Talk:siyentista

Etymology

@Mar vin kaiser Looking from the KWF's Manwal, this should be considered a coinage using Spanish roots, this one perhaps created out from siyentipiko, with -ipiko replaced by -ista.-TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 01:08, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

@TagaSanPedroAko: I see what you mean, on p. 21. This is the first time for me seeing this. Let me explain first my take on this, and my proposed course of action. What Almario is doing here is trying to differentiate a conscious coinage by academics and an unconscious derivation by people. However, I think Almario doesn't provide any evidence at all that this is a conscious coinage. He merely asserts it here. I can think of a possible reason why Almario might think it's a conscious coinage, because maybe the first instances of its usage is from academics, and maybe he thinks that academics won't have limited knowledge of Spanish or Tagalog/Filipino, but that's exactly what most Filipino academics are, I would argue, even during the 50's and 60's, English-educated, almost no knowledge of Spanish. That's precisely an environment where you would expect a pseudo-Hispanism to form. And I don't understand why Almario chose to ignore the high similarity between the words "scientist" and "siyentista", and "psychologist" and "sikolohista". Even if it's true that this is a conscious coinage, I think Almario would agree that it's impossible the academics who coined it weren't affected by their English proficiency, having their coinage affected by the knowledge of the English words "scientist" and "psychologist". But, sadly, Almario is wrong. Actually, more pseudo-Hispanisms exist, words like "biyolohista", "soolohista", "sosyolohista", "heolohista", and many more, if you search the literature. It seems like Almario simply tried to invent a reason for academics writing that way (that's what we call a folk etymology, by the way), when the most likely scenario is that the English-educated academics after World War II had poor knowledge of Spanish, and simply made the English words they know sound Spanish. Now, what's a course of action, possible? We can note that in the Etymology section that Almario suggested this etymology, but the existence of words like "biyolohista", "soolohista", "sosyolohista", "heolohista" makes it more likely to be a pseudo-Hispanism. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 04:53, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

@TagaSanPedroAko: To add, the literature also gives us words like "antropolohista", "ekolohista", "heograpista". --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 04:58, 5 March 2022 (UTC)