher priority over communication, that's my problem with every argument about "preserving culture".

If everybody in Italy understands "computer", calling it "calcolatore" is outright against communication (that word in italian is closer to "device to do math operations", which is technically correct, but not what people imagine)

> I like English spelling.

I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation.

That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling.

I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".

> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

The people pushing for this do, in fact remember that the primary purpose of language is communication.

Imagine being an aging Italian, or Quebecer, who has spoken Italian, or French all your life, do not have a good grasp of English, only to become unable to understand much of the discourse in your own mother country.

I, myself, am not super keen on seeing Spanish, Mandarin, or Esperanto become the lingua franca of my area.

If you are interested, there's a good reason why English spelling is so weird. The pronunciation of vowels shifted between 1400-1700 and depending on when a specific word's spelling was "standardised" decides which version of the pronunciation was used. If it's the old vowel pronunciation the spelling will make no sense, whereas the new vowel are mostly ok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is pretty good, and include sound files of the old vs new pronunciations.

Ironically that's exactly what "computer" means.

The root "comput-" comes from latin "computo" while "calcolatore" comes from the latin "calculo" which is a rough latin synonym of "computo". The form "comput-" transformed in Italian into "cont-" like in "conto" (English count), "contante" (cash) etc.

So perhaps "contatore" (counter) instead of "computer" would make more etymological sense.

This is an artefact of how Germanic languages can often just glue words together without explicit connective words

"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"

We had this debate in France in 1955. We use the word "ordinateur" for "computer", which comes from the latin "ordinator" which means something that order things, it shares the same root as the word "order".

It was picked over the word "calculateur" which is the French equivalent of "calculatore" after IBM France shared a letter wondering if "calculateur" was too restrictive and didn't properly express the machine capabilities. To which Jacques Perret answered "why not ordinateur?"

https://journals.openedition.org/bibnum/534

I'm well aware and I find it somewhat amusing.

The problem is the interpretation people give to the word. If I say computer, people think of something with keyboard + mouse and a screen, or maybe a laptop (funny enough, they will not think of their phone).

If I say "calcolatore", we envision one of those devices to do math operations, used in school (are those still a thing?)

It's kinda funny picturing either of those words as we play Dark Souls (videogame) on these devices. Yes of course that's "all math", still!

The reason in the first place why there are English words in the day-to-day Italian is because a majority of the population _uses already these words_.

Given that, this goes against the "preserve communication" argument. After all, this is how Italian was born (at least that's what we studied in school), there was Greek, there was Latin, somewhere the language got distorted by common people all the way until it became Italian and got shared by many, many people.

The language was not defined, it evolved with how people used it.

This process has been going on forever, I don't see why it should change now with artificial constraints.

For what is worth, official documents should be allowed in English language for the entire country, given we are part of the EU, there is a whole money-sucking machine (and time-sucking!) to translate things in English when interacting with other EU countries.

that's a calcolatrice, calcolatore is a computer :)

I'm aware, but still in the small circle of people I asked to, they all envisioned that over a computer, lol

> Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.

I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.

> I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".

English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.

This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.

Only a short time ago, the word "computer" meant a person (who calculates things as a job).

That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese.

But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).

English is very inconsistent, not that this necessarily makes it harder of course, compared to languages such as Finnish which has very regular grammar and no ambiguity with pronounciation.

("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)

I am always amused by those kinds of etymologies where a word "gets back" to the language it came from or its more direct heir (Italian for Latin) after living in a different language.

In Hebrew we have "tachless" that comes from yiddish "tachless", that comes from Hebrew "tachlit" but now tachless and tachlit have different meanings and different grammar roles

Knowing a romance language already helps in picking up another one but I wouldn't say you can communicate easily between Italian and Spanish.

It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.

Nah, the sign language really is different.

I don't think that's quite fair. I have had Italian-Spanish conversations which were slow but not painful. With Dutch I can often guess what something means when I see it written down but understanding the spoken language is very hard and I can only pick out a few words here and there.

Inconsistency of English is high compared to basically every other language.

Comparing to Finnish is... a choice. Finnish is known to be one of the most difficult languages to learn because of the incredibly variation in cases.

Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).

English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.

> If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.

> It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.

    floor
    cooperation
    coop

I moved to Finland, which is why it comes to mind. Finnish is definitely difficult, for native English speakers due to the grammar.

But Finnish is easier than English in the sense that pronounciation is 100% regular and predictable - that's the metric I've been using in this thread to say "English is hard". (I understand the reasons behind that, the mixture of influences, loan-words, and voewl shifting.)

In a lot of ways English is easy, and even bad English is understandable.

This was done in Slovenia (računalnik)

This only serves to form unnecessary barriers. If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not)

The rest is just about which language and who chooses.

The only thing this sort of bill does is make it harder to get to a better state. At least here they are not pretending it's helpful to do it

And the great vowel shift happened very shortly after the introduction of the printing press to Britain and the standardisation of English spelling.

Sign languages are independent languages in their own right, with their own grammar, often very different to the grammar of the spoken language(s) used in the same region.

> everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

Would it? It would matter which language. It'd benefit those most familiar with it today.

People have been laughed at for their accents when learning a language. How does this help?

You can't just flip a switch. It'd create a huge inequality divide moreso than today.

Some countries are surviving because they use a different language that's not English i.e. less impact from globalization.

it can be done in romance languages such as italian, but it's way more frequent that one word has to be a verb and another a noun: sanguisuga (blood sucker), magiafuoco (fire eater), porta tagliafuoco (fire resistent door), apri-pista, or noun+adjective: cassaforte (strong box, safe) or preposition+noun: oltretomba (beyond the grave, after life)

There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball

Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"

> If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

It wouldn't last. Within years it would devolve into various creoles and with centuries; almost entirely different languages. Language is not merely functional but cultural and has purpose outside of meaning (e.g. identity).

Chinese has quite nearly the opposite problem: compounds are so pervasive that they'll think any disyllable is a compound, identifiable morphemes or no, even if it's a phonetic loan.

This only serves to backup my point that culture preservation for no meaningful goal is highly dangerous.

Language-as-identity as a way of separating people has no meaningful use case that is positive for society.

I posited a world where flipping a switch was possible and the result was perfect. All your complaints are about a world where that isn't true, and so are literally inapplicable. You can argue this is unrealistic, but i'd simply point out the rest is a question of tradeoffs - how fast you do it, what language you pick, etc, there are no perfect answers.

That is no reason not to make progress.

As for practicallness: In a world of 8 billion people, literally anything you do (something, nothing, whatever) will cause hardship for someone. It's not even an interesting goal to try. Doing nothing causing hardship. Moving forward causes hardship.

Combine this with the fact that the unfortunate reality of humans is that one of the main ways that change happens writ large is through seeing the suffering (and success!) of others. I don't think you will change that part of our psychology anytime soon.

The sad truth is we don't all get a perfect, or even good, life. You can't make progress on this, either, without causing hardship to some. Does that mean you should not try?

Because you will never make progress in steps that are only positive for everyone, or even often get the chance to choose who it gets to be negative for.

"OK" in the streets, "d'accord" in the sheets (of paper)