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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: "Lap" unique to English?
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References: <332e629f.668861@news.mindspring.com> <332f31be.11469542@news.exodus.net> <E79v37.643@midway.uchicago.edu> <33307198.3273817@news.exodus.net>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 07:23:22 GMT
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In article <33307198.3273817@news.exodus.net>,
Bill Vaughan <bill@osisoft.com> wrote:
>deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) wrote:
>
>>I think a lot of the linguists who read this newsgroup will be
>>surprised to find out that "phone" is not an English word.
>
>Presumably here you mean "phone" in its linguistics/phonetics jargon
>sense rather than as an abbreviation for "telephone," which would beg
>the original question; but even in the jargon sense, did "phone"
>originate in English? Was Bell the first one to use it? 

As far as I can tell, yes.  The OED's first cite is from 1866, ten years
before Bell's invention.

>(Maybe it's really Scottish.  ;^)  ) And if I spell it "phon" does that
>make it German? 

Yes and no; nouns are capitalised in Standard German.  And "phon" is
actually an English word, too.  Funny you should mention German:  If you
want, you can claim that "telephone" originated in it, since it was a
German inventor (Reis) who first applied the term "Telephon" to a device
for the electric reproduction of sound over distance at least five years
before Bell.

>Is the word only Greek if I spell it phi-omega-nu? (Or
>maybe that's omicron, I am clueless about Greek.)

Not so clueless--you got the omega right.  But you left off the final eta,
producing gibberish.

><flame alert -- you need read no further>
>
>I really think such international techno-words and bits of
>techno-jargon cannot and should not be arbitrarily assigned to one
>language. I must admit one of my pet peeves is Americans who claim all
>high-tech terminology, wherever invented and with whatever roots, is
>really English. And the reaction of those in other countries who buy
>into that foolishness and therefore insist on having their own
>"native" terms, making it harder on everyone.

I've never made such claims.  I've only been talking about whether a term
*originated* in a given language; once it spreads, it can no longer be
called "really" X or "just" X.  "Modem" is as German as "angst" is
English.

>For instance, "data."  I guess in some sense it means "givens," so the
>French authorities insist on translating this Greek word (which does
>not even obey English inflection rules) as "donnees." Why bother?

Maybe the French don't want to clutter up their beautiful and
morphologically pure speech with troublesome foreign plurals.

>Much chemical terminology is of German origin. Your average American
>chemical engineer is unaware of this, and thinks German technical
>papers are mostly "written in English."

Mostly, they are.  That is, if by "German technical papers" you mean
"technical papers produced by Germans".

>I have it. Let us arbitrarily assign all these terms to Esperanto. No
>one will be politically offended, and the Esperantists, bless their
>souls, will know their language is really being used for something.

And hafta stick -o onto all the nouns?  No thankso, palo.


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
