Protect the language at all costs!!!

A few years ago I heard of a law in France designed to protect the French language. As with a lot of things, my memory of the law was a little fuzzy and the law was supposed to be a protection for the French consumer by requiring advertisements and contract to be in French. But the law was applied by some to mean no foreign language usage in media. While the law did not try to control the language in the way that I thought it did, I started thinking about what would be the effect of trying to ban the introduction of foreign words into a language, and would this even be possible.

Finegan talked about how words and expressions that are common today were not used or were used in a different way. The Gay Nineties does not refer to a time period when homosexuals enjoyed more social freedom but rather shows how the word gay has changed in usage in recent years.

As I look at items in my house I see how many of the common things I use every day are words that came from other languages. Pasta, pizza, chilies, tomales, enchiladas are just a few. Then I started thinking about common items that have been part of English language for many years. I realized that raccoon and possum are again loan words even if the river near my house is the Raccoon.

All this brings me to my question what would be the effect of trying to ban all new words of foreign origin or is it even possible to do this. This brings me to the role of loan words in language. When Europeans first came to North America they encountered many animals and plants that they had never seen before, for many of these they adopted the Native American word for the item. I still find it interestinlg that the word chocolate was a loan word that we took from Spanish which in turn was a loan word from N'ahuatl, I really don't think that it is possible to ban new foreign words in any language and why would you want to try.