Chat thread – Tuesday 6th May
Discuss today's stories:
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And we can still buy chicken kievs and bombay mix. 🙂
And eat Peking Duck 😋! Ho Chi Minh city is still known as Saigon by some in Vietnam as is Mumbai known as Bombay. As I first visited Burma when it was called that I still call it that and the cities as Rangoon and Pagan etc. especially as it was the Military Government who changed the name.
And you’d say Netherlands and not Nederland! Why would you randomly insert a foreign word into an English sentence?
I’m guilty of doing that in many contexts tbh. I often say “Bon voyage!” when speaking English at work, in place of “Have a good trip!” etc. My colleagues do not speak French to my knowledge. I sometimes use “Prost!” too in a non-German context.
Your first example is one of many French phrases borrowed by English speakers though. Using them in an English conversation is perfectly correct.
Also there’s a fine line between between cosmopolitan and just pretentious, lol.
And you’d say Netherlands and not Nederland! Why would you randomly insert a foreign word into an English sentence?
I’m guilty of doing that in many contexts tbh. I often say “Bon voyage!” when speaking English at work, in place of “Have a good trip!” etc. My colleagues do not speak French to my knowledge. I sometimes use “Prost!” too in a non-German context.
Your first example is one of many French phrases borrowed by English speakers though. Using them in an English conversation is perfectly correct.
That’s exactly my point. Bon voyage is correct English according to you, but Prost is not, despite some people who don’t speak German using it. Gesundheit is another similar example. The entire point is that language is dynamic, there’s a fine line between what you call incorrect and what people are actually using. Linguists refer to this concept as descriptivism.
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