Saturday 15 February 2014

preterite or palabra jot

The German language is adaptive one, which irks many purists to no end—and most languages adopt certain prevailing styles from commerce and other engendering and endangering factors, as well, and one of the more irresonate constructions one commonly hears (though there are many others) is the German congegation of the English infinitive to google—googeln.

It is especially bizarre in the past tense, zum Beispiel: ,,Ich habe schon es gegoolgelt aber kein exakter Treffer gab” (I have already googled it but there were no exact matches) where one is just as likely to encounter gegoogled—which preserves the grammatical participles, artefacts of both languages, the ge- prefix and the -ed suffix. I wondered if there are parallels to be found elsewhere and I found some very well defined ways to communicate the act of an internet search, literally and figuratively:
 
Language Infinitive: to google Gerund: googling Past-Perfect: have googled
Dutch googelen googelde gegoogeld
Norwegian รฅ google googly har googla
Spanish googlear googleando haber googleado
French googler googliser
googolisai

Most other European languages (and these certainly are not the sole representatives) that I could identify either had similar conjugations or did not bother to incorporate in greater detail, but I would like to learn more and see the list expanded. I am no polyglot and think that the pervasiveness of English does harm to lingual diversity in many cases but was very pleased to learn that come-lately words and concepts still have to stick to established rules.