Linguistic purism in conlangs

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Frislander
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Re: Linguistic purism in conlangs

Post by Frislander »

Frislandian isn't highly purist, because it acquired a good deal of religious and technological terminology from Old Irish due to the arrival of monks, but otherwise the island has mostly been completely isolated due to some kind of weird phenomenon, so in a sense there wasn't any desire for linguistic purism because there wasn't the contact situation which could generate those kinds of attitudes.
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spanick
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Re: Linguistic purism in conlangs

Post by spanick »

The Gotski definitely have their share of linguistic purist movements throughout history to limited effect. Both Old and Modern Gotski include many loans from Serbo-Croation and it is the Serbo-Croatian borrowings which receive the most criticism from purists (which is funny because there are plenty of borrowings from Latin, Greek, German, Albanian and Turkish but these receive less attention). This is due to the Gotski originally being subject to the Kingdom of Serbia and later gaining their independence from them (both politically and ecclesially). In the modern era, the Yugoslav Wars served as another impetus for purists to purge the language. In general, the purists have not been very successful and borrowings abound.

There is a national language academy which governs the “standard” language and exhibits some purists tendencies but is generally quite moderate. For instance, most modern words for things like computer or internet are simply borrowed.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Linguistic purism in conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

Adpihi don’t really have a single widely held opinion on this matter.
The net effect of the various opinions they hold, is, that foreign vocabulary quickly enters the Adpihi lexicon , but its pronunciation and morphology is quickly nativized.
I will speculate two possible reasons this might be so:
1. Everyone who has finished secondary school, and many who have finished primary school, is well aware that what is currently the Prestige dialect of their language, is a sort of a “contact dialect”, a compromise between many dialects some of which were barely mutually intelligible to each other.
2. Most of them think that most opinions or practices each other follow in the absence of adequate evidence, they follow because God told them to. They usually don’t think whatever God told them personally, God also told everybody else. And they also don’t believe they have any business interfering between someone else and God.

So if anyone thinks they should be linguistically pure, everyone, including they themselves, believes that their own business and not anyone else’s.


Reptigan OTOH believe it’s only polite for everybody to try to communicate to everyone else in whatever way is most easily understood by the addressee; and also that it’s only polite to try to understand what anyone who is speaking to you actually means, and to assume that they are doing their best to be understood. So they are much more likely to adopt foreign vocabulary with its original pronunciation and morphology, though perforce the morphology is at least somewhat natvized.
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