Quote:
Originally Posted by Idoine
And if this alternative is sufficiently acknowledged, there is a chance that this term will appear on dictionaries in the end...
 Am I here overly optimistic ?  |
I mentioned "loan words" before. Outside of two languages merging (by conquest or mass migration) most adopting of foreign words comes about by encountering a culture that has a concept or a product that is not already found in your own culture and picking up that word. For instance, in the mid-18th century when the Western world began to have cultural and material trade with Japan, we called a kimono a kimono not a "wrappy cloth thingy", we called sumo sumo, not "fat wrestly guys", and we called geisha geisha, not "powdery faced dancy girls." But we didn't start calling bread "pan" and dogs "inu" and foxes "kitsune" because we already had words for those things.
The electronic book is a new way of storing and displaying something we already have a word for-- "book." (The word applies both to the physical medium on which the words are stored and the book itself-- when someone says that they are writing a book, they are talking about stringing together the words.) And that is my problem with adopting the French word-- it isn't a French invention, it isn't a French concept, and adopting a French term for it into English is no less arbitrary than adopting whatever word is invented in Spanish, or German, or Maori, or a Khoisan language (hey, some "click" words might be fun for English!)