France bans English gaming tech jargon in push to preserve language purity
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
France's attitude to her language is IMHO marred by deep hypocrisy and a backward, reactionary worldview of "preservation" of something that for most is just a tool.
Languages live, evolve, and die. We should cherish and try to save as many as we can while giving people the tools to communicate with as many other humans as possible. It's crucial to stop languages from getting extinct, but that cannot mean that nationalistic chauvinism should be tolerated. Languages, especially smaller ones, are incredibly powerful echo chambers.
To conclude, it's ironic that France tries so hard to keep French "pure" (from what, I ask myself) when France is one of the worst offenders regarding the utter hostility it has shown multiple times against the linguistic rights of minorites and regional languages.
France lost any moral justification to "preserve her national language" when she failed to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Consider that in addition to French, you will also find the following spoken languages: Arabic, Norman, Picard, Poitevin-Saintongeais, Franco-Provencal, Occitan, Catalan, Auvergnat, Corsican, Basque, French Flemish, Lorraine Franconian, Alsatian, and Breton.
The idea behind fighting to protect the French language is to protect the unifying institution binding these groups of people together in a harmonious society.
France is a melting pot and the government defines France as an inclusive nation with universal values -- advocating assimilation through which immigrants are expected to adhere to French values and cultural norms.
Speaking the French language and declaring yourself to be French is what counts. The government thus has an interest in defining exactly what being French is. French citizens still equate their nationality with citizenship as does French law.
France having to defend French because it is a melting pot is a fantasy. The Parisian intellectual elite, in lack of a better expression, has a weird fixation on language tradition and a strong contempt for the English language.
France/Parisians has a long history of repression against people from province.
Read again what some "great" French writers, like Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Balzac wrote about Breton people in IXX century.
"Il est interdit de cracher par terre et de parler Breton"
An academy inspector wrote in 1956 in Vannes that a small Breton had half the QI of a Parisian. I was born in 1956 near Vannes.
Noam chomsky has an informative interview. He seems to think the concept of guardianship of a "pure" language is conceptually silly https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY
The quality of spoken French goes lower years after years. The generation before me spoke a much better French than my generation even if we are supposed to be better educated. The same goes for the generations after mine.
Most speakers on TV, most journalists and even school teachers are using a small vocabulary (to be better understood?) and they make gross errors. Commonly they are using the wrong gender ("le porte", "le vis"). Most of the time they discuss in a "meta language" that has no meaning ("la météo va s'intensifier", "les prix augmentent à cause de l'inflation").
Many school teachers have not a good understanding of French grammar.
Languages change and always have, people noting this is as old as written record about language. People have also always been complaining about it, and ascribing to it some meaning about the increasing degeneracy of the youth or the decline of society or whatever.
The language obviously continues to work fine for the needs people have of it, as it always has. You don't need to like the changes, but you should understand that that is an aesthetic judgement and nothing else. It doesn't indicate or represent anything "going down" or a cultural loss of any kind.
With this in mind I find your purely relativistic idea that all languages are equal, or more importantly that we should treat them as all equal, as somewhat misguided, and in many ways supremacist (it is easy for the culturally dominant, in this case the english, to wave hands and act like everyone else is irrational for trying to protect their culture, when it is implicitly understood if they don't then English will swallow it whole).
The whole purpose of any language is facilitate communication between people. I would argue that the quality and usefulness of English has increased over time, as it would be very difficult to use English from even 100 years ago in conversation today, as it would lack the words to express every day topics.
Old English was a way more complex language, akin to German and had a different form for each person. For instance, to shine was "sċīnan", and the present tense was
- ic sċīne - þū sċīnst - hē sċīnþ ...
Nowadays, it's just "I shine, you shine, he shines", without no distinction except the third person's 's'. It's a vastly simpler language, and yet, it allows people to convey concepts as well as any other language.
A thing I find ironic is that in certain languages that do thoroughly conjugate verbs, there's a way to mock those foreigners who don't know how to use verbs properly. It often happens that those who lack the knowledge of the proper inflected forms use the infinitive everywhere as a stopgap - for instance, one may say in broken Italian "io avere freddo" instead of the proper "io ho freddo", and every Italian speaker would understand it perfectly, albeit a native speaker would probably scoff it off as a blatant sign of a lack of linguistic knowledge.
That's precisely what English went through during the transition from Old to Middle English. People started speaking "broken" English and they kept doing that, and after a while it wasn't broken anymore. Subjunctive tense? That's basically dead in modern English too.
The point I'm trying to convey is, what you consider as the rules nowadays come straight from the broken babblings of the illiterates of yesteryear. If those Roman scholars that were complaining about the broken Latin spoken by their contemporaries had their way, the Romance languages would have never existed. Ironically, the moment Europe dropped Latin and started adopting the "vulgar" actually languages spoken by the people is widely considered the moment Europe truly started blooming again, and a crucial first step towards the literacy of the masses.
So I support the ban as it tries to lower the bullshit
One I truly can't stand nowadays is "ça fait sens", and I keep hearing it. Seriously...
French, Italian, Spanish came about when Latin got corrupted and hybridized with other languages, changing its sounds and evolving together with the people that spoke them.
English itself is basically 30% French - and yet it's still English, isn't it? Loanwords are just what they are - loanwords. In the end, the end goal is to be understood, and to understand those that speak to you, and if a loanword expresses a concept in a way that's more broadly understood and universally recognized (i.e., "computer"), why should people reject it?
The whole concept of "language purity" is just a silly show of chauvinism, a "fear" of contamination from foreign influence that ignores the fact that all languages are artificial constructs. Most national languages have been born out of coercion and nationalism, and only in recent times they have been "standardized". Most languages are basically just the dialect of the capital, that for some queer reason was picked to be the most noble of them all.
Knowing English is crucial and its teaching should be of paramount importance because it has become the lingua franca of the modern world. It's the koiné that allows people from various backgrounds and various places to communicate. It allows people to cut intermediaries and learn from each other, directly, what other parts of the world have to say, removing from governments and national media the ability to spin things around.
I know lots of people that only know Italian, and thus only know what the Italian media wants to talk about, or cares about. Local languages quickly become a way to gatekeep people, and cut them out of the source of global discussion about topics and ideas.
I personally think that languages should be taught and preserved, because every single language you know gives you a different outlook on life, things, and concepts. Every tongue has its set of things it cares about, its own history, its own value, and everyone should be bilingual to truly understand that there's a wider world outside of their small garden. We cannot, however, allow this to hamper the progress we've made in understanding each other. We should always keep our mother tongue close to us, without forgetting what languages are for.
But for context the ministry has absolutely no bearing on French as real life people actually speak it. This is a body of people whose power is essentially just to maintain the government’s language style guide and issue strongly worded letters to a herd of cats who largely ignore them. So while this is technically a ban when it comes to government correspondence it could be the poster child for sensationalizing a headline.
I used to work in an Ontario tobacco farming town (English), and lots of French folks would hitchhike into town to get summer priming jobs. The term "Les chips" for potato chips was really common, but on French and bilingual labels you must use the word Croustilles. That's just one example of very many.
There was damn near a panic when Contact Lenses became a commonly purchased item, because there was no French word for them. Eventually they came up with one, and you no longer hear "Le Contactlens."
Seems like it's the term they use over there. Wikipedia agrees with it [0].
> when Contact Lenses became a commonly purchased item, because there was no French word for them
French wiki seems to think the correct term is just... a word by word translation of "contact lenses". Not sure what the big deal was. [1]
When contact lenses came about, for the longest time there was no French word, so Quebec folk just called it by the English name because nobody knew what the official word would finally be.
Quebec has a literal Language Police. Here's an article about them harassing restaurants for writing too many English-only Facebook posts, and employing people who don't speak French well enough.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8539627/quebec-language-police-ba...
Not sure why someone would move there and be upset about the language. Seems like it hasn't changed since... 1608?
The USA is a 40 minute drive away...
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl...
(Even many words in English is French. You can also write in English without French words, but that also should be only if you choose to do; they shouldn't make everyone to do so even if they do not want to do. And in French, if you want to write only French words, or also English and others, it is only if you choose to do so and they shouldn't make you to do so if you do not want to do.)
If the government wants to use French words even if they are not that common, then they can use the words that they want to use. They even look to see if there are already French words, so that is good, compared with not doing so. But, they should not force everyone else to do even against their choice.
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
Interestingly, I've noticed a trend here to use English words or expressions to pimp various meetings, although the terms are often used out of context and act as a decoy to hide some lack of field knowledge, or downright language skills.
Ironically, the more English words they tend to use, the less is their ability to sustain a fluent conversation in English. When I communicate in English at least I try to make an effort not to sprinkle French words everywhere. I also do the same in French, and I'd rather not bastardize the language further.
Well, granted, English and French have a special history as they both invaded countless countries to the point those two languages eventually became spoken on all continents. I guess it's only fair when it backfires sometimes, and there's a bit of irony when it happens between those two languages in particular.
As a mostly english speaking Canadian, I have a pile of french and german words pushing into my vocabulary. I never felt the word Kindergarten was pushed into my diction. It just works.
My CV or Resume speaks for itself. :)
I don't really view these as borrowed words. They are just words.
Just the same, I don't get upset when I spell colour without the U, when I program.
I find is super odd that a country that gave us free speech spends so much time working on a way to police the words their people use.
What does America have to do with this?
We're inching closer and closer to the full-blown CNN accent on Canadian TV news.
Incidentally I was amused to discover that people on the west coast actually often do say "oot and aboot." Until a couple decades ago, I thought it was a myth.
The first time I heard her speak, I thought she was Canadian. Alaska is beside northwestern Canada, so it all makes sense.
No they don't.