No People Has a “Pure Culture”

[This is part of my series of posts on languages. You can find an overview here that I will keep updated: “Synopsis: Language Posts.”]

I have written about “Words Sorely Needed in English.” That was tongue-in-cheek — actually a good expression lacking in German — because it’s not how languages work: Someone proposes a word and then everybody follows along. Languages are a perfect example of how something regular can emerge by human action, but not by human design, ie. a central plan.

English is by now actually quite reluctant to take up new words from elsewhere, which is funny because it used to be so different. While basically a Germanic language, English borrowed terms left and right in the past: from Celtic and Scandinavian languages, and many others as well. Norman, French, and Latin even turned the language into a hybrid, and so English often behaves more like a Romance language, eg. with precise tenses, hardly any declination, regular plurals, etc. The outcome of all this is that English has a very extensive vocabulary and has perhaps become somewhat complacent.

By comparison German looks like a far more Germanic language. But then it has also swept up words and phrases from a lot of places: There are some of Slavic and Italian origin, others from Greek and also Hebrew (directly and indirectly via Yiddish), many from the French, and lots and lots from Latin. Lately, there has been a stream of new words from English, which are particularly easy to adopt because they often fit in well. German is no…