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> 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
by 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 agoWell 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.
- onli 8y ago> some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world Actually, no. Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either? > But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french. French differs strongly from other languages in how current developments are integrated, think ordinateur, portable and not having a word for uploading stuff. They might be guided by some principle, but it leads French being an artificial and very strange language that's hard to learn and differs more than necessary, from English especially.
- kuschku 8y agoGerman actually has the Rat der Deutschen Sprache which is exactly this and makes exactly these decisions. As do many other languages. The latest change they made was introducing the capital ẞ.
- bhaak 8y agoNo, it doesn't if you mean with "exactly these decisions" that it also decides what words are considered officially part of the language. You also got the name wrong. It's "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung" (Council for German Orthography) and that is exactly what they do. They standardize on the orthography. Nothing more.
- gerard2 8y agoAhah, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
- bhaak 8y agoThis list doesn't say what scope those regulators have. I only know the situation for German and there the "Council for German Orthography" only regulates orthography not language and word usage, so take this list with a grain of salt.
- gerard2 8y agoThe english language doesn't have such an institution, but what can you say about the unicity of the United Kingdom when half of the country speaks its own variant of the language and is asking for independence ?
- pqs 8y agoSpanish has the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, which is exactly like the French Académie. Many latin-American countries have an equivalent, and they coordinate with the Spanish one.
- kgwgk 8y agoMinor correction: the name of the institution doesn’t include the word “language”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy
- seszett 8y ago> Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either? Among this list, only English doesn't have an institution. All three other languages (Spanish, German and Chinese) have multiple institutions, basically one per country that speaks the language, just like French.
- onli 8y agoGerman does not have such an institution - I am German and that's just a fact. Spanish might have such an institution, but it evidently does not work - Mexican Spanish != Spanish Spanish != .... Note that I did not say it does not exist, I said there is no "powerful centralized" instance deciding this. I stand to this judgement, also for Spanish. The extent of the actual influence wielded by the academie francaise seems to me pretty unique.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoAt this point you are attributing the French academy superhuman powers, the Académie Française have of course exactly the same influence as the RAE: they make the definitive dictionary and then despair a bit about all the shit words they will have to include in the next version.
- seszett 8y agoI think you are overestimating the actual influence of the Académie then, because it has little. The new words they propose are seldom adopted, and are eventually dropped as they only formalize actual usage. They're not creating a parallel language. The education system is also governed by a different language institution. And just like Spanish, French is governed by different entities in different countries. The French and Québec councils are the most influent ones - and France French and Québec French are also the most divergent versions. The French language is only "powerfully centralized" within each French-speaking country. And even then, only among a few countries. I would say it is actually less centralized than the German language, which has a single institution that oversees orthography in ALL the German-speaking world. The French language has nothing like that.
- lucozade 8y ago> Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not The Academie have done something quite similar. Infamously, they argued against protection of regional French languages. And I agree that they’re not arbitrary but only because they have always been dead set against imported words. They have a conservatism that has become more and more anachronistic. I can’t say I have an issue with them, because they’re entirely ignorable, but there’s a risk that they’re seen as pathetic and that that view reflects poorly on France.
- gerard2 8y agoYes 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.
- dorfsmay 8y agoThe idea is to sit back and make choices that make sense when there is a conflict or that are more aligned with the rest if the language, and avoid messes like "biweekly".
- benj111 8y agoOr "inflammable". Or "Aural" and "Oral" Or Ox > Oxen, Fox > Foxes
- raverbashing 8y agoNone of those are accidents, or maybe all of those are accidents, like it is mostly common in languages
- benj111 8y agoDefine accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.
- raverbashing 8y ago> None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned. The question is: is anything planned? People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet. Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'. For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.
- benj111 8y agoFrench is kind of planned, that's why we're having this conversation.
- raverbashing 8y ago"Formal French" is planned, but the language goes on without it. For example, the AF is oblivious to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan (unless a word there ends hitting common usage) > Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse[3] and a doubly "verlanised" version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu
- coldtea 8y ago>But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist It's only deemed so by a classist and racist prejudice (that judges other cultures by its own values and metrics to boot). There's nothing "high class" about caring for language. People of all classes can and do root for the French language and Académie's role with it (and vice versa). The idea that "poor people couldn't possibly agree with high standards of language" -- as if poor implies some kind of inferior intellect, or less concern with such things as use of language, arts, etc, is classist itself. >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". They don't want "amorphous entities" in them here parts. They believe in people, scholars and artists with proven track record that are deemed worthy to be guards of the language and art (which also tends to make them "old", which in matters of experience is prudent. They don't want people eager to bring the "next hot thing" and "fad du jour" in, but people that have seen things, and are blasé about empty novelties). Also, France has historically been a predominantly "white" nation, as were the people who shaped the language in the first place, so by representation it makes sense most of Académie to be white (it includes people of Chinese, Haitian, etc ethnical origins too). Despite that, France has a much better track record for how it treats its blacks, to have the finger pointed at them by Americans.
- gerard2 8y agoI 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.
- fifnir 8y agoYou know what rubs MY nose? When people misuse language and then treat any correction as something snobby. Typical argument from someone who just wrote "could of", or mixed you're with your: "Oh but language is to communicate, and you understood what I'm saying so it worked so stop being snobby about it" gah, makes my blood boil
- umanwizard 8y agoYou haven’t explained what’s actually wrong with their argument. Language is a human cultural phenomenon, it’s not math or programming. Who are you to say whether it’s right or wrong? There is a certain variety of English that a certain social class of people have decided is “standard”, but why does that make it objectively correct?
- fifnir 8y agoIt's so self evident that I don't know where to begin... Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist. I'm sure that many "could of"s have been made official over the eons in all languages, (thanks to general ignorance/incompetence/refusal to learn) but that doesn't mean we should respect "couldofers" (see? I made up a word, I'm not that rigid) as if they're the next Shakespeare... Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere? I draw it at "you're/your/couldof" etc and it infuriates me because, not only these people offload a significant part of the work of communication to me, but they have the nerve to consider themselves somehow superior.
- umanwizard 8y agoYes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer. I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality. I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity. As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.