gerard2

I would say "politics" is organising the life together in all its aspect. With this definition in mind it is pretty much linked to everyday life, in my opinion. So yeah it is pretty feasible to separate one's enjoyment of a foggy morning to taxes or LGBTQ+ rights. But in a democracy this enjoyment is relevant to the ecological policy of your country for exemple and the opinion " I want less air pollution because I like foggy morning" is for me as justified as the next guy's.

Thank you for your honest and well argumented response. Just to be clear, my intention defending the Academie was not to go full nationalism and pretend that thanks to this god-like institution our language is the best in the world and as bearer of this language we, the french people, really are superior to everyone else. This is far from true. However I felt like this article was an unjust attack to an institution considered as quite harmless here in France. To be fair, I think a lot of people agree that it is an institution from another time, and a very few people think that it's the most useful. However I think people still have a tender liking for it and what it represents. And that is part of the french identity. As paradoxical as it may seem, being a frenchman is dreaming of being the next Marat or Jean Jaures while being a sucker for the symbols of authority. What this article calls pomp we call it "panache", and most people like this folklore. However I don't personally think that this make the french language any better that the english language or any other language. We just like our language because, as many things in France, it is charged with our history.

Stop hating on our classy habit vert. French people like having a history, as complex, bloody and sometime shameful it is. We are an old country and we have traditions. The english people have their royal family, the US have their rusty nuclear warheads and we have the institutions de la république.

Ahah sorry. Thank you, I wouldn't want an englishman with a sword coming at me in my sleep.

Germans are not allowed to play around with sharp objects anymore

Ahah yes, verlan is quite common for certain words for certain people. But nobody thinks it is legit french. It's like using terms like "doggo", "boi" or "nite" in english.

I don't know if the Academie is racist, but one of the most famous immortals is Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and politician, elected in 1983. Only 20 years after the end of the segregation in the US.

Yes I agree with you that it's quite a conservative institution, and yes if I remember well it was basically created to promote the use of french over the regional dialects. But I didn't want foreign readers (especially americans and our friends across La Manche since they have no such institution) to think that the Academie was weighing on the french everyday life.

Ahah, what the hell are you talking about. Here is a very hidden list, found on an obscure website, that you might want to look into : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators

Actually, Michel Serres (an immortal/academician) wrote something on this subject one year ago : http://www.academie-francaise.fr/la-bataille-ideologique.

I have tried to translate the relevant paragraph (the 5th) below :

"I will finish with the words ending with “-eur”. Should we say “auteure” or “autrice” or “auteuse”, etc. ? The question doesn’t stand, since the words ending with “-eur” are statistically divided in two partsm, one feminine, and the other masculine: “la douceur” [“the sweetness”] and “le malheur” [“the misfortune”], “l’horreur” [“the horror”] and “l’honneur” [“the honor”]. Thus, “Madame Jacqueline Unetelle, auteur de ce livre” can be said without malice. This simplicity can be seen in the following example: since the growing feminization of the medical profession the “doctoresse” term tend to disappear. “Madame Unetelle, docteur généraliste” si getting more and more common. Which is normal for a word ending by “-eur”. The arbitrary decision to distinguish, amongst those words, the names of the roles from all of the others, shows a subtle hypocrisy, as it allow to impose the imperium which was insufferable before."

Well maybe. Maybe someone with a stronger literary background than me could make the argument that providing traductions of english words is just a plus to ensure the completion of the french language and not really an important part of the language evolution. But I just wanted to explain that french people do not feel like the way they speak and write is dictated by the academie.And surely their appreciation of the french language has very little to do with the yellow vests protests.

Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not. It's just that the french language is kind of an international standard and some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world. But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french.

Not it really isn't. I think every european country has a similar institution. At least, italians (Accademia della Crusca) and germans (Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung) do. I think, that's because european countries are fusions of smaller regions and kingdoms which had their own language each, and at some point in time it was necessary to have a unique language for the economic development of the country. But for the authoritarian aspect, you do not have any kind of punishment for not following the prescription of the Académie, you can speak french in whatever way you like as long as the people in front of you understand you. I don't get where you get your strong feelings against the Académie from.

As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regional variation in words even in metropolitan France, but if you take into account oversea territories like french polynesia, Guyana or Mayotte it gets even more complicated. So yes, convenient english words that are widely used by french people on a day-to-day basis are not added right away in the dictionary and in fact the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for them that are coherent with the etymology of the french language, but it doesn't prevent french people from using them. So I get that the immortals don't represent the french society and the never have. But they do not really have any kind of political impact on the country, the are just the bookkeepers of the français.