Author Topic: 31/01/21  (Read 993 times)

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Offline Maik

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31/01/21
« on: Sunday, 31 January, 2021 @ 14:08:10 »

Offline Maik

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Re: 31/01/21
« Reply #1 on: Sunday, 31 January, 2021 @ 14:20:08 »
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The Greeks had a word for it … until now, as language is deluged by English terms
A leading linguist pleads for moderation as a huge outbreak of ‘Greenglish’, much of it Covid-related, spreads

Usually, Professor Georgios Babiniotis would take pride in the fact that the Greek word “pandemic” – previously hardly ever uttered – had become the word on everyone’s lips.

After all, the term that conjures the scourge of our times offers cast-iron proof of the legacy of Europe’s oldest language. Wholly Greek in derivation – pan means all, demos means people – its usage shot up by more than 57,000% last year according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers.

But these days, Greece’s foremost linguist is less mindful of how the language has enriched global vocabulary, and more concerned about the corrosive effects of coronavirus closer to home. The sheer scale of the pandemic and the terminology spawned by its pervasiveness have produced fertile ground for verbal incursions on his mother tongue that Babiniotis thought he would never see.

“We have been deluged by new terms and definitions in a very short space of time,” he told the Observer. “Far too many of them are entering spoken and written Greek. On the television you hear phrases such as ‘rapid tests are being conducted via drive-through’, and almost all the words are English. It’s as if suddenly I’m hearing Creole.”

Almost no tongue has been spoken as continuously as Greek, used without respite in roughly the same geographical region for 40 centuries.

But Babiniotis, a former education minister, worries that the resilience that has marked Greek’s long history is at risk of being eroded by an onslaught of English terms that now dominate everyday life. In the space of a year, he says, Greeks have had to get their heads, and tongues, around words such as “lockdown”, “delivery”, “click away”, “click-and-collect” and “curfew”.

“Ever more shops are carrying English-language signage as a way, I’m afraid, of having greater sales and outreach. Instead of artopoieio, Greek for bakery, we’re seeing shops calling themselves ‘bread factories’, while barbers are now ‘hairdressers’. Next we’ll have ‘hair stylists!’ It won’t stop.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/the-greeks-had-a-word-for-it-until-now-as-language-is-deluged-by-english-terms

I've always heard it referred to as Greeklish, I guess Greenglish is the same.