To name something is to own it.
I don’t know what’s more annoying: the pedantry of French bureaucrats, or the pedantry of American conservatives who like to pick on them. And no one brings those two together quite like the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Thus this article on a (heretofore unknown to me) French bureaucratic commission tasked with inventing French equivalents of foreign (in practice, American-originated English) words or phrases that make their way in the French vernacular.
In linguistics as in many other cases, I am somewhat of an outlier for a French guy. Whenever the subject comes up (rarely), it is usually split between curmudgeons who think it is an outrage to use any foreign (read: American) words in French prose, and dilettantes who just don’t give a damn about proper language. I love the French language, but also love new technologies (and to do so, in France, is to use English in every sentence). I reject cultural protectionism, and yet believe in the uniqueness of French culture and language.
What to say? That the efforts of this commission and others like it are doomed? Of course. That it is sadly risible that the people staffing it are so out of touch that they did not understand the term “cloud computing” or think it was a trend important enough to deserve their attention? Sure.
French was once the lingua franca (heh) of the world, and it looks like it won’t be for the foreseeable future. The people with the tailored suits and the smattering of degrees who are doing this are really troglodytes, wasting their time (and my money, as a French taxpayer) on a quixotic rearguard fight.
A cursory look at any French daily newspaper will tell the educated reader that what French writers need is not an education in English-to-French translation but, tragically, a course of basic grammar and spelling. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I have a vested interest in this, since the company I’m starting deals with precisely this issue.)
The French government, meanwhile, far from protecting the French language, actually attacks it on all fronts. Misguided government directives in the late nineties pushed for the feminization of the names of professions, in contempt of the actual rule of French grammar, which is that the masculine gender is also the neutral gender. (A note to all the chairwomen and chairpersons out there: this is also true for English. But at least chez les Anglo-Saxons grammatical vandalism has been privatized.)
The WSJ article correctly points out that the French Constitution holds French to be the national language, drawing on legal precedent dating back to the 16th century (or even the 9th, but postulating this leads to hair-splitting), but the government has been not only tolerating but encouraging the proliferation of regional languages and other patois, a slap in the face of centuries of tradition and policy.
And of course the French government leaves school teaching methods and programs up to the radical left-wing unions since May 68, which has resulted in an appalling drop in education standards. My future father in law, who doesn’t have a high school diploma, has impeccable spelling, unlike many of my classmates at my top-ranked school.
Like an economy, I believe culture thrives best when open. The historical evidence that languages in general, and French in particular, are enriched by additions from other languages, is overwhelming, as any reader of Rabelais can see. The common sense proposition that the proper use of language cannot be mandated beyond the classroom, but evolves organically, seems self-evident to me.
A government which claims to protect French culture but undermines it on one side, backward-looking troglodytes on the other, and me, stuck in the middle with them.
Le sigh.
Great post. Interesting how I always assume that other people care for their languages better than we Americans do.
It’s worth noting, perhaps, that good things can come from allowing your language to be word-acquisitive. English does this easily and naturally because it is lightly inflected and highly dependent on word order — so you can just grab helpful words and stick them into your sentences. This acquisitiveness means that the potential English vocabulary is enormous, which is unwieldy at times but which also brings a great deal of energy to our conversations and debates and our literature also.
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 14, 04:00 PM · #
I wonder, though, if it’s anything like in French how it is in English, where people say that the masculine is also the neutral, but when you actually use it like that – say, “a person may find that his purse is a great place to put his tampons” – it sounds weird. (Part of it, also, is that while men may not blink at the association of maleness and neutrality, women are much more likely to perceive the implicit othering going on, there.)
I don’t think a gendered term can be neutral, frankly. That gendered association is always present.
— Chet · Oct 14, 04:41 PM · #
I have to question the assertion that “French was once the lingua franca of the world.”
— Sanjay · Oct 14, 04:54 PM · #
“French linguistic legislation started in 1593. That year, King François I ousted Latin as his country’s administrative language and replaced it with French.”
Wasn’t Francois I long dead by 1593?
— Foose · Oct 14, 05:23 PM · #
Alan Jacobs everybody!
And nice post, PEG, on an interesting topic.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 14, 07:43 PM · #
Alan: Great comment. Fully agree.
Chet: That’s certainly not an indefensible point of view.
Sanjay: Why do you think the expression “lingua franca” exists, and not, say, “lingua espagnola”? From roughly the 12th Century to the 19th Century, the language of royal courts, diplomacy and trade was French. Famously (thanks to Tolstoy), members of the Russian court spoke French better than Russian. Etc.
Foose: Nice catch! The precedent dates back from 1539, actually.
Kristoffer: Thanks.
— PEG · Oct 15, 12:57 PM · #
Alan’s comment reminds me of how often I’ve heard people say, “Things are so much better/sophisticated/free/whatever in Europe.” Of course in my case they’re talking about sexuality/censorship, and they’re wrong.
I had heard about the French government making some odd rules about what words can and cannot be used, but didn’t realize the extent. Odd things happen when you dictate to people what ideas they are permitted to have, and how they must express them.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 15, 01:41 PM · #
PEG: my issue is with your “of the world,” which region is in fact bigger than Europe.
— Sanjay · Oct 15, 02:14 PM · #
Although even your examples have daggers: I associate French with the Russian court under Catherine, but German with the Russian court under Peter.
— Sanjay · Oct 15, 02:15 PM · #
Sanjay: I take your point re: “of the world.”
And re: Peter, I might be wrong about this, but my sense is that even though he was influenced by German theories and practices of State, he and his court still spoke French.
Tony: Yep.
— PEG · Oct 15, 03:16 PM · #
I love some of the French slang that incorporates bits of English. When I was teaching English in France, I frequently heard my students tell one another “On y go”, which phrase appeared briefly in an advert for McDo, I believe.
It’s pretty hard to imagine oldish bureaucrats, who I would guess aren’t mostly technologists, being able to keep up with all the neologisms that the tech industry throws out.
— TW Andrews · Oct 16, 08:54 PM · #
I’m generally a prescriptivist when it comes to language. Sure, languages change, but many of the changes are for the worse. Many of the new terms developed by high tech plus marketing are ugly-sounding, carelessly derived and redundant. Consider “podcasting”, which by rights ought to refer to a manner of planting beans. What does podcasting have to do with my downloading a song onto my laptop? The French term “balladodiffusion” not only is consistent with the rest of the language, but actually describes what it is supposed to do. Or consider “logiciel”, so much more precise than “program”.
(Even in English, do we really need “cloud computing”? What’s wrong with “online services”, which at least is a meaningful description?)
The Commission is amusingly, quintessentially Hexagonally, bureaucratic. They will often pick terms that are worse than the English import, or that no one will ever use. But they are making the effort to find a term that is better; I wish them good luck.
Nos langues sont des jardins; il faut les cultiver.
— M. Grégoire · Oct 16, 09:21 PM · #
You’re supposed to download it onto your iPod. Does that help it make sense now? That it’s a way of broadcasting to people’s iPods?
Besides the fact that “cloud computing” is actually the more meaningful term of the two, or that those two terms refer to two different things? Sure, it’s meaningless to you, but that’s because you don’t know what you’re talking about, or what it refers to. Most of the terms you object to, I suspect, fit that description.
Personally I hate the French approach to technological nomenclature. “Magnetoscope”? Really?
— Chet · Oct 19, 05:01 AM · #
In this case I favor the pedantry of the American conservatives. But it’s amusing how these things work. The Ojibwe language was once the lingua franca for the Great Lakes region and beyond, in what is now the U.S. and Canada. It borrowed a few words from the French, but if you suggest that their “hello” word came from the French bonjour, you can get your head bit off by those Anishinabe people who insist it has an Anishinabe etymology.
So maybe the commission should change its methods. Instead of prescribing the words to be used, it could invent and prescribe an official etymology. That would remove the futility from their jobs, while ensuring that they and their salaries are still needed.
— The Reticulator · Oct 19, 12:58 PM · #
Thanks for explaining the etymology of podcasting. I thought kids these days were still listening to music on their phonographs, or maybe over the wireless. So much to learn…
— M. Grégoire · Oct 21, 04:38 PM · #