Re: Intergermansk - Pizza packaging text :D

Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 23:42:31 -0600, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> wrote:
>
>
>>From:    "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@...>
>>
>>>>"quite commonly used in English"?  Not in the United States.
>>>>I just turned fifty years old, and I've never run across this word
>>>>before.
>>>
>>>Perhaps not that common on the other side of the big pond, but it's very
>>>common here in Europe. Pretty much all translations of the European
>>>languages use the word "champignon" - in Norwegian, it's spelled
>>>"sjampingjong", and only Italian uses "funghi pataioli".
>>
>>Pascal, I think we've already determined that in fact the word is
>>not common in Great Britain, either, based on Ray's comments and
>>my googling statistics. In fact, I just checked google.co.uk, just
>>to make sure google.com wasn't giving me skewed numbers, and it
>>agreed entirely with the earlier search, providing only 11.3k hits for
>>champignon on English language pages in the UK.

> "Only"? I certainly wouldn't call over 11k hits "only".
Wouldn't you? That makes it slightly more popular than the misspelling
"mushroon" at 10k, compared with 3.2 million for "mushroon". Restricting
the search to Ireland (since I can do it with one click at google) gives
57 hits for "champignon", compared with 13,800 for "mushroom" (roughly the
same proportion as in the wider English web). Many of those 57 results are
restaurant menus, in French, or are proper names of various things (a rock
formations [in scare quotes), novels, company names).

One thing I agree with you about on this issue, is that the word *does*
occur in English. Indeed, it has a certain cachet (like lots of French
words, including "cachet"), which accounts for many of its occurences.
Certainly, it is not commonly used as a name for a particular type of
mushroom, as many people have already said in this thread. How many of
the native English speakers reading this would think the following
conversation plausible?

A: 250g of champignons, please.
B: There you go; that'll be...

or

A: Do you have any mushrooms?
B: What kind are you looking for?
A: Champignons
B: Sorry, all out of them...

:)


 > Now if it were only
> a few hundred hits, that would surely be rare, but with over 11k hits its at
> least somewhat common, even if some people apparently haven't heard of it
> yet. Well, now you have, and you can add it to your repertoire (oh damn, not
> another nasty French word - hope you guys can deal with it. My English
> dictionary does list it though.)
"Repetoire" is indeed an English word. No arguments about that. What does that
prove?

s.
--
Stephen Mulraney                            ataltane@ataltane.net
The best way to remove a virus is with vi and a steady hand -- me

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