The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked • Hacker News Board

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#11

Post by monetus » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 2:57 AM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #9

zapzupnz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#12

Post by Elv13 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #9

zapzupnz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

> or did they?

Yes, they used the Latin word with the closest meaning. It is the same etymology as "order" in English. They come up with a lot of official words for things, but in the streets a lot of them are ignored. Some stick in some regions while brands or borrowed words are used in some other region.

The ironic aspect is that the closer you get to Paris (seat of the a Académie), the more borrowed words are used. In Quebec, even this close to the USA, there isn't all that much borrowed words beside pieces that are directly imported from the US such as automobile parts and tools (because until the 70's, the labels were in English only).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur

Edit: ... 3 people replied at the same time, whatever.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#13

Post by glandium » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

zapzupnz wrote: post #5

mc32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

FWIW, doctoresse is in the French dictionary.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#14

Post by sfRattan » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:06 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #8

bunderbunder wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 erodin…

Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.

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.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#15

Post by robocat » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:20 AM UTC

comex wrote: post #10

freddie_mercury wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#16

Post by macdice » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:22 AM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #6

mc32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 erodin…

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...)

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#17

Post by hirundo » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:23 AM UTC

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.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#18

Post by zapzupnz » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:24 AM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #9

zapzupnz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

> Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century?

Scholars have always gone back to Latin to influence modern language. Most technological, scientific, and plenty of engineering terms, for instance, derive either from Latin or Greek.

Modern French didn't 'branch' from Latin so much as the Latin dialects in the areas that have since become modern France evolved from Latin into what it has since become. Therefore, going back to classical and vulgar Latin tells us a lot about how the language has evolved, what features still provide valuable meaning, allowing people to guess what a word means based on their existing base knowledge of the language.

Doubly so considering the French curriculum remains relatively old-fashioned compared to the Anglophone world, such that explicitly teaching grammatical concepts at a very young age has not yet gone out of fashion in France and other Francophone regions and nations), so that the general population has a firmer understanding of the derivation of terms, the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and so on.

Not only that, it allows the modern French language to maintain a sense of consistency by going back to the roots and origins of words in order to determine how best to coin new words without causing needless difficulty, having to create exceptions where unnecessary. Hello, English language, especially in the past hundred or so years with 'electrocution' where the most important part of one of its components, 'execution', is entirely missing (such that it's not clear just from looking at 'electrocution' that being killed, 'executed', is a key part of the word).

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#19

Post by edmonddantes80 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#20

Post by gerard2 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 3:34 AM UTC

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.