My head hurts... That's probably not related to this thread though. Actually, it is, but just a little.
I agree. It does look like a dog trying to bite its own tail. The thing is that the planet discovered that that 'dog' at least since 1924 (date of the 1st time a non-anglo country was Olympic champion) is not a pure British mastiff or American hound anymore - & has now way more international & cosmopolitan traits. Its name & pedigree changed their nature and crossed the borders of England and/or its (ex)colonies. The Anglo-Saxon semantic problematics that dominated the origin of the word (football/soccer) is now outdated. Fussball, Fútbol, Voetball, Futebol & even the word calcio (well remembered by our friend RichardL) escaped from the Commonwealth orbit and started to designate the newcoming game on a planetary scale. The dog that tried to bite its tail is much bigger now, got tired of 'getting dizzy' & already started to hint that that 'tail' belongs to its own new organism (football) & not to 'other' past/exotic ones (rugby, american gridiron 'football', etc). The 'Italian Mastiff', 'Spanish Galgo', 'Argentinian Dogo', 'Dutch Shepherd', 'Russian Husky', 'German Boxer' or 'Brazilian Fila' are on their way to dispatch those old foes that still dare to attend by the same name from their neighborhoods. And will stop biting their tail for good. That process is accelerating with globalization & IMO won't take too long to be concluded.
I agree that that the game is global and multi-national and that the World Cup and other major competitions are dominated time after time by non-English-speaking nations. However, I don't think this is some sort of revelation. It has been obvious for many decades to everyone, including we benighted English speakers. How could it not be obvious, since 17 of 18 World Cups have been won by nations where English is not the primary language? Despite this, I'm sure that we will continue to speak English ourselves.
Noun calx (genitive calcis); f, third declension heel, part of the foot on the backside where it becomes the leg 'Calcio' means 'to kick', with the foot of course. But the word (etimologically) comes from calx, heel. Since the foot is the extension of the heel, calcio became the Italian denomination for the sport that 'kicks the ball with the feet'. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calcio What only points to the fact that - English included - in any language the word 'football' (& it couldn't be otherwise) points to a sport practiced with the inferior limbs. Even if nowadays it doesn't fully happen in US I personally don't see much future for any kind of meaning it may still entertain - especially if it reveals to be so abstruse as it is in the case of 'Gridiron Foot'. In my opinion, the denomination 'football' for Grid Foot - although if nowadays still prevalent - is condemned to fade out (in a medium or even long term). It's time for US language start adapting to the world jargons & not invariably the other way around. That's what was said before.
In US 'Football' for 'Grid Foot' (or 'soccer' for 'football') belongs - according to Marshall McLuhan jargon - still to the Guttemberguian Era (1450 AD on, approx., date of the printing of the 1st Bible) That era is just dying (if already didn't die). 'Football' for 'soccer' on the other hand belongs to the Informatics Era (1950 on). It's (& will be in the States) the name for the IIIrd Milennium world's most popular game.
Bingo. Nobody decides what direction the evolution of language is going to take. It just happens. It makes its own decisions, dictated by the tastes of the mass of people, something that no one can control. Not only do we not decide the direction, I don't think we can predict it, either. We may think that we can predict it, but we're kidding ourselves.
...except for the French, who do actually decide by committee on which words they'll allow in their language. But they always do like to be awkward.
That's actually not true. The French Academy only gives advice, it doesn't enforce anything. For instance, they proposed "ordinateur" to say "computer" and it did catch among people. However, they proposed "mèl" for "e-mail" and the masses rejected it (we either use "e-mail" or "courriel", which actualy comes from Canada). As for football, it's called "football" in French. The idea that the French language is dictated by an Academy is a common misconception in the US. Another one being that Jerry Lewis is popular in France (Honnestly I had never heard of him untill an American tried to convince me I was crazy about him).
Now I ask your permission to deeply disagree. Things can change very quickly in terms of language, and the way one wants. The word futebol for example is nowadays much more diffused in the planet than football, fussbal, voetbal, soccer. It started not too long ago & demanded no more than some original dribbling & kicking in 1958. That means: it demanded absolutely conscious...will. And that futebol trend only seems to be growing. Bye bye, soccer & football (soon the Webster will be listing the anachronic terms in the category of obsolete XIXth century words).
In places where they think American English would be better if it were more like Portuguese, I guess.
It was just a question. You seemed to be implying that more and more people around the world were choosing the word futebol instead of football (or whatever word they'd previously used). I just asked where. Either there are places out there or it was just some kind of random nonsense.
Well, Brazil has 200 mill, Angola & Mozambique 40 mill, Portugal 10 mill, there is still Goa, Cabo Verde, Madeira, Timor & some other, let's say 300 mill people speaking Portuguese in he world. Not that impressive, I agree. When said futebol though I didn't necessarilly mean the word futebol, but the phenomenon Brazilian football. Since football (thanks to the Pelés, Garrinchas, Eusébios, Zicos, Romários, Ronaldos, Ronaldinhos, Cristiano Ronaldos, Kakás of life) is more & more being deprived from its anglo-saxon roots & being world wide confounded as a Luso-Brazilian sport by billions of people who don't have appropriate access to internet (or to the formal & obsolete system of education) the world may be imperceptibly but gradually getting convinced that the correct way to spell the word for the game is the Portuguese one, don't you think so?... Now, if Brazil wins this year and 2014, besides the Olympic gold, believe me, this process will suffer a geometric acceleration, and before 2025 I wouldn't doubt that even India & China will be adding to their dictionaries the word 'futebol' (Brazilian way). That ain't 'random nonsense' but strong, well-founded (and scary, for the traditionalists) speculation. ... PS: Just a curiosity: the word in Japanese for 'thank you' is arigatô (Port. spelling). The reason for that was the Portuguse colonization of a small part of the coast of Japan for a long time in the 16th or 17th century (I'll go check) & since everytime they'd thank somebody they'd say 'obrigado' ('thank you' in Portuguese) the Japanese adopted it in their idiom. O-bri-ga-do became a-ri-ga-tô in Japanese till our days. Quite a few other Japanese words have a Portuguese origin because of that phase of their history.
There are words in Japanese that have Portuguese origins but that is not one of them. Arigato comes from the Japanese phrase, arigatō gozaimasu, which means "such kindness is hard to find". It is of completely Japanese origin. Arigatō gozaimasu has been used in Japanese for over 1,000 years which is long before contact with Portuguese.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the Portuguese futebol really is replacing football, fussbal, voetball and soccer (maybe it is, although I doubt that you'll see many Spanish speakers spelling the name of the game with an "e' in it). You, as a Portuguese speaker, are happy with this trend. But is the fact that you wanted it to happen the reason why it did happen, or did it happen because of forces that you can't control and neither can anybody else. Besides, you seem to be assuming that "the way one wants" and what Portuguese speakers want are the same thing. But, I doubt that many English, French, German or Dutch people want to see their names for the game replaced by the Portuguese name.
none of them replaced the word football with futebol though, as they'd have almost certainly used the portuguese word from the outset. well no, as they won't be watching broadcasts in portuguese, and will never see the portuguese spelling. It's a nice idea in theory, much like the elastic tape measure. The nonsense of that idea has already been dealt with, but maybe you should learn to read the Japanese katakana alphabet and go to Japan, and amaze yourself with just how much you can read over there despite knowing barely a word of Japanese. How can you do it? Well, simple. A huge number of katakana words are transliterations from....well can you guess which language? (as a clue, it doesn't begin with P).