Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
chryuop, if you use a word in Italian and it's not a rare occurence in the language, it's Italian.
Tangram, I consider "a priori" an English phrase because I use it on a regular basis as a native speaker.I consider Deus ex machina and English phrase as well. "Ergo" I'm not so sure about because I never hear anyone using it unless they're trying to be pretentious by using Latin words.
And so what if an English student wouldn't use the word? They wouldn't learn the word "aglet" either, but that's undeniably an English word. What is your criteria for "word in XXX language"? What makes "fjord" an English word but "a priori" not English?
I mean, would you consider コンピューター not Japanese? Would you consider しよう not Japanese because it's a Japanese attempt at pronouncing the Chinese 使 and 用?
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I guess American and Italian language professors think differently. Even tho for certain words we have no Italian translation and we use only English words (like baseball or computer) we do not call them Italian words. We call it foreign words borrowed by our language (or borrowed words). Esterofilia (sorry, not sure how to translate it, it is the "love" for foreign countries) is always more growing and not only in Italy. If every country should consider their own, words borrowed from other languages we would end up having a big messy language...which was already tried to be created and failed miserably.