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 Authority of dictionaries

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bgeh
post Feb 20 2010, 05:27 AM

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Well, what I learnt was that while French, BM, have 'official' bodies that, in some sense, represents the official authority of the language, and this isn't true for English, and the OED, which IIRC does not claim to be 'the authority' on English, but only claims to be a definitive record on English, because the base is much more diluted instead. An example of this is the verb 'to google', which was used widely before it actually got into the OED. Similarly, the verb 'to photoshop' hasn't entered the OED yet, but is used very widely worldwide, and it looks likely that it'll end up into the OED sooner or later.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewan_Bahasa_dan_Pustaka

[please do correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm certainly not a languages student]

This post has been edited by bgeh: Feb 20 2010, 05:34 AM
bgeh
post Mar 1 2010, 09:31 AM

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QUOTE(Thinkingfox @ Feb 27 2010, 02:38 PM)
So some of you might think that language is trivial, isn't it? (Don't worry, I'm not referring to you Bgeh  smile.gif )

Think of it. The language(s) you speak, to some extent, influences your perception of the world around you. For example, there at least five verbs for love in Latin, namely amare, stoge, eros, phileo and agape. See how these words have separate definitions even without adjectives to accompany them. Another example would be the urban myth about Eskimos and the large amount of words they have for snow, and how they classify snow by varying thickness and texture.

So since a language can influence your outlook of life, wouldn't you be interested on these people who decides the syntax of your language, how and why they do it?
*
You're actually starting to go down the path of philosophy of language here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language

with the associated questions of how does a language change the way you see the world, etc, etc.

 

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