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

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#151

Post by baud147258 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #148

baud147258 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' Dunno, when I'm using email, or any other English word part of our developper vocabulary, like build or bug, I don't feel guilty, I'm just using the words that are used by the rest of my (all-French) team.

And when I'm cooking, I use French terms to describe what I want. It just makes sense this way because the terms are just more specific than if they were translated, i.e., brunoise, mirepoix, chiffonade, etc.

You and I don't have the same level of cooking, I guess; I've never used any of those terms.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#152

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

fifnir wrote: post #134

msla wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cl…

You 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

You 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?

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#153

Post by bane » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

gerard2 wrote: post #146

bane wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that t…

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 c…

> was not to go full nationalism and pretend that thanks to this god-like institution our language is the best in the world

I personally did not take it that way. I'm glad that you took my post in the self-effacing way it was meant.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#154

Post by plopz » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #36

macdice wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think English speakers just find it a bit strange because our own language is such a mess. In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words (maybe due to a deliberate political act by Noah Webster? not sure), and there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point, so we can't even imagine an official body that does this. Perhaps that's why some people seem to interpret it as "authoritarian".…

"In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words" Yes the US seemed to go with Webster, while the rest of the anglosphere went with Johnson. Not quite as simple as that, as there were a few different waves of reform. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

And there are fun ones like the etymology of aluminum which went through spellings like a ping pong.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#155

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

hibbelig wrote: post #34

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…

AFAIK, there are no neutered professions in German. So that would be a big change, it's hard to imagine. I know very little French, but if I understand correctly, because person in French is female (la personne), you could have a sentence mentioning "the persons" (plural) (les personnes?), and then later on using the pronoun "elles" (female version of "they") to refer to them. So a female-coded pronoun would refer to…

Yes, your understanding is correct.

Grammatical accord overrides physical gender for pronoun choice in French.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#156

Post by nwatson » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

macdice wrote: post #24

gerard2 wrote: post #20

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 regiona…

I think English speakers just find it a bit strange because our own language is such a mess. In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words (maybe due to a deliberate political act by Noah Webster? not sure), and there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point, so we can't even imagine an official body that does this. Perhaps that's why some people seem to interpret it as "authoritarian".…

The pseudo-official documentarians of the English language are the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). They don't prescribe or authorize English language use but generally accept new words and uses into the lexicon ... [1] briefly discusses their process.

[1] https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/our-story/creating-dictio...

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#157

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #23

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's rather a slap in the face to non-binary and gender non-conforming people, though.

Do those exist in France? I have always thought it was an American (or Anglo-Saxon) cultural phenomenon.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#158

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

magicmouse wrote: post #82

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 i…

Latin never died or was destroyed, it was indeed “allowed to grow organically” and the dialects it grew into (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, etc.) are now spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#159

Post by enahs-sf » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

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...

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#160

Post by microcolonel » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

gerard2 wrote: post #20

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 regiona…

> 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.

I think the weird thing about it is that it is so unnecessary. Dictionary publishers have their opinions, the public has their own, state-run schools have their own still.

The proper use of a language flows from the desire of the speaker or writer to be understood. If deferring to the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary serves that purpose for you, that's great, but the institution is not what legitimizes that decision.

Furthermore, in Québec, L'Office québécois de la langue française has real institutional power, and has seriously oppressed people and damaged their lives in service their arbitrary protectionist ideology; harassing small business owners to strike English loan words from their signs, insisting that well-accepted signage be changed to suit them (stop signs with STOP on them are ubiquitous, even in many French speaking places, but in Québec they insist on making the signs also have ARRÊT, or only have ARRÊT on them).