How do you balance new ideas, without overly polluting a language?

My native tongue is English, and I think we've embraced our newer diverse words. I also know German, and touches of other tongues.





Some words enter unchanged, or respelled, ie computer in German is der Computer, or der Komputer.





I know French is very defensive, and even invents new words that appear French. E-mail= courriel. This appears overly protective to me.





So where do we balance flexibility with control in regard to language?|||the words are borrow the way they exist... so this process can't be prevented or influenced|||ALWAYS THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK.|||Don''t worry about balance. Kill their language like they kill ours.|||Benjamin, that is a thoughtful question. American English, like America, is a melting pot. Americans will say, "That's a good word!" and happily use it. One of the characteristics of Americans is that we keep looking for a better way of doing something, and we will do what works. We do tend to simplify words so that spellings follow the same format, as with transposing the British English -re to -er. I was going to say that we don't make the national origin of a word off limits as the French do, but we did do this during World War II with German names and terms, and we did much worse to the Japanese at that time than just dislike their words.