Word: linguists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...purist and patriot, Linguist Etiemble has declared war against Franglais, the pidgin French-English that has flooded la belle langue with U.S. neologisms. French newspapers speak of call-girls, cliff-dwellers, containment, fairways, missile-gaps, uppercuts. French sociologists analyze le melting-pot, out-groups, ego-involvement. French business roils with words like boom, le boss, fifty-fifty, soft-approach and supermarket...
...Linguistic Sin. French zeal to avoid all this is rooted in feelings of national identity. French until recently was the world's diplomatic language. Only 65 million people now speak it as a first language; less than one-fourth of the U.N.'s 111 member nations still use it in debates. Franglais is spreading so fast, argues Parisian Linguist Alain Guillermou, that U.S. French teachers may soon have nothing to teach. Guillermou calls for a national commission to police Américanolatres on the ground that Franglais is not only a linguistic sin but is also...
...purists are thus aghast at the eat-and-run tone of le snack-bar as opposed to the civilized Gallic pace of le cafe. The Franglais word teen-ager is rebellious worlds apart from the dutiful jeune fille. The traitorous notion that "American is the only living language," cries Linguist Etiemble, will lead straight to what he calls, in ironic Franglais, "I' American way of life...
...lucky, a field worker will find at least one member of the tribe with a smattering of Spanish or Portuguese. The institute man then points to a hut, tree, rabbit, or other familiar object and asks the Indian the word for it. As he learns the Indian dialect, the linguist records the sounds on tape. Then, using basic phonetic symbols, he constructs an alphabet for the language. The process can be exasperating. One tribe of suspicious Bolivian Indians refused to cooperate, convinced that the whole thing was a plot to steal their language. When linguists tackled the Cocama tribe...
Once words are learned and written down, linguists can prepare a bilingual dictionary and primers and teach the Indians how to read. Then the real rewards begin. The teachers cite cases of illiterate Indian boys and girls, taught by the institute, who are now successful surgeons, scholars and teachers. "When they first learn how paper talks," says an institute linguist, "it is a thrilling experience for the Indians...