Amando de Miguel: “Badly translated English is threatening the structure of the Spanish language”

I tend to concentrate on the Catalanist language nuts because they’re closer to hand, but Madrid has its own share of nationalist loons. For example, Amando de Miguel over at Libertad Digital is given to making unfounded claims about the dangers of English. I showed a while back that there’s no statistical basis for his assertion that

The yoísmo is a genuine lexical epidemic that affects us all. It is evident that we are dealing with yet another influence of imperialistic English.

In his post today he’s at pains not to come over as an Anglophobe:

The worst of this is not that [Anglicisms] come from another culture but that they may alter considerably the structure of the Spanish language.

Unfortunately all of his subsequent examples deal with word swaps, and he doesn’t even attempt to produce an instance of structural alteration. So has Mr de Miguel made some remarkable, unpublished discoveries about language? Does the horror with which he views the replacement of the clumsy tres goles en un partido by the convenient jatrik mean that he is about to overthrow one of the basic tenets of linguistics, that the symbols used in language are arbitrary? Or is he just talking bollocks? (Might he not be better employed concentrating on his principal interest, lexicography, and publishing more of the delightful lists of localisms sent in by readers?)

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