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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

You and I don't have the same level of cooking, I guess; I've never used any of those terms.

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."

Very good point, thank you.

> 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.

I agree with your caracterization of courriel as elegant - and I find "pourriel" (for "spam") even more so.

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.

Honestly nobody younger than 50 feels guilty of using words, be it email, hashtag or bacon. And older people don’t quite understand them anyway.

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.

They should feel very guilty of confusing "numerique" and "digital" all the time.

In French, 'numerique' generally means 'digital' and 'digital' only means related to fingers (e.g. fingerprint is 'empreinte digitale').

In English "digital" also means related to fingers (because your hand has 5 digits.)

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).

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