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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 bac

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...
  - robocat 8y ago
    Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French? Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer
    - gonzus 8y ago
      To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)
      - harperlee 8y ago
        But doesn’t this directly follow the latin computare?
- monetus 8y ago
  The further the romance languages deviate, the less mutually intelligible they are. I am no etymologist, so I'll leave it to speculation as to whether that is the best choice. But I don't know French or German, and having a Latin vocabulary allows for some understanding, especially if a sentence has English loan words in it to boot.
glandium 8y ago
FWIW, doctoresse is in the French dictionary.
gerard2 8y ago
Actually, Michel Serres (an immortal/academician) wrote something on this subject one year ago : http://www.academie-francaise.fr/la-bataille-ideologique 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."
seszett 8y ago
> 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 Actually, the school curriculum (both public and private) follows the Ministry of Education recommendations which are based on the Conseil supérieur français de la langue française, and which are not necessarily the same as the Académie française. Although the Académie usually approves them, it is purely symbolical.

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...
- robocat 8y ago
  Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French? Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer
  - gonzus 8y ago
    To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)
    - harperlee 8y ago
      But doesn’t this directly follow the latin computare?
monetus 8y ago
The further the romance languages deviate, the less mutually intelligible they are. I am no etymologist, so I'll leave it to speculation as to whether that is the best choice. But I don't know French or German, and having a Latin vocabulary allows for some understanding, especially if a sentence has English loan words in it to boot.

glandium 8y ago

FWIW, doctoresse is in the French dictionary.

gerard2 8y ago

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

seszett 8y ago

> 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 Actually, the school curriculum (both public and private) follows the Ministry of Education recommendations which are based on the Conseil supérieur français de la langue française, and which are not necessarily the same as the Académie française. Although the Académie usually approves them, it is purely symbolical.