Dear All,
Since we translators are in the business of dealing with language – our own, Italian as the charismatic lingua franca of the Congregation, English and other languages as well, there is probably no need to over-stress the fact that languages change when they come into contact, and the more contact there is, the more language changes as a result. But it does help to name the phenomenon clearly and explain its consequences.
Since English has been adopted as the EAO Region’s lingua franca, it means we have a complex set of contact-induced changes going on. We are often dealing with Italian in its role mentioned above, and the majority of our provinces, vice-provinces and delegations in the region have a native language other than English, so English is spoken and written as an ‘other’ language (it could be the second, third or more language used by an individual) and probably restricted to particular situations... which is why I introduced the notion of diglossia a couple of weeks back. This leads to varying degrees of acceptance of change, and usually, the further away one is from being a mother-tongue speaker of a language, then the more accepting one is of changes in that language induced by contact with other languages.
A great many instances of contact-induced change will of course be accepted by all the speakers concerned. The vast majority of these are changes in which morphemes (words or recognisable parts of words) are transferred from one language to another, namely, lexical borrowing and the borrowing of grammatical morphemes, both particles and affixes. No one really questions whether words like pasta (from Italian) and monsoon (from Cantonese) are native or of foreign origin; they just eat one of them and rejoice or suffer when the other comes around! And a little study of linguistics will soon teach somebody that the suffix -able (e.g. readable) has Germanic roots that came into English centuries back, but people just regard it as ‘English'.
Yet when it comes to Salesian English (by which I mean certain features of English that are the result of contact with Italian Salesian discourse), the change is relatively recent, far less subtle and much more noticeable, and the question for people who are interested in the language they use to express the charism in English is to determine what might be regarded as contact-induced change that is firmly established from what is still open to change. Note that I am not using words like ‘good’, ’bad’, ‘acceptable’, ‘unacceptable’. That would suggest a prescriptive approach to language (“do this but don’t do that”), which we don’t do in linguistics. But we can make a distinction between linguistics and what is stylistically or socially desirable, and I think the translator needs to keep a balance between these two and know something about both.
Acts (as in AGC), card (as in Common Identity Card), coadjutor, college, economer, economic, educator, formation, institute, itinerary, monsignor, oratory, pedagogue, presence, procure, project, protocol, Rector Major, rendiconto, spiritual exercises, urn, Work... from out here on the periphery, about as far from Rome as one can get, I have just listed a few terms that we would definitely identify as often having appeared in Salesian English. If you want some more thoughts on these from a linguistic and stylistic or social desirability point of view, go to the Best Practice.
best_practice_45-Salesian English.docx