You can help expand this article with text translated from
the corresponding article in Polish. (December 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the Polish article.
Machine translation, like
DeepL or
Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,451 articles in the
main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide
copyright attribution in the
edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an
interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Polish Wikipedia article at [[:pl:Puryzm (językoznawstwo)]]; see its history for attribution.
You should also add the template {{Translated|pl|Puryzm (językoznawstwo)}} to the
talk page.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is the
prescriptive[1] practice of defining or recognizing one
variety of a
language as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties. Linguistic purism was institutionalized through
language academies (of which the 1572 Accademia della Crusca set a model example in Europe), and their decisions often have the force of law.[2]
The perceived or actual decline identified by the purists may take the form of a change of vocabulary,
syncretism of
grammatical elements, or
loanwords.[citation needed] The unwanted similarity is often with a neighboring language the speakers of which are culturally or politically dominant.[citation needed] The ideal may invoke logic, clarity, or the grammar of classic languages. It is often presented as a conservative measure, as a protection of a language from the encroachment of other languages or of the conservation of the
nationalVolksgeist, but is often innovative in defining a new standard. It is sometimes part of governmental
language policy that is enforced in various ways.
The practice opposite of purism, when borrowed words displace native ones, also exists. For example, in English, the native word bookstaff (
German: Buchstabe) was replaced by the Latin word letter.
In one common case, two closely related languages or language varieties are in direct competition, one weaker, the other stronger. Speakers of the stronger language may characterize the weaker language as a "
dialect" of the strong language, with the implication that it has no independent existence. In response, defenders of the other language will go to great lengths to prove that their language is equally autonomous.
In this context,
Yiddish and
Dutch have in the past sometimes been considered dialects of
German. In the case of
Low German, spoken in eastern Netherlands and northern
Germany, the debate is still current, as it could be considered a dialect of Dutch or German or a language of its own. An example of a related language that has only recently attained the status of an official national language is
Luxembourgish. Since linguistic science offers no scholarly definition of a dialect, and linguists regard the distinction with scepticism – see
A language is a dialect with an army and navy – the argument is really about subjective questions of
identity politics, and at times it can invoke extreme emotions from the participants.
Writing systems
Closely related languages often tend to mix. One way of preventing this is to use different writing systems or different
spelling systems.
The
Serbian and
Croatian literary standards differ mainly in using the
Cyrillic and Latin scripts. They exhibit a high degree of mutual intelligibility as they are based on essentially the same dialect, a stylized form of
Neoštokavian (Štokavian being the one dialect common to both Serbian and Croatian).
Forms
Various scholars have devised classifications of purism. These classifications take different criteria as their starting point and are therefore partly independent of each other.
Based on the approach
One taxonomy of puristic orientations is due to George Thomas:[4]
Ethnographic purism: This form is based on an idealization of the countryside, folk stories and dialects. Examples:
Nynorsk (New Norwegian), some versions of
Demotic Greek.
Elitist purism: Associated with a highly formal variety linked to an
elite, for example the language spoken at the court.
Playful purism: Intended as a joke, e.g.,
Philipp von Zesen's coinage Gesichtsvorsprung lit. 'facial projection' to mean 'nose'.
Xenophobic purism: involves the elimination or exclusion of foreign elements. Examples include
High Norwegian,
Korean and
Anglish. Many
English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled the virtues of "strong"
Anglo-Saxon words such as foreword over the "weak"
Romance word preface.
French,
German,
Greek and
Latvian are known for their preference for
coining words using native roots (often
calques) over borrowing foreign words; some are more successful than others.
Based on the goals
Democratic purism: Aims at safeguarding the intelligibility of (modern) concepts for a larger group of language users through enforcing their expression by the means of common, every-day words or expressions (for example, "back[ing] up" instead of "sustain[ment]")
Unificatory purism: Aims at better uniting the overall user group of a language by reducing certain regional or professional linguistic peculiarities which could separate varying aspects of life, or even obstruct interconnectivity, between individuals or sub-groups of different regional provenience or professional background.
Defensive purism: Aims at defending a language from external threats. Mostly, these are to be understood as influx of foreign ideas which a given language group (or its political system) disdains or has overthrown, or influx of foreign words or expressions which tend to substitute innate vocabulary, thus diminishing and/or endangering supra-regional or inter-generational intelligibility within a language area or between its present speakers and the literary remnants of their venerated ancestors, i. e., some kind of "classical" heritage (as e. g. Shakespeare's usage is already no more widely understood amongst many of today's English speakers [citation needed][dubious –
discuss]).
Prestige purism: Aims at varying prestige functions.
Delimiting purism: Aims at establishing some kind of separating functions.
Based on the intensity
Marginal purism: Purism never becomes at any stage a value-feature of the speech community. On the contrary, there is a certain openness to all sources of enrichment, at the same time characterized by a lack among the language elite of intellectual digestion of foreign influxes, or by a lack of such an elite as a whole. Examples:
English,
Russian,
Polish,
Japanese,
Ancient Greek.
Moderate, discontinuous purism: A moderate attitude is discernible over a long period of time. Examples:
Spanish,
Portuguese,
French and
Italian.
Trimming purism: A reactive correction to a potentially dangerous trend in the development of a standard language. Examples:
Danish,
Swedish,
Dutch,
Slovak.[clarification needed]
Evolutionary purism: Purism is seen early in the development of a written language. There are no radical changes or orientation. During the standardising process, purism gains momentum after which it slows down. Examples:
Hungarian,
Finnish,
Estonian,
Hebrew,
Latvian,
Croatian and
Slovene.
Oscillatory purism: Involves repeated swings between intense purism and a more inclusive attitude. Examples:
German,
Czech and
Yiddish.
Stable, consistent purism: No interruption or fluctuation in intensity is seen. Purism is a constant value-feature of the speech community. Examples:
Arabic,
Tamil and
Icelandic.
Revolutionary purism: An abrupt change from the previously mentioned patterns to another. Examples:
Turkish.
Based on linguistic level
Lexical purism: directed at the lexicon, first of all against direct lexical loans, often combined with the development of loan translations (such as in
Norwegian: hand out > støtteark and snowboard > snøbrett or
Arabictilifūn > hātif and kumbyūtir > ḥāsūb.
Orthographic purism: directed against foreign orthographic elements (such as in Norwegian: genre > sjanger, in Spanish: football > fútbol). Note that there is also reverse orthographic purism. Some Spanish speakers prefer the English spelling "blue jean"[5] and object to the spelling bluyín.[6]
Morphological purism: directed against foreign inflection and declension (such as the resistance to plural -s in noun endings in Scandinavian languages).
Syntactic purism: directed at syntactic features from other languages (such as the stylistic resistance in Nynorsk against some passive constructions and some constructions with the genitive).
Phonetic purism: directed at foreign phonemes and phonematical combinations (such as gánster[7] or champú[8] in Spanish). There is a reverse phonetic purism, which insists in the original pronunciation, such as pronouncing gángster and shampú in Spanish.
Other forms
Regressive purism: The eradication of very old loan-words. It is one of the main features of ultrapurism.
Ultrapurism: The extreme upper limit of purism. In this pattern, everything expressed by human speech can become a target for puristic intervention, even geographical names, proper names, etc. (The attitude – in itself "puristic" and associated with increased education and foreign language competency – opposed to the translation or adaptation of toponyms, or even personal names, is historically quite recent, as names are not considered fixed or unchanging in most cultures; and there are many exceptions even in English, especially the names of historical personages, Native Americans, and even contemporary royalty. Historically, names were part of the lexicon of a language just as every other word, and it was common to have different names associated with different language communities. See
exonym and endonym. The longer established the tradition of a name or term, the more likely are strong differences.) Two recorded examples of this are
High Icelandic (Háfrónska), and the usage of the German renaissance humanist
Johann Georg Turmair who even translated the name of the ancient Roman general
Fabius Cunctator into Zauderer Bohnenmaier (i. e. literally "Laggard Bean-Mayor"). While not ultra-purism per se,
phono-semantic matching is commonly used in a number of languages, notably for translating proper names into Chinese.
^Veisbergs, Andrejs (2010). "Development of the Latvian Language, Purism and Prescriptivism".
Linguistic Studies in Latvia(PDF). Vol. 18. University of Latvia. p. 15.