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The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

124 points by Jun8 8y ago

Jun8 8y ago
The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
- mc32 8y ago
  It’s interesting they’re taking the German route rather than the English route which is to erode most feminine gendered trade words: waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter, etc. likewise the male equivalent have become neutral so actor, governor, baker, waiter, etc don’t only apply to men.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    I wonder if the Académie is insisting on following correct etymology. A lot of people are saying 'docteure' as a feminised form of 'docteur'; yet, if you go back to the Latin 'doctor', derived from 'doceo' ("I teach"), and change masculine agent noun suffix '-or' for the feminine agent noun suffix '-trix', then the derived French form should be 'doctresse' (edit: apparently a word 'doctoresse' exists); yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur', which would surely offend the sensibilities of the Académie. On the one hand, the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum, but the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) in Quebec often has its own, separate ideas about how the French language should evolve, and there could be two feminised terms for the same thing, differing based on the region. Not to mention the other Francophone regions and nations whose curricula aren't tied to the French or Québécois ones.
    - mc32 8y ago
      That’s a good question. Hopefully they choose one or the other and not choose to make up a totally synthetic and nonsense suffix (as when they want to invent new French words so as not to corrupt French with loan words (have they come up with a native word for sushi, by the way?)
      - seszett 8y ago
        French is almost completely impervious to "totally synthetic" suffices or words, almost all new vocabulary is created from Latin (or Greek for the more technical or scientific words) when it's not borrowed from a foreign language. Creating a new suffix from scratch actually sounds like more of an American answer to the "gender problem". There is also no reason to invent a word to replace "sushi", just as nobody is advocating for a replacement for "fish and chips" or "hamburger".
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      This isn't snark, I'm honestly trying to understand: Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century? Didn't they branch like 1,500 years ago? When the French created a new word for, I dunno, "computer" or whatever, they didn't go back to Latin roots to figure out what it should be...or did they?
      - comex 8y ago
        I don’t know French, but according to Wiktionary the main French word for “computer” is “ordinateur”, which is: > From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”). > In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter). The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”. Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur: https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinateur-computers-in-french/ https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inherently an odd feature. Whereas, German and French both have a grammatical gender. In German I suppose you could neuter all the professions Whether that's feasible or not I couldn't say; I don't speak German. French doesn't have a neuter gender, though, so eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.
      - sfRattan 8y ago
        That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.
        paulddraper 8y ago
        Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)
    - macdice 8y ago
      The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)
  - msla 8y ago
    It's rather a slap in the face to non-binary and gender non-conforming people, though.
    - black-tea 8y ago
      I identify as a small potted plant and it's a real slap in the leaves for me because I can't even speak.
      - dang 8y ago
        Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
    - neonate 8y ago
      Superimposing an extremely recent political movement onto linguistic gender seems like the mother of all category errors.
      - msla 8y ago
        Nonbinary people existing is a political movement now? Then the existence of binary people is a political movement, too.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      Do those exist in France? I have always thought it was an American (or Anglo-Saxon) cultural phenomenon.
  - simias 8y ago
    There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders. Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop having them reflect gender doesn't flow very naturally in the language. "Une boulanger", "un hotesse", "une acteur" etc... All that is very grating to the ear and somewhat un-french sounding. It basically breaks very common patterns in the language that every French speaker consciously or unconsciously integrated as part of learning French. Compare for instance: Un boulanger fier (a proud baker, male) Une boulangère fière (a proud baker, female) Note that both the adjective "fier" and the noun "boulanger" decline similarly. If you "erode" boulanger to be neutral you end up with: Un boulanger fier Une boulanger fière Suddenly the pattern is broken. Do we erode "fier" and similar adjectives as well to remain consistent? But then of course it has a cascading effect throughout the language. I'm not saying that this means that it cannot or shouldn't be improved, I dislike the heavy knee-jerk backlash every proposed reform of French grammar gets (no matter how small and obvious it is, like simplifying some ridiculous rules for the accord of the passé composé) but it's definitely a complex topic.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - littlestymaar 8y ago
    French (and German) is a gendered language: we say «une»/«un» and «la»/«le». And we don't even have a way to opt-out the gender (German does). In the 18th and 19th centuries, L'Académie Française tried to get rid of the feminine version or many existing names, and promote the idea of the masculine as «gender-neutral». The most (in)famous example is the masculine auteur (the French for “author”) replacing autrice for both sex. But this unification around the male version always felt artificial and somewhat offensive for women, because of the gendered articles.
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      I think that approach might be politically easier to accept if the plan had been to drop the masculine version for half the nouns, and the feminine one for the other half. But it's also hard to imagine the members of an old men's club voluntarily deciding that they should henceforth be known as autrices instead of auters. Doubly so 200 years ago.
  - zeveb 8y ago
    > waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter I use all of those other than baxter! Seems only polite; I'd be offended were I an actress and others called me an actor.
bernardv 8y ago
Truly a very French bunch of elitist old farts, l’academie.
hirundo 8y ago
This is an authoritarian project. It attempts to impose authority in an area that operates fine or better without it, by people with no particular claim to authority in the matter beyond membership in their own club. How is France improved by having an official government dictionary? For the authoritarian it seems that the proper role of the state to reduce any form of uncertainty in life, and positive uncertainty is oxymoronic.
- edmonddantes80 8y ago
  Spain has the "Real Academia Española", guardian of the Spanish language in the world. They seems very related to this guardian of French,they don't accept gender questions and they do an authoritarian imposition of their ideas.
- gerard2 8y ago
  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.
  - pintxo 8y ago
    The relevant entity for German is [1]. Apparently created after or during the struggle for an official reform of the language in the 90 and early 2000. [1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschreibung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschrei...
- slim 8y ago
  having standards is always useful. think of it as w3c for french speaking people
gerard2 8y ago
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.
- msla 8y ago
  > 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. But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist, and reifying that classism and racism into a body composed of rich old White people just rubs everyone's noses in it. It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".
  - gerard2 8y ago
    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.
4ad 8y ago
I laugh at this useless institution, but then I realize that many "real" institutions are probably just as useless and anachronistic as this particular one.
grumpydba 8y ago
> Actually, it is mostly old white men. So racism is OK?
- 29ssyg 8y ago
  France is a white country, so I don't know what's so surprising about having only white people there. The nytimes is trying to apply American standards to everything.
  - grumpydba 8y ago
    I find American identity politics to be nefarious. And people in France are trying very hard to import them here.
  - EvagohP5 8y ago
    >france is a white country
qalmakka 8y ago
I never got the hang of this kind of myopic, senseless traditionalism. If Latin didn't let himself be bastardised with the influences of Frankish and Gaulish there wouldn't be any French.
- realusername 8y ago
  Most European countries have a similar language board, English is more an exception than anything else. And there's not much Gaulish influence in French, here is the full (and small) list of words originating from Gaulish: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mots_en_fran%C3%A7ais_issus_d%E2%80%99un_mot_en_gaulois https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mots_en_fran%C...
  - gpvos 8y ago
    I don't think any of those have so much pomp and circumstance about their functioning and composition, though.
    - gerard2 8y ago
      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.
      - tozeur 8y ago
        Good points, monsieur.
      - Ericson2314 8y ago
        They all have rusty nukes shhhh.
      - 4ad 8y ago
        Ah, yes, the good old whataboutism.
magicmouse 8y ago
The Latin language was destroyed by pompous academicians who refused to allow the language to grow organically. The Academie Francaise has set in motion the destruction of the importance of the french language, because if you don't allow flexibility in your language, eventually people abandon it. Dante's Inferno was i believe one of the first novels done in the vernacular Italian. They can claim they are protecting it, but it will be washed away like a sandcastle because they don't see the forces at work from their little chairs. They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU. Sorry, but when was the last time anyone cared about computer research in the french language? They are crippling themselves by not adopting some english. The Japanese managed to adopt Elevator (e-re-be-ta), because didn't have the concept before Mr. Otis, so acknowledging inventions external to your country is part of not living on an island.
- Arnt 8y ago
  Who were the pompous academics who destroyed Latin and what did they do, exactly?
- raverbashing 8y ago
  > They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU To be honest that point is moot, they have words for the common terms, and if it's too esoteric it will be either used as-is or adapted. The standardization has an importance only where the formal version is "needed" (but it's not like no one can use a foreign word if it's needed)
- labster 8y ago
  An even better example Japanese example is ググる ("to google") which managed to make it in the closed class of verbs -- and it's even written in two different character sets!
- seszett 8y ago
  > They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU What do you mean? French has a perfectly acceptable word for computer ("ordinateur") and CPU is called CPU in French. Or processeur. Elevator is ascenceur, and I don't see a problem with that?
- 8y ago
sleepingbot 8y ago
Yes, French institutions are deadlocked... What I find in total disarray is the anglosphere. Both epistemologically and socially. Britain and US are not the places to look up to anymore, nor even in pop culture. We'll see in 10 years time, but I think continental Europe looks better than the anglosphere.
deleted 8y ago
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supergirl 8y ago
pathetic article. what's with this tone of superiority? I'm not even french and I had to stop reading it.
enahs-sf 8y ago
Reading the title, I thought to myself, there’s a dining philosophers joke to be made, but I can’t seem to Sartre it out...
xwolfi 8y ago
It’s very anglo-american to take this so seriously. For us it’s a club of old dudes who like to bask in past glories and write one of many dictionaries, that nobody reads anyway. Everyone understands french evolves with usage and must take some influence abroad, and nobody ever refused a word because a 90yo grandpa was slow to add it to their unpublished dictionary...
xondono 8y ago
relevant to the discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY

124 points by Jun8 8y ago

Jun8 8y ago

The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."

mc32 8y ago
It’s interesting they’re taking the German route rather than the English route which is to erode most feminine gendered trade words: waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter, etc. likewise the male equivalent have become neutral so actor, governor, baker, waiter, etc don’t only apply to men.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  I wonder if the Académie is insisting on following correct etymology. A lot of people are saying 'docteure' as a feminised form of 'docteur'; yet, if you go back to the Latin 'doctor', derived from 'doceo' ("I teach"), and change masculine agent noun suffix '-or' for the feminine agent noun suffix '-trix', then the derived French form should be 'doctresse' (edit: apparently a word 'doctoresse' exists); yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur', which would surely offend the sensibilities of the Académie. On the one hand, the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum, but the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) in Quebec often has its own, separate ideas about how the French language should evolve, and there could be two feminised terms for the same thing, differing based on the region. Not to mention the other Francophone regions and nations whose curricula aren't tied to the French or Québécois ones.
  - mc32 8y ago
    That’s a good question. Hopefully they choose one or the other and not choose to make up a totally synthetic and nonsense suffix (as when they want to invent new French words so as not to corrupt French with loan words (have they come up with a native word for sushi, by the way?)
    - seszett 8y ago
      French is almost completely impervious to "totally synthetic" suffices or words, almost all new vocabulary is created from Latin (or Greek for the more technical or scientific words) when it's not borrowed from a foreign language. Creating a new suffix from scratch actually sounds like more of an American answer to the "gender problem". There is also no reason to invent a word to replace "sushi", just as nobody is advocating for a replacement for "fish and chips" or "hamburger".
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    This isn't snark, I'm honestly trying to understand: Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century? Didn't they branch like 1,500 years ago? When the French created a new word for, I dunno, "computer" or whatever, they didn't go back to Latin roots to figure out what it should be...or did they?
    - comex 8y ago
      I don’t know French, but according to Wiktionary the main French word for “computer” is “ordinateur”, which is: > From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”). > In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter). The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”. Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur: https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinateur-computers-in-french/ https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inherently an odd feature. Whereas, German and French both have a grammatical gender. In German I suppose you could neuter all the professions Whether that's feasible or not I couldn't say; I don't speak German. French doesn't have a neuter gender, though, so eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.
    - sfRattan 8y ago
      That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.
      - paulddraper 8y ago
        Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)
  - macdice 8y ago
    The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)
- msla 8y ago
  It's rather a slap in the face to non-binary and gender non-conforming people, though.
  - black-tea 8y ago
    I identify as a small potted plant and it's a real slap in the leaves for me because I can't even speak.
    - dang 8y ago
      Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
  - neonate 8y ago
    Superimposing an extremely recent political movement onto linguistic gender seems like the mother of all category errors.
    - msla 8y ago
      Nonbinary people existing is a political movement now? Then the existence of binary people is a political movement, too.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Do those exist in France? I have always thought it was an American (or Anglo-Saxon) cultural phenomenon.
- simias 8y ago
  There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders. Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop having them reflect gender doesn't flow very naturally in the language. "Une boulanger", "un hotesse", "une acteur" etc... All that is very grating to the ear and somewhat un-french sounding. It basically breaks very common patterns in the language that every French speaker consciously or unconsciously integrated as part of learning French. Compare for instance: Un boulanger fier (a proud baker, male) Une boulangère fière (a proud baker, female) Note that both the adjective "fier" and the noun "boulanger" decline similarly. If you "erode" boulanger to be neutral you end up with: Un boulanger fier Une boulanger fière Suddenly the pattern is broken. Do we erode "fier" and similar adjectives as well to remain consistent? But then of course it has a cascading effect throughout the language. I'm not saying that this means that it cannot or shouldn't be improved, I dislike the heavy knee-jerk backlash every proposed reform of French grammar gets (no matter how small and obvious it is, like simplifying some ridiculous rules for the accord of the passé composé) but it's definitely a complex topic.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- littlestymaar 8y ago
  French (and German) is a gendered language: we say «une»/«un» and «la»/«le». And we don't even have a way to opt-out the gender (German does). In the 18th and 19th centuries, L'Académie Française tried to get rid of the feminine version or many existing names, and promote the idea of the masculine as «gender-neutral». The most (in)famous example is the masculine auteur (the French for “author”) replacing autrice for both sex. But this unification around the male version always felt artificial and somewhat offensive for women, because of the gendered articles.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    I think that approach might be politically easier to accept if the plan had been to drop the masculine version for half the nouns, and the feminine one for the other half. But it's also hard to imagine the members of an old men's club voluntarily deciding that they should henceforth be known as autrices instead of auters. Doubly so 200 years ago.
- zeveb 8y ago
  > waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter I use all of those other than baxter! Seems only polite; I'd be offended were I an actress and others called me an actor.

bernardv 8y ago

Truly a very French bunch of elitist old farts, l’academie.

hirundo 8y ago

This is an authoritarian project. It attempts to impose authority in an area that operates fine or better without it, by people with no particular claim to authority in the matter beyond membership in their own club. How is France improved by having an official government dictionary? For the authoritarian it seems that the proper role of the state to reduce any form of uncertainty in life, and positive uncertainty is oxymoronic.

edmonddantes80 8y ago
Spain has the "Real Academia Española", guardian of the Spanish language in the world. They seems very related to this guardian of French,they don't accept gender questions and they do an authoritarian imposition of their ideas.
gerard2 8y ago
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.
- pintxo 8y ago
  The relevant entity for German is [1]. Apparently created after or during the struggle for an official reform of the language in the 90 and early 2000. [1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschreibung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschrei...
slim 8y ago
having standards is always useful. think of it as w3c for french speaking people

gerard2 8y ago

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.

msla 8y ago
> 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. But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist, and reifying that classism and racism into a body composed of rich old White people just rubs everyone's noses in it. It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".
- gerard2 8y ago
  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.

4ad 8y ago

I laugh at this useless institution, but then I realize that many "real" institutions are probably just as useless and anachronistic as this particular one.

grumpydba 8y ago

> Actually, it is mostly old white men. So racism is OK?

29ssyg 8y ago
France is a white country, so I don't know what's so surprising about having only white people there. The nytimes is trying to apply American standards to everything.
- grumpydba 8y ago
  I find American identity politics to be nefarious. And people in France are trying very hard to import them here.
- EvagohP5 8y ago
  >france is a white country

qalmakka 8y ago

I never got the hang of this kind of myopic, senseless traditionalism. If Latin didn't let himself be bastardised with the influences of Frankish and Gaulish there wouldn't be any French.

realusername 8y ago
Most European countries have a similar language board, English is more an exception than anything else. And there's not much Gaulish influence in French, here is the full (and small) list of words originating from Gaulish: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mots_en_fran%C3%A7ais_issus_d%E2%80%99un_mot_en_gaulois https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mots_en_fran%C...
- gpvos 8y ago
  I don't think any of those have so much pomp and circumstance about their functioning and composition, though.
  - gerard2 8y ago
    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.
    - tozeur 8y ago
      Good points, monsieur.
    - Ericson2314 8y ago
      They all have rusty nukes shhhh.
    - 4ad 8y ago
      Ah, yes, the good old whataboutism.

magicmouse 8y ago

The Latin language was destroyed by pompous academicians who refused to allow the language to grow organically. The Academie Francaise has set in motion the destruction of the importance of the french language, because if you don't allow flexibility in your language, eventually people abandon it. Dante's Inferno was i believe one of the first novels done in the vernacular Italian. They can claim they are protecting it, but it will be washed away like a sandcastle because they don't see the forces at work from their little chairs. They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU. Sorry, but when was the last time anyone cared about computer research in the french language? They are crippling themselves by not adopting some english. The Japanese managed to adopt Elevator (e-re-be-ta), because didn't have the concept before Mr. Otis, so acknowledging inventions external to your country is part of not living on an island.

Arnt 8y ago
Who were the pompous academics who destroyed Latin and what did they do, exactly?
raverbashing 8y ago
> They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU To be honest that point is moot, they have words for the common terms, and if it's too esoteric it will be either used as-is or adapted. The standardization has an importance only where the formal version is "needed" (but it's not like no one can use a foreign word if it's needed)
labster 8y ago
An even better example Japanese example is ググる ("to google") which managed to make it in the closed class of verbs -- and it's even written in two different character sets!
seszett 8y ago
> They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU What do you mean? French has a perfectly acceptable word for computer ("ordinateur") and CPU is called CPU in French. Or processeur. Elevator is ascenceur, and I don't see a problem with that?
8y ago

sleepingbot 8y ago

Yes, French institutions are deadlocked... What I find in total disarray is the anglosphere. Both epistemologically and socially. Britain and US are not the places to look up to anymore, nor even in pop culture. We'll see in 10 years time, but I think continental Europe looks better than the anglosphere.

deleted 8y ago

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supergirl 8y ago

pathetic article. what's with this tone of superiority? I'm not even french and I had to stop reading it.

enahs-sf 8y ago

Reading the title, I thought to myself, there’s a dining philosophers joke to be made, but I can’t seem to Sartre it out...

xwolfi 8y ago

It’s very anglo-american to take this so seriously. For us it’s a club of old dudes who like to bask in past glories and write one of many dictionaries, that nobody reads anyway. Everyone understands french evolves with usage and must take some influence abroad, and nobody ever refused a word because a 90yo grandpa was slow to add it to their unpublished dictionary...

xondono 8y ago

relevant to the discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY