France Gives in to the Hashtag

Mot-clic is humorous; I had not seen that before.

This one strikes me a quite terrible, to be honest.

Readers should note that the OQLF also has an enforcement branch, which is used primarily to harass and extort minorities, allegedly for linguistic infractions.

The weird thing is that in the longer turn it results in a much larger problem: irrelevance.

There must be some basic cognitive bias here, like valorizing too highly the literature you loved in your youth, while discounting the creative innovations of your own age.

On the one hand I agree with you. The English we use now, even when written or spoken in a grammatically perfect way, is very different to the English used a couple of hundred years ago.

On the other hand, seeing "your/you're" or "they're/their/there" used incorrectly or interchangeably rustles my jimmies immeasurably.

Everybody knows that languages naturally evolve on their own. The advantages of the "Académie" are:

  - it slows down the evolution allowing better choices.

  - although the language is still driven by everybody using it, it is stirred in the right direction by linguists and authors, usually making choices consistent with the rest of the languages, its history and roots.

I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect their modern pronounciation.

And certainly not isolated to English. I find internet lingo in non-English languages far more interesting than those in English (at least when we are talking about something else than simply using the English loanword), since the Internet is largely an English-written concept, other languages are finding its incompatibilities with English difficult and the solutions can be quite interesting.

I find the anglifications of languages to be uninteresting at best, from a completely linguistic standpoint. Take a modern item like a 'vacuum cleaner', called »støvsuger« in Danish, which literally translates as 'dust sucker'. This reveals a difference in how each language's speakers think about items, words and their meanings.

If all words are English, then the languages themselves reveal nothing about our differences and how we think. Moreover, it will cause us all to think in the same way. It's documented that speaking more languages helps one think different about approaching problems, even ones not related to language. It broadens the mind. Everything being English won't broaden the mind.

It's been a quixotic quest, at best, it's not as if in regular speech (French) people didn't inject whatever was the argot dujour into the speech be it domestic or foreign.

Sometimes, when the translation is obvious, we'll use the gender of the original word, e.g. "une backdoor" (porte dérobée).

Seems like they take on the gender of the transliterated word.

I'm not sure what the rule for foreign words is (we have many of them, latin, greek, french, etc.), but their gender seems to be inferred from the base word (that's not a word, is it?). E.g., "internet" (and "network" respectively) is neutrum because the german word for "network" is as well. Same for "printer."

"Email" and "connection" are femininum because the german words for "mail" and "connection" are as well. I suspect that words like "email" might actually not be female, but plural (both share the same pronoun) because the german word for "mail" is one of these words that don't have a singular form (think "fish").

Oddly enough, the word "post" (in the sense of a forum post), even though it is literally the same word we have for "mail" (which is still femininum, "die Post"), is (generic?) masculinum. I guess that's what happens when multiple languages inherit a word from a language, change it over time, and then share the new words later.

Buttons are obviously male (you already know why).

Some words fall back to the generic masculinum however, even though they do have neutral german equivalents (e.g., "account"). I wish I could tell you why.

Anyway, languages are hard. Let's talk about computers instead.

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Btw: I hate the fact that my french neighbours have a weird nationalistic attitude when it comes to their language. French isn't exactly the greatest language on this planet. (Germans get to choose between french and latin as a third language.)

- e-mail / electronic mail / posta elettronica -> feminine (as posta/mail is feminine)

- Internet / rete -> feminine (as rete, [fishing] net, is feminine)

- shell -> feminine (this one I have no idea why, but it is feminine)

- library / libreria -> feminine (as libreria, as a books-library, is feminine)

- directory / cartella -> feminine (as cartella, folder, is feminine)

when I went to university back in the 90s there was definitely a push by some professors to use Italian terms for everything, which in some cases didn't work that well; one of my teachers insisted that we use 'fila' (which is feminine btw) for 'file', note that in Italian 'fila' is the translation of 'file' as in 'single file' which to me sounded quite grating.

Most people I know use the English form for the terms above, but you do see the Italian translation for them in advertising and other more 'official' forums often.

Things can get complicated if a loanword does not have a suffix that exists in German (or is reasonably close to an existing suffix). In this case, you may get regional variations (that can be pretty random) or the grammatical gender of the German translation of the loanword may be adopted instead.

Examples of feminine loanwords: E-Mail (because the word "Post" in German is feminine), URL (because words ending in -el tend to be feminine).

Older loanwords were sometimes 'Hellenized' into a Greek ending and gender. Example: Turkish cep became Greek τσέπη (tsépi, pocket, feminine), French canapé became Greek καναπές (kanapés, couch, masculine), and Turkish pabuç became Greek παπούτσι (papoútsi, shoe, neuter). These are then declined according to the noun class they were assimilated into.

Another category are words whose ending is translated to the semantically equivalent Greek ending, for example any -ism (capitalism, communism, feminism) will become an -ισμός, which is masculine.

This isn't always clear: spoon is masculine, knife neutral (the indogermanic word apparently denoted the result of sharpening something) and fork (a collection of… pointy bits?) feminine, e.g.

And with borrowed words, the gender not always universally agreed on. A processor is masculine, but a CPU or GPU is feminine (probably because unit is, too). Is an e-mail feminine (it's a highly abstract concept), or neutral (the result of writing)? Both genders are used – hash tags, however, are masculine. Letters (as in physical mail) are masculine, but mail (the concept, as in Royal Mail) is feminine… and a Letter (as in print letters) are feminine, because it's taken from French/Latin, and loan words of gendered languages usually keep their gender, even if the rules are incompatible.

Spontaneously I can't think of many "English borrowed words" that are feminine, as most words that could be loaned are already shared from French and/or Latin, which influenced German centuries earlier.

Basically, whenever a noun (or the core of a compound noun) has a direct (or close) translation to a frequently used noun in German, then it's quite common for its gender to "bleed" over into the English loanword.

So in the examples above, Mail → Post, URL → Verbindung, CD-ROM → Platte, Jeans → Hose, etc.