If I understand this argument correctly--kingkong is saying that once Brazil wins another World Cup and another Olympics, the direct result will be that millions of Americans will start referring to our football as "Gridiron" or some other term, and we will stop calling association football "soccer"? Wow. That will be really interesting when that happens. Of course, it will be a little weird to follow the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers Gridiron Team, what with them having been called a "football" team since...oh, let me see...oh, right--1890. Better late than never!
Well, folks, I was quite explicit when I declared I was wandering in the realm of speculation. Besides, it also involved a bit of healthy provocation. Not that I don’t intend you to take me seriously, but you're interpreting me a bit too literally. Well understood: I'm no prophet, maybe a patriotic amateur (lol) interested in futurology. Futurology based on a few real facts, I hope. Some call it intuition. Of course sometimes intuition can go wrong too. Sometimes not. It could work both ways. Could, please. The rest is spice in the quarrel. PS1: As far as arigatô coming from obrigado, that's somewhat polemical, but, true, I could be wrong: I've also seen authoritative statements against that theory. What doesn't make my argument invalid: there are a series of Portuguese words incorporated to the Japanese idiom in that period (XVIth century). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin And if words from a Western language can be absorbed by an Eastern culture, why can't futebol (Brz/Port term) substitute football or fútbol in a globalized era within countries of the same cultural profile?... Wait, you’re sort of ‘editing’ what I said. I said 2 World Cups (2010 & 2014) and the Olympic gold, what’s not impossible, since 2 of those tournaments will be in Brazil, and the other in the African South Hemisphere. I also ventured to say that it could affect (not necessarily America) but the vocabularies of China & India, remember? Let’s remember of Goa & Macau... Now, if Portuguese can affect Nipponic terms why not Chinese or Hindi?...Or with even a bigger chance…Spanish or English?... Of course we learned the word ‘football’ in an epoch in which England was a big empire & its football dominant in the planet. Those conditions are quite different now: although far from being dominant in politics or economics, Brazil is undoubtedly dominant in ‘football’ for many decades already (a phenomenon that started in the 50s). It’s not a matter of ‘imposing’ the term futebol on the world: it’s a matter of the world itself absorbing it spontaneously. PS2: BTW, Bigredfutbol, aren't you yourself incorporating to an English nick the Spanish version (futbol) of the game? LOL ...
That's the point; the word was adopted because it was being received. Now that the whole world pretty much knows the sport and everybody has their own accepted name for it, it's a little late for re-colonization of that particular sliver of the lexicon. Well, yeah, but it's a joke--I discovered soccer rather late in life (I was 30), about two years before moving away from Nebraska, my home state. I didn't know anyone else who was into the sport, and felt pretty isolated because of that. So I was making a (poor) play on what seemed to me at the time to be an anomoly--a soccer fan from Nebraska. Of course, things are changing, and the idea isn't as odd as it seemed then. Of course, I never lived in Omaha, where soccer is definitely a fixture on the local scene.
As I had suggested before, Americans can even keep calling Grid Foot 'footbal' but might also feel the need (or drive) to quit the term 'soccer' in favor of futebol (with the Brazilian phonetical frame): foo-tchee-ball. It could happen with the Spanish one too (fútbol) but then it would sound too similar to Gridiron 'football'. Speculations ... But Einstein ("God doesn't play dice') died with the certainty that the Quantic Theory was scientific speculation too. Precisely God who created...the Word. With the difference that in language sometimes dice don't roll so at random as wishes Roger Allaway but very often come 'marked'.
because those words came into play through a meeting of cultures, often bringing into play new words for things that had never existed in that language. There's much less history of foreign words replacing the local words. Theoretically there's no reason why it couldn't happen, but there doesn't seem to be anything at all to suggest it would. Well, for a start, nobody over there in China, India or Japan will ever see the word written in Portuguese. ...and yet every non English speaking country adopted its own spelling or transliteration. It's a nice idea, bourne of some kind of idealism coupled with a hopeless overestimation of Brazil's importance to people around the world, but at the moment you are just speculating like a man dreaming of the day when cars run on air and cost £3.99, "because it'd be really cool if that happened."
I don't know that "random" is quite the best term for what I think. I think that the dice roll in ways that are determined by forces that none of us can control, forces that are controlled by the collective tastes of the mass of human beings, not by any individual or small group of individuals. As bigredfutbol said a few pages back, this isn't something that's decided by committee. A question: Brazil went 24 years, from 1970 to 1994, without winning the World Cup or even reaching the final. During that time, German soccer was ascendant, winning the World Cup twice and reaching the final two other times. So, did Brazilian fans stop calling the sport futebol and starting calling it fussbal instead? I didn't think so. Does any of this really matter anyway? The sport originated in England, where it was called football, so the name football was imitated in other languages. Thus, the Spanish call it futbol, the Germans call it fussbal and the Dutch call it voetbal. You are suggesting that since the sport is now dominated by Brazil, where it is called futebol, other languagues will follow the Brazilian futebol example instead of the English football example. Thus, the Spanish will call it futbol, the Germans will call it fussbal and the Dutch will call it voetbal. Quite a turnabout.
Now you make that dog start biting its tail again. I insist – not allways. Individuals or groups of individuals – on the contrary of what you sthink - can colaborate in the (re)creation or invention of words, expressions, neologisms, slang, that become of universal acceptance. Let’s take the game of rugby, which so many times entangled me & my friend RichardL in interesting and informed discussion (mostly on his part): Would it be too far-fetched to insinuate that a very specific group of individuals, the ones who attended the public school of Rugby, in England, was responsible for the game’s denomination? And if we take the story to its last consequences, we could even play with the idea that just one individual, Mr. Hroca, from Rocheberie (‘Rockbury today’) was the - indirect - responsible for the baptism of the sport of the oval ball? ... Still, the impact of the 1958-1970 generation was so big that Brazil arrived at any of the Cups of that period (1974 to 1994) as frank favorite. The Pelé culture & ideology was already firmly instaured in the planet's unconscious - even with Brazil titles shortage. Germany, Holland, Italy, France, Argentina were ascending but were not able to establish an hegemony on their own as Brazil did in the precedent period. Holland could have done that in the early 70's but didn't give it a reasonable sequence. I think it matters. I may be roundly wrong in my absurd prophecies, but many interesting things on language were vehicled on a satisfactorilly high level in this discussion (from both sides) and I personally consider it to have been highly profitable.
Of course its not too far-fetched to say in retrospect that the Rugby School students are responsible for the game's name. It seems obvious that they are responsible for it. But it would be too far-fetched to say that the name happened because they set out to make it happen. The Rugby School students who developed their game in 1826 or whenever did not control what other people would decide a half-century later to call the game. Their actions may have influenced what those other people decided, but those other people did their own deciding. Those students probably didn't even call it rugby themselves. They probably just called it football. I suppose that it could matter to the English and the Brazilians (it surely matters a lot to one particular Brazilian) whether the Spanish name futbol, the German name fussbal and the Dutch name voetbal are an imitation of the English football or an imitation of the Portuguese futebol. But I doubt that the Spanish, the Germans and the Dutch would care one way or the other. Football and futebol are damned near identical. How would it be possible to tell which one is being imitated?
Maybe 'setting out to happen' is a little too much, I agree, but that they did some pushing & grabbling for the sport to happen, they did. Deserves research (although probably impossible to check). Look, I didn't say (unless as I pointed out before, as a 'healthy provocation') that the world is imitating & incorporating the Portuguese term futebol. Yet. Gotta wait for the 3 titles (2010, 2014, 2016): the dice have been thrown. Then we'll talk! ...
They would have called it football. It's just that various schools had their own variant of the game and there wasn't a definitive single game called football until the football association formed and standarised an agreed set of rules. It was only when members broke away from the FA and formed the Rugby Football Union that Rugby Football became established sport in its own right, rather than just one of multiple variants.
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i think calling it futbol in spanish is worse than calling it soccer in english. I fell like i am taking an english word and trying to make it sound spanish is like adding an O to the end of an english word because you are trying to make it sound spanish e.g
I call it Football when talking to my fellow friends that are football fans. When talking to Americans who are not football fans I call it Soccer
The weirdness of the expression ‘American Football’ doesn’t only dwell in the fact that the game practitioners don’t use their feet to ‘handle’ a ball during a match. They don’t use a ball…either. A ‘ball’ by definition is round, circular (where ‘every point of which is equidistant from a fixed point within the curve’), spherical. An American Football ‘ball’ is everything but a ball. It is absolutely oval, testicle-shaped. It looks like its shape was specially contrived in order for it to be ‘fondled’ by hands…& not feet! To say that the foot is used in Gridiron Football is an imprecision. To say that they use a ball…a heresy. Frankly - all that confusion disrupts the sacred harmony of the spheres ...
Merriam-Webster defines "ball" as "a spherical or ovoid body used in a game or sport." (emphasis mine) Did you know that your nose can run and your feet can smell? English is krazy!
Merriam-Webster is American: it had to make a concession to homeland. Yes, it's 'also' ovoid. In a secondary - deformed - meaning. Don't worry. Happens to the best families. I know. Real 'krazy'. In English feet can even...grab. And if a nose can 'run' why can't nostrils 'catch'? ... Touchdown!...
Yes, it has to accurately describe the language as it is used in America. Not that America is the only place ovoid objects are called balls. Other language facts: Did you know that the word "bullet" comes from the French boulette, meaning "small ball," because it's like a cannonball, but smaller? But it's not a sphere! Where's the sacred harmony? Another word with similar origins is "ballot," because people used to vote by putting a small ball into a jar representing their preferred candidate. The jar with the most balls won. The "ballot" was the ball which the voter "cast" into the container. But every time I vote, the ballot is a piece of paper. It's not even round!
In the 6 or 7 rugby countries of the world that practice rugby unfortunately those 'ovoid objects' are called balls. For the rest of the planet though they are plain eggs. First Gridiron Football/Rugby 'balls' (sigh) were always oval. First cannonballs though were absolutely...round & spherical. Sheer illusion. The modern 'ballot' is still round. I'll concede - it's even oval. Elections organizer commitees though just make use of the old & worn out 'Columbus' egg' trick. (Wanna go crazy, let's go crazy then.lol)
It's unreasonable to expect perfect logic in a language in which "slow up" and "slow down" mean the same thing.
It's reasonable to expect from languages some logic though. If they were so aleatory as you wish we wouldn't be exchanging so opposed but 'understandable' concepts here. I can’t deny you’ve been displaying quite an acrobatic talent during this whole thread to prove that ‘round’ and ‘oval’, ‘hand’ & ‘foot’, ‘circle’ & ‘elipse’ – just like ‘up’ & ‘down’ in your last post – can mean practically the same thing. This whole debate btw makes me remind of the famous nursery’s rhymes character, Humpty-Dumpty, the egg. And I can just applaud yours & ThreeApples brilliant efforts to make that slippery ‘egg’ stand on the wall. In spite of what the famous rhymes decree: It's my opinion that the word 'football' for 'Grid foot' is in its post-'decay' phase & it's gradually getting harder & harder to pick up its pieces & put them together again.
Sure Brittish & American dictionaries display affinities - they deal with the same language don't they?.. Nevertheless in the Oxford the 'oval' option is only the 'II.2.a' one. The exception of the exception of the exception. And certainly the 'oval' acception of the option II.2.a for the word 'ball' derived from the unusual format of the rugby 'ball' - and continued in American English (reinforced by the fact that the American football 'ball' - game derived from rugby - is also oval). To this insistence on putting that oval object on top of the wall & praying for it not to fall from there we could call the Humpty-Dumpty Syndrome.
at least both can spell British correctly, something you've failed to do 94 times on Bigsoccer so far.
Since the first definition is an archaic topographical term that survives only in surnames and place names, I doubt that the definitions are listed in order of prominence or importance. And the spherical option is also "only" the II.2.a definition. Because there was never a restriction of the word "ball" to pure spheres. If a ball can only be a sphere, we wouldn't need the word "ball"--we would just say "sphere." A spherical ball also will not easily sit on top of a wall. But I am not aware of any kind of football that incorporates this wall-balancing activity.