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Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

laphamsquarterly.org

21–30 of 114 posts

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#21

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated.

The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to wake up a few months later, telling everyone to say "la covid", out of dubious and easily countered justifications. The members of the Académie are not even linguists. They are regular, if conservative, speakers at best. I don't know why I would even trust them on handling the language better than random people on the street.

But actually, random people on the street are the ones defining the language. The right approach for covid would have been to say "ok, everybody here says "le covid". Canadians happen to say "la covid". Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

English is spoken a bit differently depending on the area of the world and there are rules which are discussed. So what. No academies will change that by the way. French is spoken slightly differently across France, never mind across the world.

Just pick your style and your version, and be consistent in your formal writing if you value this kind of things.

(And yes, you can split infinitives in English, obviously ;-))

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#22

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

I await their verdict on liker (to like on Facebook) with interest.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast. They don't like loan words in general, and have a particular grudge against English loanwords. https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/27/france-invents-new-words...

Do they have any practical authority? Why don't people tell them to mind their own business?

Because most people are not aware of the issues and actually see members of the Académie as people who have authority on the language.

And yes, their ridiculous, expensive dressing does work.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definition seems difficult to project into the past, when the King of England might not speak English at all.

The joke I tried to make was an allusion to how the Metric System's units like the meter and the kilogram were all based on reference objects before they were truly modernized. So despite the reference objects losing tiny amounts of mass over the years, they were, by definition, what a kilogram should be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the... Admittedly, I now realize that I in no way made t…

The Queen's English.... Pretty clear.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#25
>ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.

>JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#26
post #3

If there was one, who’d follow it? York, New York, Melbourne (Ireland) and Melbourne (Australia) all have their variants from what London speaks.

Americans, for one, would never recognize the authority of a foreign body over their language.

They already do. The Americans who speak Spanish in Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, etc. recognize the authority of La Real Academia Española (even though their own brands of Spanish differ a bit from the kind spoken in Spain).

This is, by the way, not a criticism of your use of “Americans”, which I and all English speakers use the same way.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#27
post #22

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

I await their verdict on liker (to like on Facebook) with interest.

It will be obviously rejected. It is too English-y. Better use good French-sounding words like "jogging" and "parking".

Have you heard how we are supposed to call a follower (on Twitter)?

"Acolyte des illustres"

This is not a joke, see for yourself this post dated "not a 1st of April": https://www.academie-francaise.fr/followers

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#28
post #4

English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.

That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it.

"So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other? The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system. “The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#29
post #21

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

> be consistent in your formal writing

But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK). The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#30
post #27
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I await their verdict on liker (to like on Facebook) with interest.

It will be obviously rejected. It is too English-y. Better use good French-sounding words like "jogging" and "parking". Have you heard how we are supposed to call a follower (on Twitter)? "Acolyte des illustres" This is not a joke, see for yourself this post dated "not a 1st of April": https://www.academie-francaise.fr/followers

In Spanish they use seguidores: literally followers. Why can’t they do something like that in French?
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