Comment by zapzupnz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zapzupnz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Actually, Michel Serres (an immortal/academician) wrote something on this subject one year ago : http://www.academie-francaise.fr/la-bataille-ideologique.

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:

https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...

Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French?

Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer

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. :-)

But doesn’t this directly follow the latin computare?

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.

> or did they?

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.

> 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).

"computer" is also from Latin "computare"

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.”"

https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2015/the-etymology-of-the...

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.

But according to the OP following Latin increases surprise. Hence my question.

"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.

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.

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.

FWIW, doctoresse is in the French dictionary.

> 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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com