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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Russian words in English
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References: <CypEv1.Fn4@spss.com> <Cywv9p.50C@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <CyypDD.LKD@spss.com> <Cz2t8q.ELr@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 23:17:48 GMT
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In article <Cz2t8q.ELr@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>A word has to acquire word status (and this can only happen by usage)
>before it enters the dictionaries.

And what is word status?  You mention "usage"; how much usage is needed?
Is anything else needed?

[markrose:]
>>I've already given a citation for _pravda_, but I've also said that
>>I see a scale of acceptance of foreign words, not a binary category,
>>and _pravda_ falls pretty low on the scale.
>
>Indeed it does.  So low that I (and some other netters) wonder if it
>should be counted as a word that English has borrowed.  It certainly
>is much, much closer to the bottom of the scale than it is to the top.
>Compare:
>                               _istina_   _pravda_   _truth_
># of occurrences
>  in English speech/writing    0          1          uncountable
>% of speakers
>  who recognise it as a word   0          1          100

You can prove anything by making up numbers.

Or by circular arguments, for that matter.  We demonstrate that _pravda_
isn't an English word by saying that most speakers don't recognize it
as a word.  Huh?

>It seems clear to me that ?_pravda_ is far closer to *_istina_
>than it is to _truth_.

I agree; in fact I said as much in the paragraph cited above.

>>Tom Wolfe in _The Painted Word_ uses _ne kulturny_, italicized
>>but unglossed, and not in a discussion of anything Russian either [...].
>
>Well, JRR Tolkien uses _linnod_ in Appendix A of _The Lord of the Rings_,
>also italicised but unglossed.  I'll count that as a word that English
>has borrowed from Sindarin.

But 1) _ne kulturny_ is used rather more often, and understood by far
more anglophones, than _linnod_; 2) Tolkien was arguably imitating the use of
foreign terms in English, adding to the sense of realism by writing as if
Middle Earth and Sindarin were as well known as mundane places and languages;
that doesn't make _linnod_ an English word any more than his list of kings
make Gondor a real country.

What makes a word English?  I've given a number of suggestions; not 
everyone seems to like them, but since no one will offer any alternatives
I don't find their criticisms persuasive.

>>I see no reason why proper names don't count as borrowed words.  Is 
>>"Moscow" a borrowed word?  It certainly isn't a Russian word, so if 
>>it isn't an English word, what is it?
>
>Then why was _Moscow_ not on your list?  Or any of the other names of
>Russian cities, towns, villages, rivers, mountains, seas, hills, lakes,
>que sais-je encore?  What about all Russian personal names and surnames
>that have ever been mentioned in English discourse?

Just following Grice's rules of discourse.  It doesn't seem useful to 
give a list of Russian toponyms when they can be easily read out of an atlas.

My point about a continuum of acceptability holds here as well.  You
decline to give an argument why _Moscow_ is not an English word, but
I hope you'd agree that it's frequently used and almost universally
understood.  The same cannot be said of, say, Solikamsk.
