"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication
But also one might consider, or seek the word, that certain way of spitting, tells some peeps we fam.
Language isn't just about communicating meaning but also cultural content, identity and social markers. This is part of what drives its frequent development and also part of why some people want to preserve their way of speaking even if its merely a creole or a "dying" language.
If everybody in Italy understands "computer", calling it "calcolatore" is outright against communication (that word in italian is closer to "device to do math operations", which is technically correct, but not what people imagine)
The root "comput-" comes from latin "computo" while "calcolatore" comes from the latin "calculo" which is a rough latin synonym of "computo". The form "comput-" transformed in Italian into "cont-" like in "conto" (English count), "contante" (cash) etc.
So perhaps "contatore" (counter) instead of "computer" would make more etymological sense.
It was picked over the word "calculateur" which is the French equivalent of "calculatore" after IBM France shared a letter wondering if "calculateur" was too restrictive and didn't properly express the machine capabilities. To which Jacques Perret answered "why not ordinateur?"
The problem is the interpretation people give to the word. If I say computer, people think of something with keyboard + mouse and a screen, or maybe a laptop (funny enough, they will not think of their phone).
If I say "calcolatore", we envision one of those devices to do math operations, used in school (are those still a thing?)
In Hebrew we have "tachless" that comes from yiddish "tachless", that comes from Hebrew "tachlit" but now tachless and tachlit have different meanings and different grammar roles
I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation.
That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling.
I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is pretty good, and include sound files of the old vs new pronunciations.
English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.
This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.
("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)
Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).
English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.
But Finnish is easier than English in the sense that pronounciation is 100% regular and predictable - that's the metric I've been using in this thread to say "English is hard". (I understand the reasons behind that, the mixture of influences, loan-words, and voewl shifting.)
In a lot of ways English is easy, and even bad English is understandable.
floor
cooperation
coopThe people pushing for this do, in fact remember that the primary purpose of language is communication.
Imagine being an aging Italian, or Quebecer, who has spoken Italian, or French all your life, do not have a good grasp of English, only to become unable to understand much of the discourse in your own mother country.
I, myself, am not super keen on seeing Spanish, Mandarin, or Esperanto become the lingua franca of my area.
Given that, this goes against the "preserve communication" argument. After all, this is how Italian was born (at least that's what we studied in school), there was Greek, there was Latin, somewhere the language got distorted by common people all the way until it became Italian and got shared by many, many people.
The language was not defined, it evolved with how people used it.
This process has been going on forever, I don't see why it should change now with artificial constraints.
For what is worth, official documents should be allowed in English language for the entire country, given we are part of the EU, there is a whole money-sucking machine (and time-sucking!) to translate things in English when interacting with other EU countries.
I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.
It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.
Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.
History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not)
The rest is just about which language and who chooses.
The only thing this sort of bill does is make it harder to get to a better state. At least here they are not pretending it's helpful to do it
Would it? It would matter which language. It'd benefit those most familiar with it today.
People have been laughed at for their accents when learning a language. How does this help?
You can't just flip a switch. It'd create a huge inequality divide moreso than today.
Some countries are surviving because they use a different language that's not English i.e. less impact from globalization.
That is no reason not to make progress.
As for practicallness: In a world of 8 billion people, literally anything you do (something, nothing, whatever) will cause hardship for someone. It's not even an interesting goal to try. Doing nothing causing hardship. Moving forward causes hardship.
Combine this with the fact that the unfortunate reality of humans is that one of the main ways that change happens writ large is through seeing the suffering (and success!) of others. I don't think you will change that part of our psychology anytime soon.
The sad truth is we don't all get a perfect, or even good, life. You can't make progress on this, either, without causing hardship to some. Does that mean you should not try?
Because you will never make progress in steps that are only positive for everyone, or even often get the chance to choose who it gets to be negative for.
It wouldn't last. Within years it would devolve into various creoles and with centuries; almost entirely different languages. Language is not merely functional but cultural and has purpose outside of meaning (e.g. identity).
Language-as-identity as a way of separating people has no meaningful use case that is positive for society.
We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.
And when I talk about work l, it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (software development), which incidentally is the same place where my Italian teacher was when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.