The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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".
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.
The latest change they made was introducing the capital ẞ.
You also got the name wrong. It's "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung" (Council for German Orthography) and that is exactly what they do.
They standardize on the orthography. Nothing more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_f%C3%BCr_deutsche_Rechtsch...
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.
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.
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.
Or "Aural" and "Oral"
Or Ox > Oxen, Fox > Foxes
The question is: is anything planned?
People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet.
Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'.
For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.
For example, the AF is oblivious to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan (unless a word there ends hitting common usage)
> 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
This communication, from 2001, on the future of the French language for example http://www.academie-francaise.fr/lavenir-de-la-langue-franca... talks at length about verlan. Just to translate a small excerpt:
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.
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.
"Of course, I'm glad I'm not having to learn it as a second language."
As I said, I agree with the sentiment :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
gah, makes my blood boil
Language is a human cultural phenomenon, it’s not math or programming. Who are you to say whether it’s right or wrong?
There is a certain variety of English that a certain social class of people have decided is “standard”, but why does that make it objectively correct?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...
See also: “Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”
'Canceling'? That looks like a spelling mistake :-)
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
It’s just an english habit of bashing an idiotic gallicism, just like we find their queen concept surreal and idiotic ahah
I'm not sure what it's about. Maybe a holdover from French being the language of the English aristocracy during the middle ages?
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.
I am not a historian and I'm quite happy to be corrected, but I'm suggesting these as factors.
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.
[1] https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/our-story/creating-dictio...
> 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.
Lucky you, we do not have an academie anglaise...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 :-)
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.
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.
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...
That makes little sense. Anyway, I'm going to go and synergise my Kim Kardashians.
Meanwhile if you want a masters study Dutch language at a Dutch university it is entirely taught in English...
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.
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."
In French, 'numerique' generally means 'digital' and 'digital' only means related to fingers (e.g. fingerprint is 'empreinte digitale').
I am in favor of using digital in french (we learn to count with fingers after all).
"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.
Using courriel was somewhat funny and snobbish but people used them to be fun and snobbish, not because the law of the academy mattered to them.
I think we care about grammar a lot more than english vocabulary, and it’s been fading quite a lot the last few centuries anyway.
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.
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.
This post on /r/AskHistorians was incredibly enlightening to me and has completely turned around many of my earlier feelings about the Académie: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7u8oyk/how_t...
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.""
I personally did not take it that way. I'm glad that you took my post in the self-effacing way it was meant.
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
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).
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.
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.
He was from île de paris; your mileage may vary.
"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.
There is no "île de Paris" in France.
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...
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.
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".
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?
> 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:
https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...
Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages:
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).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur
Edit: ... 3 people replied at the same time, whatever.
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).
"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.”"
https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2015/the-etymology-of-the...
"yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur"
It isn't "elegant" if the public is "far more likely" to do it a different way.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Grammatical accord overrides physical gender for pronoun choice in French.
Then the existence of binary people is a political movement, too.
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.
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.
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 use all of those other than baxter! Seems only polite; I'd be offended were I an actress and others called me an actor.
And there's not much Gaulish influence in French, here is the full (and small) list of words originating from Gaulish: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mots_en_fran%C...
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).
So racism is OK?
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschrei...
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.
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.
To be honest that point is moot, they have words for the common terms, and if it's too esoteric it will be either used as-is or adapted.
The standardization has an importance only where the formal version is "needed" (but it's not like no one can use a foreign word if it's needed)
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?
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.