Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

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".

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.

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!

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

> 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).

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

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.

> 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)

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