The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
1–10 of 203 posts
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#2The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#3Truly a very French bunch of elitist old farts, l’academie.
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#4The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
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.
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#5The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
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 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.
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#6The Académie earlier this month "voted by an overwhelming majority to approve a report compiled by three of its five female members that recommended ending its centuries-old official ban on feminizing the names of professions and trades."
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 eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#7Earlier 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…
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?)
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#8Earlier 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…
Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#9Earlier 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…
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?
Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
#10Earlier 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?
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-lordinate...