As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regional variation in words even in metropolitan France, but if you take into account oversea territories like french polynesia, Guyana or Mayotte it gets even more complicated. So yes, convenient english words that are widely used by french people on a day-to-day basis are not added right away in the dictionary and in fact the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for them that are coherent with the etymology of the french language, but it doesn't prevent french people from using them.
So I get that the immortals don't represent the french society and the never have. But they do not really have any kind of political impact on the country, the are just the bookkeepers of the français.
I think English speakers just find it a bit strange because our own language is such a mess. In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words (maybe due to a deliberate political act by Noah Webster? not sure), and there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point, so we can't even imagine an official body that does this. Perhaps that's why some people seem to interpret it as "authoritarian". But in fact many other languages DO have a body like this, and I think it makes perfect sense. I'm not sure if any others have fancy swords and 17th century suits though...
> there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point
Well, the French language isn't really standardised internationally either, as many French-speaking countries have their own equivalent to the Académie.
The Office québécois de la langue française in Québec is the most active and influential one (as an example, their proposed word "courriel" for replacing "email" is the most common variant, even in France) and Belgium also has a Conseil de la langue française. Switzerland also has a Délégation à la langue française which is much less active, and the equivalents in Africa are mostly anecdotal for now though.
"In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words"
Yes the US seemed to go with Webster, while the rest of the anglosphere went with Johnson. Not quite as simple as that, as there were a few different waves of reform.
Just yesterday, I ran into trouble while searching for noise cancelling headphones because the site where I was searching had it spelled “canceling” for some of the products and the search wasn’t fuzzy enough to show both.
See also: “Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”
> Just yesterday, I ran into trouble while searching for noise cancelling headphones because the site where I was searching had it spelled “canceling” for some of the products and the search wasn’t fuzzy enough to show both.
'Canceling'? That looks like a spelling mistake :-)
The pseudo-official documentarians of the English language are the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). They don't prescribe or authorize English language use but generally accept new words and uses into the lexicon ... [1] briefly discusses their process.
Many native English speakers have a certain obsession with France and the French language that doesn't happen with other counties and their languages. It's really strange. For example, in the US, speaking French is considered a particular accomplishment and a sign of good breeding, much more so than with any other second language.
I'm not sure what it's about. Maybe a holdover from French being the language of the English aristocracy during the middle ages?
I think there are many reasons, including yours definitely true at least in the cultural unconscious in England. Other possibly more important reasons for Americans - whose white populations come from a wider cultural European base - includes the pre-eminence of French culture in the C17-C18th and through the C19th. Furniture, arts, music, food, wines and all sorts of things were particularly refined there, from before and especially during the courts of King Louis at Versailles through tothe golden decade in the late 19th century in Paris. Everybody who had aspirations to be cultured would speak French: it was the lingua franca after all! It was the language of diplomacy. Aristocratic Russians spoke French rather than Russian. I suspect in the Germanic states that was also this looking towards a rich and prosperous France as well, to the extent of invading it once they gaind some sort of cohesion and became a Prussian / German state in the late C19th. And remember that more white Americans come from Germanic stock than English stock, which is very readily observable in surnames and physiognomy.
I am not a historian and I'm quite happy to be corrected, but I'm suggesting these as factors.
> For example, in the US, speaking French is considered a particular accomplishment and a sign of good breeding, much more so than with any other second language.
As an American, my impression is that French is just considered more elegant and sophisticated than other foreign languages. I wouldn't consider it anymore difficult than another language, and quite a bit easier than some (e.g. Chinese).
...But I'm not a WASP, and if anyone has opinions similar to what you describe, my bet is they'd be WASPs.
It seems Romance Language academies love to squabble and love their "exclusive club". Though to be honest I haven't heard of a similar push to exclude people in other Academies
And I think that the Dutch is at least standardized in the same way for Belgium and the Netherlands. (Het groene boekje, regarding spelling, is definitely shared).
I can imagine a bunch of old people sitting in a room complaining about all the new words the young kids are using and how they are destroying the language.
The problem I think most of us have with the Académie Française is the disconnect between their decisions and the reality of the french language. Not that they are completely against change, but that they are regularly missing the point when they actually make changes.
An example is about CD-ROM. They proposed to rewrite it "cédérom". Basically turning an acronym into a completely made up word. It is ridiculous in many ways. CD-ROM is already a stupid word: both audio CDs and CD-ROMs are read only memory, so why keep that? We already had a word for audio CDs that was in common use: "disque compact", which is perfectly acceptable french, why not build on that? We translated many computer-related words in the past with great success: disquette (floppy disk), mémoire vive (RAM), logiciel (software), etc...
Sometimes, a new french translation appears that really sound good. Courriel is one of them: it sounds good and it is definitely french (from courrier (mail) and éléctronique (electronic)). And guess what... it comes from Quebec, like many other good proposals.
Interesting... when I asked a few years ago, I was told by a French guy that nobody uses courriel in real life and that I'd sound better if I used 'mail' (in french pronunciation).
He is right. We all use "mail". And it always means email.
"Courriel", or its complete form "courrier éléctronique" is more common in formal, written conversation.
I think the translation came up too late. An early french proposal was to use the "mél" abbreviation which is terrible and never took off... It is still preferred by the Académie Française, another case of being completely off.
BTW, it is "Île de France", the region where Paris is ;) But the situation is the same for all of continental France. I don't know about the overseas and other French-speaking countries.
It appears wasteful. Being deadlocked, spending multiples of $100k on ceremonies. The group should be promoting the language and getting people excited about it's use. Instead, French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel' because an ineffectual body refused to admit an Englishism into the language. This holds the language back. Languages are fluid, living breathing things and that aspect should be promoted.
> French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email'
Dunno, when I'm using email, or any other English word part of our developper vocabulary, like build or bug, I don't feel guilty, I'm just using the words that are used by the rest of my (all-French) team.
And when I'm cooking, I use French terms to describe what I want. It just makes sense this way because the terms are just more specific than if they were translated, i.e., brunoise, mirepoix, chiffonade, etc.
Well, I did work in a professional kitchen for about four years.
But cooking shows, YouTube videos, and basic cookbooks in America use those terms. I found definitions for mirepoix and chiffonade in Better Homes & Gardening cookbook, which is as white-bread American as it comes (along with many, many other French words).
My point was that the culture that produces an innovation ends up defining the terminology because it's easier to use the single term the innovators came up with in their language rather than using long, translated definition for the term. "Bug" instead of "issue when trying to perform a specific action" is not unlike "saute" instead of "fry at high heat stirring or shaking the pan vigorously." I'm not going to say, "jump the onions up."
> French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel'
"Courriel" is the word proposed by the Québec institution (OQLF). It is used in France as well, but not as much as "email", which nobody feels guilty about.
Courriel is also a newly coined word, and an elegant one as well, so it fits right into your "languages are fluid, living breathing things" remark.
My experience here in France has been folks simply use "mail" when speaking of emails, rather than "email" or "courriel". I've run across "courriel" a handful of times in four years, and almost never heard French friends use the word "email". Personally, I like "courriel" as a word, but given that "mail" is the most used word in my francophone circles for email, I tend to say "mail" like my friends and colleagues do.
Yes, in contrast to "manual" (related to the hand), but in regular usage most people think of digital as a reference to non-analog technologies, not a reference to their fingers.
Unfortunately, we don't have a good equivalent to digital in french: numérique means "relative to numbers (nombres)", digital means "relative to digits (chiffres)".
I am in favor of using digital in french (we learn to count with fingers after all).
Due to my French language failings I'm much detached from this debate (and more generally francosphere) - I'm more familiar with Spanish and Portuguese languages and their own regulatory pressures.
Being a non-native who moved to live in an English speaking country and then a Spanish speaking one (and reading in all 3 languages) I have to say I never stumbled onto Appeal to Authority (of regulatory bodies and or dogmatic dictionaries) in Anglosphere as I have when debating in Spanish and Portuguese (and I guess from this post, French)... Maybe this says more about the people I hang around with rather than cultural specificities of Romance people, but I can certainly feel the power wielded by these Regulatory bodies.
I think what you're seeing is partially due to the misperception that you described, and partially due to the relatively (and, yeah, variably) anti-authoritarian nature of anglo-saxon culture.
Also, I'm not sure the idea of trying to keep loanwords out of one's language makes much sense to someone who grows up speaking a language composed almost entirely of loanwords. So that might be why you see so much fixation on that aspect of the Académie.
I think it might have something to do with their role of "protecting France from “brainless Globish” and the “deadly snobbery of Anglo-American,” as a member spat out in a speech last month"
Yeah it bothers a lot of french that “globish” is english-based. I bet you my arm that if the world tried to communicate poorly in french, we would bask in the glory of our beautiful international language :D
My fellow countrymen who think globish is a dumbed down version of english have a point, but that it gave rise to millions able to read english litterature somewhat they cannot deny.
> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people
> the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for [convenient English words] that are coherent with the etymology of the french language
Don't these two sentences you wrote contradict each other? From what I gather, you ARE saying that the French language IS dictated by the Académie, even though you initially wrote the contrary. I'm a little confused.
???? There is a huge gap between trying to influence the French language, and dictating it (forcing to use it). The Francophones at the end of the day decide what they use, they live as a free society.
I welcome people trying to creatively influence a language, whether they are normal people, cool teenagers, rappers and rock stars, Quebecois guardians of the French language, or people at the Academie Francaise.
For all words the equivalent of computer - "ordinateur" was invented by académie française from a sollicitation of IBM and it stuck. Everyone uses this word now.
Meanwhile the rest of the world use a word that refers to computation, and french has even a "computationnel" word because "ordinateur" doesn't make much sense. A computer is not something that gives holy orders.
> A computer is not something that gives holy orders.
Unless it's running HolyC and TempleOS, of course! Rust and RedoxOS may be the best human-made solutions, but a computer with TempleOS is the only true "ordinateur", because it directly communes with G-d.
Well maybe. Maybe someone with a stronger literary background than me could make the argument that providing traductions of english words is just a plus to ensure the completion of the french language and not really an important part of the language evolution. But I just wanted to explain that french people do not feel like the way they speak and write is dictated by the academie.And surely their appreciation of the french language has very little to do with the yellow vests protests.
The effort of the Academy to create new words top-down (partly) inspired us to make a parodic website: https://bitoduc.fr/
I think french rappers (which are amazing imho) create more words successfully because they have a mechanics for popularizing the new words. They can have a word adopted with one song.
My problem with the Academy is rather simple, if an entire profession use "deadlock" successfully, why complicate things creating a new word like "interblocage"? For technical fields this may brings confusion.
The word "interblocage" has been used for at least a century in mechanics though. It's just a very straightforward word that anyone could come up with to describe such a situation, and one that is immediately understandable to a French speaker. I'm pretty sure the confusion would come from using "deadlock" to someone who knows "interblocage", rather than the contrary.
I glanced at your list, and thought this one in particular was brilliant:
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) <--> SAVON (Simple Accès Vers Objets Nuageux)
> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary.
I think the weird thing about it is that it is so unnecessary. Dictionary publishers have their opinions, the public has their own, state-run schools have their own still.
The proper use of a language flows from the desire of the speaker or writer to be understood. If deferring to the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary serves that purpose for you, that's great, but the institution is not what legitimizes that decision.
Furthermore, in Québec, L'Office québécois de la langue française has real institutional power, and has seriously oppressed people and damaged their lives in service their arbitrary protectionist ideology; harassing small business owners to strike English loan words from their signs, insisting that well-accepted signage be changed to suit them (stop signs with STOP on them are ubiquitous, even in many French speaking places, but in Québec they insist on making the signs also have ARRÊT, or only have ARRÊT on them).
And self proclaimed bookkeepers at that. As you said nobody cares and they are always reactive anyway. They cannot invent words or they’ll be ridiculed, so they simply either accept what random dudes like you and me use everyday or they latinise some english word to try to pretend they did something... then must give up under the ridicule caused by the likes of imèle and mot-dièse :D
To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that the continued existence of the body seems pointless.
As an Anglophone, there's a certain sense of superiority we feel in that we're basically able to go pretty much anywhere and find somebody who speaks passable English and we don't have an equivalent body. Whenever the Académie comes up in the Anglosphere, it's in the context of an attempt to prevent an English word or phrase from officially entering the language, even though (and this is the attitude) "any stupid person can see that English won out and why not just let the loan-words in".
So that's my knee-jerk attitude, being entirely honest.
However, there's a deep rooted insecurity that's built into many English speakers. The paradox and complexity in the attitude is that English is basically a language of mostly loan words. And due to history, we inherited various modes of the language that represent various social class structures...one of the oldest was the split between the Germanic roots of English and the French (Norman) roots of English in the 11th century. To this day, the Latin or French root words are considered "superior" to the Germanic or Old-English equivalents. In some cases, the Germanic roots are considered "forbidden" while the upper-mode equivalents are considered okay to say in perfectly polite conversation. For example, "fuck" and "fornicate". This insecurity, and the modern global dominance of English (which happily uses "lingua franca" to describe itself) means internet posts about the Académie are bound to make fun of it.
But I think it also stems from not understanding in any way the historic reasons such a body was formed, maintained, and then reinstated when it was abolished during the revolution. It's virtually incomprehensible to the modern Anglophone to understand that France in the 17th century had such a diverse linguistic landscape that travel from one village to another meant needing a translator.
That thread is full of incredible information that I was almost entirely ignorant of and as I read the various follow ups, especially the ones about Napoleon, I realized how important a unified language was for military and economic matters.
From the link "As late as 1863, "a quarter of all army recruits were said to speak 'patois' and nothing else," Robb writes.
This often didn't last long. There are many reports of soldiers learning French while in military service, because of the necessity of communication and orders.
But "men returning from the army quickly reverted to their native tongue. A man who came home to Cellefrouin near Angoulême in 1850 after seven years in the army and thirty years in America was speaking the patois of his boyhood again within a few days."
This wasn't a universal case, however. McPhee notes the young men of Mazières who came back home from military service in the 1870s "determined, as a sign of their worldliness, no longer to speak patois" (220).
As late as 1914, "there are several reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades in the First World War because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.""
Thank you for your honest and well argumented response. Just to be clear, my intention defending the Academie was not to go full nationalism and pretend that thanks to this god-like institution our language is the best in the world and as bearer of this language we, the french people, really are superior to everyone else. This is far from true.
However I felt like this article was an unjust attack to an institution considered as quite harmless here in France. To be fair, I think a lot of people agree that it is an institution from another time, and a very few people think that it's the most useful. However I think people still have a tender liking for it and what it represents. And that is part of the french identity. As paradoxical as it may seem, being a frenchman is dreaming of being the next Marat or Jean Jaures while being a sucker for the symbols of authority. What this article calls pomp we call it "panache", and most people like this folklore. However I don't personally think that this make the french language any better that the english language or any other language. We just like our language because, as many things in France, it is charged with our history.
That last anecdote gave us the verb baragouiner (which means speaking unintelligibly) that came from Bara and Gwinn which respectively means bread and wine.
The Bretons, unable to speak French, were only communicating in their own language and sometimes thought as being German. Terrible combo on the Eastern Front
Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? Especially when they talk in such pompous way:
"Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language.
I find the sound of the French language absolutely beautiful, including the when you use English words, and I am an admirer of your country's culture. Unlike many here on HN, I also like your version of regulated capitalism. I think the average French person has much better quality of life than the average American. But I really don't see the point in this Académie Française. For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around :-)
> "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language.
I would not judge based on a single phrase, because I can imagine a very different minds which can produce it. He can be a person who likes to speak, who tries to get a maximum from the language he speaks, who knows language and loves it. Or maybe he just an impositor, consciously or unconsciously. He can love old language and hate any attempts to change it, or he can be happy with some changes while rejecting others.
At last, he can just a few minute ago had a conversation with someone else, who spoke like that and it was good, and under impression of that he accidently did the same. It happens sometimes. So this phrase could be produced not by a special mind, but by a special state of mind and had nothing to do with personality traits.
>Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary?
No.
>"Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest"
Better that, than the mix of pop culture references and business weasel words, the English have become.
I don't think, by your comment, that you understand the sentiments of continental Europeans in general, and the French in particular.
>For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around
A republic is its traditions. Else it's just a market contract.
Lived in one, ethnic origins from another, studied in a third, have visited repeatedly over 10 of them, speak 3 of their languages (4 with mine, tho to be frank my French are read-only, as my accent has always been quite bad even in my native language), and am well-read in 4 of Western European countries' literature and philosophical writings. Have also worked for one pan-European organization.
That said, I'm probably not in line with the "modern" americanized Europeans, so there's that. Just with the good fashioned European culture. I don't find frilly language (like the example) offensive for example...
> As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary.
But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist, and reifying that classism and racism into a body composed of rich old White people just rubs everyone's noses in it.
It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".
>But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist
It's only deemed so by a classist and racist prejudice (that judges other cultures by its own values and metrics to boot).
There's nothing "high class" about caring for language. People of all classes can and do root for the French language and Académie's role with it (and vice versa).
The idea that "poor people couldn't possibly agree with high standards of language" -- as if poor implies some kind of inferior intellect, or less concern with such things as use of language, arts, etc, is classist itself.
>It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".
They don't want "amorphous entities" in them here parts. They believe in people, scholars and artists with proven track record that are deemed worthy to be guards of the language and art (which also tends to make them "old", which in matters of experience is prudent. They don't want people eager to bring the "next hot thing" and "fad du jour" in, but people that have seen things, and are blasé about empty novelties).
Also, France has historically been a predominantly "white" nation, as were the people who shaped the language in the first place, so by representation it makes sense most of Académie to be white (it includes people of Chinese, Haitian, etc ethnical origins too). Despite that, France has a much better track record for how it treats its blacks, to have the finger pointed at them by Americans.
Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not. It's just that the french language is kind of an international standard and some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world. But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french.
> Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not
The Academie have done something quite similar. Infamously, they argued against protection of regional French languages.
And I agree that they’re not arbitrary but only because they have always been dead set against imported words. They have a conservatism that has become more and more anachronistic.
I can’t say I have an issue with them, because they’re entirely ignorable, but there’s a risk that they’re seen as pathetic and that that view reflects poorly on France.
Yes I agree with you that it's quite a conservative institution, and yes if I remember well it was basically created to promote the use of french over the regional dialects. But I didn't want foreign readers (especially americans and our friends across La Manche since they have no such institution) to think that the Academie was weighing on the french everyday life.
> some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world
Actually, no. Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either?
> But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french.
French differs strongly from other languages in how current developments are integrated, think ordinateur, portable and not having a word for uploading stuff. They might be guided by some principle, but it leads French being an artificial and very strange language that's hard to learn and differs more than necessary, from English especially.
This list doesn't say what scope those regulators have.
I only know the situation for German and there the "Council for German Orthography" only regulates orthography not language and word usage, so take this list with a grain of salt.
> Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either?
Among this list, only English doesn't have an institution.
All three other languages (Spanish, German and Chinese) have multiple institutions, basically one per country that speaks the language, just like French.
The German 'Duden' is comparable in its role to Webster/Johnson. A private dictionary publisher who somehow managed to be regarded as the standard for a language.
That's the Larousse for French, or the competing Robert. Or the Littré if you're a writer with pedant and traditionalist tendencies.
The Académie is not the main reference for orthography (and its dictionary is incomplete) or for the general rules of the French language, its goal is to steer the language towards consistency, and recognize whatever new usage emerges.
German does not have such an institution - I am German and that's just a fact.
Spanish might have such an institution, but it evidently does not work - Mexican Spanish != Spanish Spanish != .... Note that I did not say it does not exist, I said there is no "powerful centralized" instance deciding this. I stand to this judgement, also for Spanish.
The extent of the actual influence wielded by the academie francaise seems to me pretty unique.
I think you are overestimating the actual influence of the Académie then, because it has little. The new words they propose are seldom adopted, and are eventually dropped as they only formalize actual usage. They're not creating a parallel language. The education system is also governed by a different language institution.
And just like Spanish, French is governed by different entities in different countries. The French and Québec councils are the most influent ones - and France French and Québec French are also the most divergent versions.
The French language is only "powerfully centralized" within each French-speaking country. And even then, only among a few countries.
I would say it is actually less centralized than the German language, which has a single institution that oversees orthography in ALL the German-speaking world. The French language has nothing like that.
There is the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung[1] which oversees German orthography. The German orthography reform of 1996 was overseen by it's predecessor organization, the Internationale Arbeitskreis für Rechtschreibreform.
An international orthography reform like that would be pretty much unthinkable for the English language.
At this point you are attributing the French academy superhuman powers, the Académie Française have of course exactly the same influence as the RAE: they make the definitive dictionary and then despair a bit about all the shit words they will have to include in the next version.
> Spanish might have such an institution, but it evidently does not work - Mexican Spanish != Spanish Spanish
I believe French has this problem as well. I don't speak the language but I don't think the Quebecois and "mainland" French agree on the language or care for each others' variants.
Spanish has the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, which is exactly like the French Académie. Many latin-American countries have an equivalent, and they coordinate with the Spanish one.
The idea is to sit back and make choices that make sense when there is a conflict or that are more aligned with the rest if the language, and avoid messes like "biweekly".
Who needs to plan a language? I love the mess that is English, there's so much history encoded in it - like how our words for common farm animals are Anglo-Saxon but the words for their meat are French, which is a snapshot of England being invaded by a French speaking Norman aristocracy who ate what the Anglo-Saxon peasants raised.
I love the different dialects that are developing of it. I particularly love my country's variant, enriched with Maori. "Kia ora bro" as a greeting captures our spirit nicely.
I love the fact that English "pursues other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary". It's a glorious organic mess. Much like humanity.
Of course, I'm glad I'm not having to learn it as a second language.
> Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse[3] and a doubly "verlanised" version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu
A language that stays still is a dying language. Ours is enriching in proportions never seen before. What the 21th century will bring us is verlan. It would be useless to fight it, as oral language has always preceded written language.
I think the Académie is much more competent than many people here think it is.
Ahah yes, verlan is quite common for certain words for certain people. But nobody thinks it is legit french. It's like using terms like "doggo", "boi" or "nite" in english.
English speakers themselves are quite capable of sorting this kind of thing out for themselves without waiting for the deliberations of the appointed whose decisions they'll probably ignore anyway - as do the French, one gathers. Life and English are both messy but we muddle through.
> As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning.
Huh I never noticed this peculiarity of English before. "I am an Italian/Australian/Canadian" - fine. "I am an English/French/Swedish" - hell no. Traditionally you'd say Frenchman, nowadays you'd avoid the gender and use
"I am French" directly as an adjective.
Anyone know why -an words can be used as a noun and -sh words can't?
-an words are initially nouns that have come to be used as adjectives, while -ish words are only adjectives.
The English language readily makes adjectives from nouns, but not the other way round. Nominalized adjectives are used for collective groups at most (which is why you can say "the French") but rarely become regular nouns.
If you see biweekly somewhere, it is impossible to know what it means without more explanations, even context isn't enough. This has been like this for years and nobody's even tried to fix it.
What is the point of having such confusion?
Also, why having dictionaries at all? And who decides which one is right?
Why not have a body made up of experts who make that decisions once and for all when natural evolution leads to bad results?
Exactly the opposite of why you think we have them, apparently. In English-speaking countries, dictionaries document existing usage, they don’t try to influence it. No modern dictionary has any opinion on what usage is “correct”, and you can find a lot of extremely non-standard things in the most prestigious dictionaries.
I don't know if the Academie is racist, but one of the most famous immortals is Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and politician, elected in 1983. Only 20 years after the end of the segregation in the US.
You know what rubs MY nose? When people misuse language and then treat any correction as something snobby.
Typical argument from someone who just wrote "could of", or mixed you're with your:
"Oh but language is to communicate, and you understood what I'm saying so it worked so stop being snobby about it"
It's so self evident that I don't know where to begin...
Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist.
I'm sure that many "could of"s have been made official over the eons in all languages,
(thanks to general ignorance/incompetence/refusal to learn) but that doesn't mean we should respect
"couldofers" (see? I made up a word, I'm not that rigid) as if they're the next Shakespeare...
Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere?
I draw it at "you're/your/couldof" etc and it infuriates me because, not only these people offload a significant part of the
work of communication to me, but they have the nerve to consider themselves somehow superior.
> Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist.
Those rules are discovered, not handed down from authorities, and the rules you were taught in school are largely not the real rules English speakers abide by. The real rules are learned the way every native language is learned: Through imitation and conversation with other native speakers, the caretakers and the peers.
> Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere?
First, we're talking about language, not orthography. If you want to see some bizarre orthography, read Chaucer. Or Shakespeare. Or Lewis and Clark, who managed to spell "mosquito" multiple ways on the same page, in full view of each other.
Second, native speakers do make mistakes, but if a "mistake" is persistent enough to bother you, well, it probably isn't a mistake, but a dialectical feature, and saying a dialect is wrong or inferior is contrary to the science of linguistics. You wouldn't claim to have a new rule for electrons and then rant about how the electrons refuse to follow it because they're uncultured and uneducated.
And saying a dialect is "wrong" is very often a proxy for saying some people are too poor or the wrong color to "speak right" in the mind of the complainer. Witness the idiocy spewed about African-American Vernacular English, commonly called "Ebonics" by the people who try to mark it as uneducated.
Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer.
I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality.
I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity.
As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.
The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject.
People make up languages all the time. You can write your own rules to make the above grammar be instructions on getting to my village. You could write a different set of rules that make it an order to make my roast duck for dinner. (you can have fun coming up with even more bizarre things that it could mean under some rule system)
> The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject.
By this standard, using "their", "there", and "they're" or "your" and "you're" completely randomly is fine -- it's almost impossible for it to cause misunderstanding.
In fact this is false. Even though in verbal speech they are the same, in written they are different. I have known people who didn't understand something written because the wrong word was written, once someone read it out loud they understood it.
Of course there is no reason the above people couldn't get used to one spelling if they changed the rules. We just need to have universal agreement to change the rules. (I have no clue how you would do that)
It’s very anglo-american to take this so seriously. For us it’s a club of old dudes who like to bask in past glories and write one of many dictionaries, that nobody reads anyway.
Everyone understands french evolves with usage and must take some influence abroad, and nobody ever refused a word because a 90yo grandpa was slow to add it to their unpublished dictionary...
The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
It’s interesting they’re taking the German route rather than the English route which is to erode most feminine gendered trade words: waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter, etc. likewise the male equivalent have become neutral so actor, governor, baker, waiter, etc don’t only apply to men.
I wonder if the Académie is insisting on following correct etymology. A lot of people are saying 'docteure' as a feminised form of 'docteur'; yet, if you go back to the Latin 'doctor', derived from 'doceo' ("I teach"), and change masculine agent noun suffix '-or' for the feminine agent noun suffix '-trix', then the derived French form should be 'doctresse' (edit: apparently a word 'doctoresse' exists); yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur', which would surely offend the sensibilities of the Académie.
On the one hand, the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum, but the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) in Quebec often has its own, separate ideas about how the French language should evolve, and there could be two feminised terms for the same thing, differing based on the region.
Not to mention the other Francophone regions and nations whose curricula aren't tied to the French or Québécois ones.
I have tried to translate the relevant paragraph (the 5th) below :
"I will finish with the words ending with “-eur”. Should we say “auteure” or “autrice” or “auteuse”, etc. ? The question doesn’t stand, since the words ending with “-eur” are statistically divided in two partsm, one feminine, and the other masculine: “la douceur” [“the sweetness”] and “le malheur” [“the misfortune”], “l’horreur” [“the horror”] and “l’honneur” [“the honor”]. Thus, “Madame Jacqueline Unetelle, auteur de ce livre” can be said without malice. This simplicity can be seen in the following example: since the growing feminization of the medical profession the “doctoresse” term tend to disappear. “Madame Unetelle, docteur généraliste” si getting more and more common. Which is normal for a word ending by “-eur”. The arbitrary decision to distinguish, amongst those words, the names of the roles from all of the others, shows a subtle hypocrisy, as it allow to impose the imperium which was insufferable before."
This isn't snark, I'm honestly trying to understand: Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century? Didn't they branch like 1,500 years ago?
When the French created a new word for, I dunno, "computer" or whatever, they didn't go back to Latin roots to figure out what it should be...or did they?
I don’t know French, but according to Wiktionary the main French word for “computer” is “ordinateur”, which is:
> From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”).
> In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter).
The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”.
Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur:
To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)
> Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century?
Scholars have always gone back to Latin to influence modern language. Most technological, scientific, and plenty of engineering terms, for instance, derive either from Latin or Greek.
Modern French didn't 'branch' from Latin so much as the Latin dialects in the areas that have since become modern France evolved from Latin into what it has since become. Therefore, going back to classical and vulgar Latin tells us a lot about how the language has evolved, what features still provide valuable meaning, allowing people to guess what a word means based on their existing base knowledge of the language.
Doubly so considering the French curriculum remains relatively old-fashioned compared to the Anglophone world, such that explicitly teaching grammatical concepts at a very young age has not yet gone out of fashion in France and other Francophone regions and nations), so that the general population has a firmer understanding of the derivation of terms, the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and so on.
Not only that, it allows the modern French language to maintain a sense of consistency by going back to the roots and origins of words in order to determine how best to coin new words without causing needless difficulty, having to create exceptions where unnecessary. Hello, English language, especially in the past hundred or so years with 'electrocution' where the most important part of one of its components, 'execution', is entirely missing (such that it's not clear just from looking at 'electrocution' that being killed, 'executed', is a key part of the word).
I think one of the reasons is elegance. As in coding, you try to minimise special cases, so whenever you need to introduce a new word you go back to the roots of the language and try to derive it from what's already there. In this way the chosen word is more integrated in the language (has more connections with other existing words), its pronunciation is more predictable, and its derivation follows the same rules as the majority of the other words. Thus minimising entropy and surprise.
Good point. I guess that, as always, what counts as a "surprise" depends on your overall knowledge of the system. (For example: an eclipse of the moon is a surprise if you don't know astronomy, the absence of an expected one would be a far bigger surprise for those who do). I've found the following declaration from the Academie:
"formes telles que professeure, recteure, sapeuse-pompière, auteure, ingénieure, procureure [..] sont contraires aux règles ordinaires de dérivation et constituent de véritables barbarismes"
So, it feels wrong to them, who know the derivation rules. Probably it feels slightly more obvious to those who don't.
That depends heavily on your idea of elegance. Even if the French say they ignore the Académie Française, the really is that their pronouncements carry a lot of weight since those enter the language through the public education curriculum.
The further the romance languages deviate, the less mutually intelligible they are. I am no etymologist, so I'll leave it to speculation as to whether that is the best choice. But I don't know French or German, and having a Latin vocabulary allows for some understanding, especially if a sentence has English loan words in it to boot.
Computer has a longer history than what you think.
"The first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”"
Yes, they used the Latin word with the closest meaning. It is the same etymology as "order" in English. They come up with a lot of official words for things, but in the streets a lot of them are ignored. Some stick in some regions while brands or borrowed words are used in some other region.
The ironic aspect is that the closer you get to Paris (seat of the a Académie), the more borrowed words are used. In Quebec, even this close to the USA, there isn't all that much borrowed words beside pieces that are directly imported from the US such as automobile parts and tools (because until the 70's, the labels were in English only).
> the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum
Actually, the school curriculum (both public and private) follows the Ministry of Education recommendations which are based on the Conseil supérieur français de la langue française, and which are not necessarily the same as the Académie française. Although the Académie usually approves them, it is purely symbolical.
That’s a good question. Hopefully they choose one or the other and not choose to make up a totally synthetic and nonsense suffix (as when they want to invent new French words so as not to corrupt French with loan words (have they come up with a native word for sushi, by the way?)
French is almost completely impervious to "totally synthetic" suffices or words, almost all new vocabulary is created from Latin (or Greek for the more technical or scientific words) when it's not borrowed from a foreign language. Creating a new suffix from scratch actually sounds like more of an American answer to the "gender problem".
There is also no reason to invent a word to replace "sushi", just as nobody is advocating for a replacement for "fish and chips" or "hamburger".
It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inherently an odd feature.
Whereas, German and French both have a grammatical gender. In German I suppose you could neuter all the professions Whether that's feasible or not I couldn't say; I don't speak German. French doesn't have a neuter gender, though, so eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.
AFAIK, there are no neutered professions in German. So that would be a big change, it's hard to imagine.
I know very little French, but if I understand correctly, because person in French is female (la personne), you could have a sentence mentioning "the persons" (plural) (les personnes?), and then later on using the pronoun "elles" (female version of "they") to refer to them. So a female-coded pronoun would refer to a mixed-gender group of people.
The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)
That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.
Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)
There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders.
Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop having them reflect gender doesn't flow very naturally in the language. "Une boulanger", "un hotesse", "une acteur" etc... All that is very grating to the ear and somewhat un-french sounding. It basically breaks very common patterns in the language that every French speaker consciously or unconsciously integrated as part of learning French.
Compare for instance:
Un boulanger fier (a proud baker, male)
Une boulangère fière (a proud baker, female)
Note that both the adjective "fier" and the noun "boulanger" decline similarly. If you "erode" boulanger to be neutral you end up with:
Un boulanger fier
Une boulanger fière
Suddenly the pattern is broken. Do we erode "fier" and similar adjectives as well to remain consistent? But then of course it has a cascading effect throughout the language.
I'm not saying that this means that it cannot or shouldn't be improved, I dislike the heavy knee-jerk backlash every proposed reform of French grammar gets (no matter how small and obvious it is, like simplifying some ridiculous rules for the accord of the passé composé) but it's definitely a complex topic.
French (and German) is a gendered language: we say «une»/«un» and «la»/«le». And we don't even have a way to opt-out the gender (German does).
In the 18th and 19th centuries, L'Académie Française tried to get rid of the feminine version or many existing names, and promote the idea of the masculine as «gender-neutral». The most (in)famous example is the masculine auteur (the French for “author”) replacing autrice for both sex. But this unification around the male version always felt artificial and somewhat offensive for women, because of the gendered articles.
I think that approach might be politically easier to accept if the plan had been to drop the masculine version for half the nouns, and the feminine one for the other half.
But it's also hard to imagine the members of an old men's club voluntarily deciding that they should henceforth be known as autrices instead of auters. Doubly so 200 years ago.
I never got the hang of this kind of myopic, senseless traditionalism. If Latin didn't let himself be bastardised with the influences of Frankish and Gaulish there wouldn't be any French.
Stop hating on our classy habit vert. French people like having a history, as complex, bloody and sometime shameful it is. We are an old country and we have traditions. The english people have their royal family, the US have their rusty nuclear warheads and we have the institutions de la république.
That’s kind of the nature of conservatism. Some invaders capture the city, force everyone to convert to their religion or be killed, and 500 years later it is our religion, the religion of our ancestors, the one we always had and will never change.
I think the EU will always be a mere bureaucratic administration unless all European citizens speak the same language. I can’t really think of any serious alternative to English, that’s by an order of magnitude the only real common denominator. For that, French, but also Dutch, German, Spanish, etc must all disappear as languages. And we should be ruthless. French only became the language of France because that country got ruthless with regional languages (patois).
France is a white country, so I don't know what's so surprising about having only white people there. The nytimes is trying to apply American standards to everything.
This is an authoritarian project. It attempts to impose authority in an area that operates fine or better without it, by people with no particular claim to authority in the matter beyond membership in their own club. How is France improved by having an official government dictionary? For the authoritarian it seems that the proper role of the state to reduce any form of uncertainty in life, and positive uncertainty is oxymoronic.
Not it really isn't. I think every european country has a similar institution. At least, italians (Accademia della Crusca) and germans (Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung) do. I think, that's because european countries are fusions of smaller regions and kingdoms which had their own language each, and at some point in time it was necessary to have a unique language for the economic development of the country. But for the authoritarian aspect, you do not have any kind of punishment for not following the prescription of the Académie, you can speak french in whatever way you like as long as the people in front of you understand you. I don't get where you get your strong feelings against the Académie from.
The relevant entity for German is [1]. Apparently created after or during the struggle for an official reform of the language in the 90 and early 2000.
No. It would be authoritarian it was done as in Russia. Like bolsheviks came and declared a few letters from an alphabet deprecated and also they rewrote grammar. A few decades later they released a bugfix for their new grammar.
In France seems they have no authority to change anything. They cannot order to a school teachers to teach new grammar, or to writers to stop using some letters or words.
Spain has the "Real Academia Española", guardian of the Spanish language in the world. They seems very related to this guardian of French,they don't accept gender questions and they do an authoritarian imposition of their ideas.
I laugh at this useless institution, but then I realize that many "real" institutions are probably just as useless and anachronistic as this particular one.
The Latin language was destroyed by pompous academicians who refused to allow the language to grow organically. The Academie Francaise has set in motion the destruction of the importance of the french language, because if you don't allow flexibility in your language, eventually people abandon it. Dante's Inferno was i believe one of the first novels done in the vernacular Italian. They can claim they are protecting it, but it will be washed away like a sandcastle because they don't see the forces at work from their little chairs.
They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU. Sorry, but when was the last time anyone cared about computer research in the french language? They are crippling themselves by not adopting some english. The Japanese managed to adopt Elevator (e-re-be-ta), because didn't have the concept before Mr. Otis, so acknowledging inventions external to your country is part of not living on an island.
> They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU
What do you mean? French has a perfectly acceptable word for computer ("ordinateur") and CPU is called CPU in French. Or processeur. Elevator is ascenceur, and I don't see a problem with that?
Latin never died or was destroyed, it was indeed “allowed to grow organically” and the dialects it grew into (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, etc.) are now spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Since you seem to be generalising to Latin languages, I just want to point out that in colloquial Spanish in Mexico (some regions, it is a big country) there are a lot of influences from English.
Spanish is the most spoken Latin language and each region has differences in how they use the language, just like the UK/US/Australia,... in how they use English.
EDIT: btw, my wife uses the word "computadora" for computer.. seems close enough. I think others use Ordenador in Spanish which is close to the French "ordenateur" or something like that.
Always amazed when people with absolutely no knowledge of a subject tend to come out with a final statement. (2 minutes to use google translate and to read the elevator page of Wkipedia just show how clueless you are...).
An even better example Japanese example is ググる ("to google") which managed to make it in the closed class of verbs -- and it's even written in two different character sets!
