• AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    France has been doing this for ages. this is why a walkman is known as a balladeur in France and a hamburger is called a saucepain ("sauce bread"). similar movements have been a thing among nationalists in Europe for literal centuries - back before Germany even existed as a state there were German nationalists who refused to use latin, greek or egyptian loan words and called insects "Kerbtiere" ("segmented animals") or mummies "Dörrleichen" ("dried corpses") out of spite. Nowadays this is mostly a fringe neo nazi thing, only nazi skins in Germany will translate t-shirts to "T-Hemden" or internet to "Weltnetz", but the French still do this nonsense officially and are now at the point where the boomer-ass linguists who are charged with "preserving" the French language have become aware there is such a thing as video games.

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Normal french people, to be clear, think that l'internet est tres cool. The formal stuff is only assholes and the Quebecois, but I repeat myself.

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      translate t-shirts to “T-Hemden” or internet to “Weltnetz”

      We do this in Finland, lol. Every word has an official "proper" Finnish translation maintained by the Institute for the Languages of Finland, though often people will tend go with colloquial loanwords instead, especially with more modern tech-y stuff. The thing is though, the pronounciation and spelling of the words is modified to fit Finnish phonetics, unlike in something like German where they just plop "T-SHIRT" or "COMPUTER" in the middle of a sentence

      Maybe English is just easier to pronounce for Germans, but there's a reason people say "t-paita" instead of "tiishört/tiishööt" in Finland