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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

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You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated.

The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to wake up a few months later, telling everyone to say "la covid", out of dubious and easily countered justifications. The members of the Académie are not even linguists. They are regular, if conservative, speakers at best. I don't know why I would even trust them on handling the language better than random people on the street.

But actually, random people on the street are the ones defining the language. The right approach for covid would have been to say "ok, everybody here says "le covid". Canadians happen to say "la covid". Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

English is spoken a bit differently depending on the area of the world and there are rules which are discussed. So what. No academies will change that by the way. French is spoken slightly differently across France, never mind across the world.

Just pick your style and your version, and be consistent in your formal writing if you value this kind of things.

(And yes, you can split infinitives in English, obviously ;-))

> be consistent in your formal writing

But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK). The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

> But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK).

Yep, that's what I meant. Within a (set of) text(s).

Each newspaper has its set of rules to follow to ensure consistency, so if you need consistency across an organization you can do this. English newspapers do that too.

> The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

...And that people don't consistently follow, because this standard does not reflect the reality of how the language is spoken or written. Almost by definition. Anyway, we are still waiting for their dictionary, which first edition should have been released maybe a century ago. They have one important task and they can't manage to finish it. Not a big issue though (except for the money thrown out of the window), if you need a dictionary that actually works you have the Robert or Wiktionary.

But we need documentation for the French language and that's why the Observatoire de la langue française exists (http://observatoire.francophonie.org/l-observatoire-de-la-la...).

Anyway, each individual is going to speak the language with their own quirks and particularities. Consistency across everybody is unreachable. But that's fine.

For Covid, the Académie has ironically been a source of inconsistency. Before their intervention, everybody had been saying "le covid". All was well. Now, usage is uncertain here.

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

I was speaking about French. In French, most nouns have genders. Usually, the gender is well defined but for some nouns like Wifi, the gender is different depending on the area or even across people. Where I live, wifi is mostly masculine, but you hear the feminine form often enough. Usually from people from the South West of France but not exclusively.

You can notice the gender of the noun from the article: le wifi, un wifi, or from the adjectives qualifying it, if any.

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. GP is pointing out that the Académie Française chose to assign covid the feminine gender despite the popular use of the masculine gender for it in widespread use before their decision.

Exactly.

And so while "tavolo" in Italian is masculine, our table is feminine. And while our planète is feminine, Spanish's planeta ends with an A and is masculine.

English generally doesn't have genders on common words, except for cases like vehicles that can be found used as feminine (ship, car, …) [1], but that's fairly anecdotal.

[1] https://www.antidote.info/en/blog/reports/metaphorical-gende...

> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns.

‘She’s a fine ship.’

I actually did have that in my original comment but it didn't survive an edit. Vehicles, vessels, countries and a few others seem to get a gender, but it's not actually a part of the language in the same sense as in Spanish, Italian, German, French, and others. It more seems to reflect a kind of personification (the nation as an entity becomes a she, same with a ship). That's distinct from the grammatical gender in other languages.

That's anthropomorphism, not grammatical gender.

It’s kind of a quirk of history that English lost grammatical gender when importing French, German, and Latin words.

The closest idea to gender would probably be the idea of weak/strong vowels that while no longer codified, is what results in things like see/saw, run/ran, mouse/mice. IIRC Old English had a much stronger sense of these and conjugated many of their words in this way.

An example: Mouse -> Mice is valid. Moose -> Meese is not.

> I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

Easily, by the language making it an obligatory grammatical category for nouns. Grammar says there's concord in the language and some words have gender? Suddenly all nouns require gender for concord, regardless of whether it seems reasonable to you or not.

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF)'s relatively nuanced take on it is here:

http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=26557671

"On constate une hésitation dans le genre attribué au terme COVID-19" -- "One can sense some hesitation regarding the gender assigned to the term COVID-19"

The feminine form ("la covid") might come (according to the OQLF, at least) from "la maladie à coronavirus 2019" i.e. "maladie" (which is feminine) "transferring" its gender over to "covid".

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Actually, now that I read the Académie Française's take on it, I don't find it too unreasonable:

https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19

They state (as does the OQLF) that the gender is transferred over from the "core" word of the expression. So, "la" (feminine) SNCF because SNCF stands for "Société nationale des chemins de fer français" and "Société" (the core word) is feminine.

"la" covid, again, because of "maladie" (which is feminine)

The Académie says: "Il n’en reste pas moins que l’emploi du féminin serait préférable" -- "That being said, the use of feminine would be preferable". Not _that_ prescriptive.

Should the Académie have a prescriptive (vs descriptive) role in every day French (in France / or Canada) is of course a whole debate topic. :-)

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Shameless plug since we're on the topic: I run an Urban Dictionary-like site for French Canadians expressions -- https://www.laparlure.com/ -- it's purely descriptive and user-generated i.e. French (mostly in Canada) "as it's spoken"

The explanation is not unreasonable, but you have reasonable explanations for the masculine too. Wifi is a good counter-example: Fidelity is feminine, yet the masculine gender is widespread for Wifi. You can also justify the masculine form by metonymy (at the beginning of the pandemic we mostly said coronavirus, and we shifted to covid but kept the masculine of the former).

If you'd like some background on this (in French):

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3BfFPM3qI (France Inter, short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zykIohErTr8 (short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L78FkTtwKw4 (Linguisticae, longer)

In short: you cannot argue against the usage, even with the most logical explanation that goes against the usage. Natural languages are far from being formal, entirely consistent and completely logical.

For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast. They don't like loan words in general, and have a particular grudge against English loanwords.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/27/france-invents-new-words...

Do they have any practical authority? Why don't people tell them to mind their own business?

Because most people are not aware of the issues and actually see members of the Académie as people who have authority on the language.

And yes, their ridiculous, expensive dressing does work.

> For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast.

I can think of worse ideas. It's always shocking to me how people think that there's a difference of some kind between "podcasts" and "audio files that you download from the internet". The name really seems to be doing serious damage to people's understanding of what's happening.

One is a subtype of the other. Would you insist on using "radio broadcast" instead of "morning show"? Aside from that, a podcast is still a podcast regardless of whether you downloaded it, streamed it, or distributed it over media like flash drives and compact discs. That's why it's useful to have a new noun.

'Audio files that you download from the internet' could be absolutely anything - a song, an opera, a news broadcast, a test signal, a play... tells you nothing. 'Podcast' gives you a general idea of the medium and intent. That's useful.

Otherwise we might as well call everything in the universe 'stuff' if you really don't like nouns that may have a slight overlap.

I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.

Why are they fighting it? What’s the problem has to be fought against? What will happen if they don’t fight? Is it just a weird xenophobic thing?

Linguistic hegemony can be felt as related to cultural and political hegemony. Just as something would be lost if the world only had one language, it’s natural for people to ask why, if our language has a fine word for something already, we have to throw it out and use a foreign word instead. Language is bound up with history and culture. People have affection for these things, and don’t always want to toss them away willy-nilly. There also is the aesthetic dimension.

It may be harder for us US people to understand. Ours is a dominant society, and English dominance is only gaining ground. We are not the ones losing our traditions. Preserving something of your heritage is not xenophobia.

Not sure if France, whose government eradicated many local languages and dialects in geographical France throughout the 19th & 20th centuries and is not very eager to protect what survives of them now is the best example in this case, though.

e.g. in the mid 19th century 4/10 of all people in France spoke Occitan as their native language, how many do now?

It's not xenophobic, but it is nationalistic and atavistic.

There was a time when French had a chance of establishing itself as a "Lingua Franca" (sic); French is still considered the primary language of international law, I believe. The distaste for loanwords seems to be a sort of harking back to what might have been.

They wouldn't approve of a bunch of German words being used either. It just tends to be mostly English at the moment.

They just view foreign influence on the language as bad, even though that's been going on since the dawn of time.

And to complicate things further, the quebec office of the French language prefers podcasts be called balados i believe.

At least that has the benefit of being somewhat short and fun to say (but not shorter than podcast and thus will not catch on)

I await their verdict on liker (to like on Facebook) with interest.

It will be obviously rejected. It is too English-y. Better use good French-sounding words like "jogging" and "parking".

Have you heard how we are supposed to call a follower (on Twitter)?

"Acolyte des illustres"

This is not a joke, see for yourself this post dated "not a 1st of April": https://www.academie-francaise.fr/followers

In Spanish they use seguidores: literally followers. Why can’t they do something like that in French?

"suiveur", in French, is connoted pejoratively and means "someone without initiative". So I guess most people would find it uncomfortable to use this term in this context.

But there's a word that works great for this in French and that everybody who needs it already understands well: follower. It's borrowed from English, like so many other words. It's only fair, a big part of the English vocabulary directly comes from the French.

"Follower" had the same connotation in English before its use in relation to social media.

I believe you, and I can't explain why it did work for English speakers and not for the French ones. Maybe I'm wrong in my hypothesis by the way, that's just how I feel it. Follower does not bear this pejorative meaning for French people.

Maybe Twitter did push for this word in English and it worked? And then people who translated Twitter's interface in French and decided to leave follower "untranslated" actually sealed the destiny of this word in the French language?

Although it can have that connotation in English, it has to be activated by context: “Jim is not a leader, he’s a follower”. But in phrases like “a follower of the Chicago school of economics” it’s neutral. Maybe in French the negative connotation is more tightly bound to the word.

Interesting. No, indeed, we can't use suiveur neutrally like this in French as far as I know.

We'd probably say un étudiant or une étudiante (a student) in this specific case. Or un membre (a member).

But we actually can follow a lesson (suivre un cours) without it being pejorative, so while the noun is probably always pejorative, the verb is generally not if not activated by context, as you say.

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