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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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)

> 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.

'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.

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.

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