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.
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.
Then the existence of binary people is a political movement, too.