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A former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary staged a bizarre secret battle on foreign words over many years, deleting thousands of them from OED supplements — and blaming his predecessors for the linguistic vandalism.
Robert Burchfield worked for the OED between 1972 and 1986, during which time he deleted some 17 per cent of words with overseas origins that had been added by a previous editor. His arbitrary overseas deletions include the word balisaur, which is a sort of badger thing that lives in India, plus the Americanised term wake-up and many more.
It’s a particularly bizarre case as it was Burchfield who first included swear words in the dictionary in the 1970s, so he wasn’t exactly a prudish man. Probably just a racist one. The OED is now working to rebuild its listings, adding back the words Burchfield deemed too foreign for our own good. [Guardian]
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Not sure it’s racist to remove foreign words from an English dictionary.
It would depend on whether he discriminated specifically along race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic basis. If so then it could be seen as racial discrimination according to the UN.
But it sounds like it was fairly disorganised and arbitrary rather so it is more just xenophobic.
Well we have an example of an Indian word which has an English alternative and an American one which also has en englishn alternative. I’d say both were good candidates for chucking out of the dictionary.
je ne comprends pas………….
Considering all language is a bastardisation of many different root languages, his actions seem futile and nonsensical. What a strange man!
Clearly does not know much about the history of English then – given so many of our words are in fact derived from foreign sources – such as Bungalow (Indian) and the word servant comes from the Latin word servus – from whence we also get the word servile, and serf.
well seeing as English didn’t even exist until about 1400CE, it’s safe to say every single word is at least influenced by foreign languages. you only have to look at the etymology of common words, as per your examples, to understand how not-English modern English is.
I say well done, Americanisms belong in an American English dictionary and foreign words are pointless when we have English alternatives (they sell X to English dictionaries for a reason). Those of you saying that English is made up from foreign languages are missing the point, it’s like saying PC World can sell you the elemental components a computer is made of (i.e. copper, gold, carbon, etc.) because that’s what computers are made of.