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Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?
Ant gestures ambiguously at this ZDNet Latin America story which reports the unhappiness of some academics with the increasing use of English or English-influenced words in the tech world, which they say is hurting the education of Spanish speakers. A short excerpt: "Some say the jargon of technology is destroying
Spanish, and some are worried, including Odon
Betanzos, president of the North American Academy of
the Spanish Language. Betanzos recently sent an open
letter to the other 22 academies worldwide. The letter
raised a harsh cry in defense of the Spanish tongue."
This kind of thing's happened before. Greek became the principal language of the eastern Meditteranean, Latin became the principal language of academics in the Middle Ages, French became the principal language of diplomacy. Now it's English's turn; in a hundred years it'll change to Mandarin or Hindi or Spanish. Unless a language is spoken only by a relatively small group of people, the chances are pretty slim it will be eradicated so easily.
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First of all, languages are not static but rather they evolve and change all the time. This does not destroy them, it just makes them different. Just by observing that single fact one can see how rediculus this is.
However, I woudln't mind if Spanish was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Danish was removed from the earth (my own native tongue). The reason for this is that it's simply stupid and unproductive for everyone not to speak the same langauge. At the time, the only language that seems to have the possibility of becoming a truely universal language is English, so I hope more people will talk English.
There's nothing special about English, though; I'd much prefer a synthetic language like Esperanto that's actually thougth out and easy to learn, instead of the random suckiness inherent in natural languages. But [i]everyone[/i] learning Esperanto or anything besides English unfortunately seems rather unlikely right now.
Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway.
Bjarke Roune
By its very nature, Language is the most democratic of all possible institutions. If you decide to call the thingamabob over there a wongle and everone else agrees, it is called a wongle foreverafter until folks decide that it should be called something else. If nobody agrees, then you wander the space asking for a wongle and getting blank stares. Purity of the language agruments are pure rot. The strength of American English (at least) is that it is a total mongrel and thus has hybrid vigor. Given the fact that the rest of the world shipped their treasure to us (black gold from africa, yellow gold from aisia, white gold from europe, red gold from the americas, etc...) we have one of the richest languages in existance. Each of those people had special contributions to make, and these pearls were simply strung on the tread of the old world syntactic construction (sometimes). Thank God that American English did not have any of the "purity" arguments that are being made...
This whole debate ignore the dymanic nature of language. "English" isn't a plot by english speakers to establish global control. People learn english in order to buy into that power. English speakers use so many words from other languages that the language can't be said to have evolved so much as congealed.
It's virtually impossible to go through a day in the US without using at least a couple of words that have filtered into US english from other languages. And that's the way it should be. Dr. Samuel Johnson, when he published the first english dictionary, dispaired that people would try to use it as an authority; that it would define the language. He understood that no language in static except a dead one.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Not only would Spanish (and in many cases above, also Portuguese) be severely impoverished without these words, so too in many cases would most other European languages. One can hardly begrudge them these.
What the author of this article is actually complaining about may in fact be the fact that nominally bilingual people in the United States often, in fact, no neither language particularly well. Later on in the same page as I cited earlier, one also reads the following:
That's certainly true in the Southwest, where you routinely hear this "code-switching" en las calles and with the ubquitous cucina-help chavalines washing sus dishes sucios, if tu takes my meaning aquí.One thing that's seldom mentioned, which is going here, is that Spanish is not in the United States considered a prestige language. It is widely disparaged, relegated to the working class, or even the nominal underclass. This is completely different from what happens in, say, Canada, where the French language heritage is elevated and venerated--and vehemently and vociferously so, too, for where else but Québec can you find supercilious arrête signs where in even Paris and Madrid and Bonn and Tokyo you see normal stop signs? Sigh.
It is very sad but true that Spanish speakers in America are not taught their rich heritage. They do not know their writers of antiquity, like Cervantes, Unamuno, Lope de Vega, Galdós, Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa, Quevedo, or San Juan de la Cruz. They do not know their writers of this century, like Federico García Lorca, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rudolfo Anaya (to spread around the honors geographically). As I've heard say in New Mexico (the only State which is legally bilingual), "It is even easier to be illiterate in two languages than in one." :-( Then again, how many English speakers know their
own literature? Few, I suspect.
You can hardly fault tejanos for their curious code-switching or their rampant Spanglishization. You may flinch at hearing how in Texas then rentan something instead of alquilándolo, or talk about driving their troques instead of their camiones. (The former is especially annoying, because la renta is one of those faux amis that already has a meaning quite different in Spanish than the English cognate would suggest!) Then again, when you listen to Texans speak English, you might be a bit unnerved there, too. :-)
In technical jargon, Spanish certainly has much of its own terminology, as this article on El sistema de ficheros virtual de Linux will show you. Sure, you see a few foreign terms there, like driver and off-line, but by and large, they are perfectly native terms, such as an enlace simbólico. Somtimes there are transliterations, like superbloques and inodos (eg " El NFS guarda una tabla de inodos virtuales y su correspondencia"). But Spanish has plenty of its own words for things, like teclado "keyboard" and pantalla "screen".
(In Portuguese, interestingly enough, although teclado is keyboard, you have ecran to be screen, a French borrowing (the French word is actually éran), not an English one. I don't hear anyone in Portgual complaining about borrowing the French word, although I wouldn't completely blame them if they were to spell it eicrã to better match the pronunciation.)
Better that the hispanohablantes (hispanophones?) should use driver or superbloque though, which are obvious in derivation, than that they should use such deceptive monstrosities as the recently legally approved term in French, cédéron, meaning, of course, "CD-ROM". This is evil because it is not traceable back to Romance roots, and requires several linguistic jumps to decode. You must first say it out loud, transliterate back to English, then lookup an acronym in English (misspelled, too--see the "n"?) before you have a chance of knowing what it means. This is wicked.
Now, you'll always have people arguing about ficheros versus archivos in Spain and Mexico respectively, or ficheiros versus arquivos in Portugal and Brazil respectively. But these are no different than arguing about trucks and lorries between the US and UK, or heros versus hoagies versus grinders versus sub(marine sandwiche)s here in the States. These are really immaterial. The transliterations are a bit more jolting, such as people using salvar espacio to save space rather than ahorrar espacio, or salvar un fichero to save a file rather than guardar un fichero. It annoys because salvar is--well, originally--one of those religious things having to do with salvation. Agonizing purists tell you that you simply cannot salvar dinero--that you can only ahorrarlo, of course, and that buffers must be guardados, as their souls are not in peril. :-)
But probably, this is no greater a shift than the mutilations we see daily in English, like "unique" weakened to mean merely "unusual", "ubiquitous" weakened to mean merely "commonplace". In the technical arena, we see it when people use "hacker" to mean "cracker" and "memory" to mean "disk space"--and, I suppose, "software" to mean by default source-less for-pay "fleeceware", although I nominate "Billware" for that. :-) It's
happened before (consider "awful" last century), and there's just
no stopping it.
Let me finish this up with a note of encouragement, taken from the concluding page of the chapter in the reference book I've already quoted from:
These languages are growing, not always as one wants them to, but really no differently than they've always grown, and not as nastily as the article would have us all believe. If you want people to know a language, a literature, a history, and a culture, then you have to teach that to them!I now return you to your previously scheduled mano-a-mano diatribes; me, I've got a burrito nuking. :-)
In some ways, I do resent that somehow people who speak Spanish feel it is necessary to get Spanish spoken everywhere, that somehow Spanish is the only language that matters. Here in NYC, if you tell me that you are in fear of Spanish disappearing, I'd wack you in the head! About half (I exaggerate a little, but it sure seems that way) of the signs are in Spanish! If Spanish is disappearing, it must all be coming to New York!
Here's a link: The 50 Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World that gives you an idea of where things are. It doesn't show, of course, the language spoken by income or by technological level, but with Spanish being the number two language in the world, ahead of English, it is hardly in danger of disappearing. Methinks they are being a little alarmist. Personally, I think they should go to China and demand that half of the signs be in Spanish.
I'm not sure of all the facts of where & how & who started the internet, but I do have this much to say:
If you want more Spanish on internet sites & in tech jargon, then have more Spanish speaking people &/or companies come up with devices & give them Spanish names & slowly let it infiltrate into mainstream tech jargon.
To rant about how Spanish might be dying out because of so much English tech jargon, is crazy. You must adapt yourself to learn the technological terms of those who created the technology... I call a "Zip Drive" a "Zip Drive" because that is the name IOmega gave it, not me. And so what if it happens to be in English, it was developed by a corporation living in a predominately English speaking country.
All this is akin to the following:
If you *live* in the U.S. you *NEED* to learn English, not expect Americans to learn Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, etc... We simply cannot learn that many languages to accomodate so many foreign cultures, but the immigrants can afford to learn one language if they choose to live here!
It's similar to what my university's career center told those of us going to coop jobs. Something to the effect of: "Write down names because the people at work only have one name to learn, you have all of their names to learn."
And don't get me wrong, if I was going to move to Canada, I'd probably brush up on my french to the point of some fluency in it. If I went to Mexico to *live* there I'd learn Spanish. If I were to live in Italy, I'd learn Italian. It's really that simple. When you move to another country, they aren't required to adapt to you at all, but if you want to have *ANY* hope of fitting in & making a life for yourself, you *MUST* learn at least their language & a lot of their customs (as long as said customs don't compromise your values).
And for any who might be lame enough to say it, *NO*, learning a new language is not compromising values.
So again, if tech jargon comes from English speaking "techies" adapt. And if it bugs you, convert the English words to Spanish equivalents in the documentation for Spanish OSes & when talking to other Spanish speaking people, but do *NOT* complain to any English speaking people if you start saying the term in Spanish & they don't know what in the world you are talking about.
In the words of John Stossel on the news program 20/20... "Give me a break."
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