One of the books I read when I was doing my teaching diploma was Jean Aitchison’s Language Change: Progress or Decay? While Linguistic conservatives tend to decry any borrowing, I tend to sympathise with them only when there already exists a word in the home language. However, some of the “native” words are often made-up abortions. Is it any surprise that αντισφαίριση, καλαθοσφαίριση and πετοσφαίριση lost out to τένις, μπάσκετ and βόλεϊ respectively? I cannot remember the exact reason or time, but for a while ‘fatwa’ appeared in Greek media. I cannot remember if it was written in the Latin alphabet or transliterated, but it irked me that supposedly educated people in the media did not seem to know that Greek already had a word, albeit itself a borrowing: φετφάς.
Being in the company of young people gives you an inkling into what’s going on linguistically, so I can now give my reading public (all nine of you) another borrowing that has entered the language, νέρντουλας, which obviously means nerd. To be honest, I quite like the fact that Greek youth has Hellenized the word. It’s much more euphonic than the clumsy νερντ.
Going back to Jean Aitchison, if I remember correctly, she accepted language change as inevitable. For me, the issue is simple. It’s the battle of the syllables; why use a 5- or 6-syllable word when you can use two or three? To use another example, in French “fin de la semaine” suffered the same fate as πετοσφαίριση.