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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

(www.cnn.com)
231 points rntn | 9 comments | 02 Apr 23 17:19 UTC | HN request time: 1.153s | source | bottom
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ghusto ◴[02 Apr 23 19:01 UTC] No.35413937[source]▶
On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic. Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved. How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy?

On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world. I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.

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Quarrelsome ◴[02 Apr 23 19:48 UTC] No.35414385[source]▶
I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and struggles to handle the fact that its present isn't at that zenith. France do a lot of this sort of thing too.

I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.

On paper there is absolutely nothing wrong with cultures seeking to preserve the use of their own language, however it is fair for us to argue that restrictive and punitive measures such as this are not helpful.

Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;). Would English then be a "relic" to you?

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Fire-Dragon-DoL ◴[02 Apr 23 23:02 UTC] No.35416246[source]▶
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.

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Quarrelsome ◴[03 Apr 23 00:55 UTC] No.35417197[source]▶
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.

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1. stevekemp ◴[03 Apr 23 03:11 UTC] No.35418105[source]▶
> 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".

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2. nl ◴[03 Apr 23 04:21 UTC] No.35418526[source]▶
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.

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3. thaumasiotes ◴[03 Apr 23 08:18 UTC] No.35420217[source]▶
> 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.

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4. stevekemp ◴[03 Apr 23 08:30 UTC] No.35420299[source]▶
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.)

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5. GoblinSlayer ◴[03 Apr 23 10:28 UTC] No.35421159[source]▶
Inconsistency of English is high compared to basically every other language.
6. jwestbury ◴[03 Apr 23 10:35 UTC] No.35421212{3}[source]▶
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.

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7. justsomehnguy ◴[03 Apr 23 10:46 UTC] No.35421333[source]▶
> It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.

    floor
    cooperation
    coop
8. stevekemp ◴[03 Apr 23 10:48 UTC] No.35421350{4}[source]▶
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.

9. TRiG_Ireland ◴[03 Apr 23 11:21 UTC] No.35421652[source]▶
And the great vowel shift happened very shortly after the introduction of the printing press to Britain and the standardisation of English spelling.