France commits idiotic act to try to show it is superior to America... bans "e-mail"

[Richelieu]

I translate emails from english to french every day and i use "courriel", but i'm not even certain that it is the term the govt. recommends. The Canadian govt. has an online french-english dictionary that public servants are supposed to use. I'll have a look at it tomorrow to see what they recommend.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
You guys are missing the point. In a hundred years when the term "email" is as firmly entrenched in the lexicon as any other word and the French government looks really really stupid for using "courriel", they'll "discover" that email actually has a French root and change their guidelines to match...

That didn't stop them from banning jeans or weekend.

[Richelieu]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
That didn't stop them from banning jeans or weekend.

They can try all they want to ban "jeans": it's never going to go away. That one is firmly embedded.

As for "weekend", that one is kind of interesting. The French actually use it much more than the Quebecois actually, as is the case for many english expressions. And i find that the use of "weekend" in Quebec is a good indicator of how pro-France you are.
I always say "fin de semaine".

[HershOstropoler]

I think it is much better to mangle english words into the domestic one. For example, I'd say "I schick da a Mail", where "Mail" is pronounced like "Mehl" (flour).

That way people can only complain about "improper" pronounciation.

[TCO]

Originally posted by DAVOUT



Badly wrong.

Who said : when I hear the world Kultur I take my gun ?

3rd Reich Minister of Propaganda Goebbels.

You should revise some ideas of yours.

And he did...take his gun.

[FrustratedPoet]

What a load of silly fuss about nothing.

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
That didn't stop them from banning jeans or weekend.

I use daily an edition of the Larousse dictionnary printed in 1948 where weekend is listed as expected (written week-end). As for jeans and the Académie Française, you probably dont know that the last edition of their dictionnary was completed in 1935, and the following edition, the tenth since the inception of this institution in 1635, has its second volume (including the letter J) currently published. You will accept that the Académie could not have an opinion on jeans in 1935, and we soon will see if this word is now included in the 60000 words of the common language.

Some posters here dont know that the Académie has only a moral authority, and is not bound by the decisions of the governement; in several occasions, they made public their objections to some crazy initiatives. The power to ban cannot exist without sanction, and the only power of the Académie is the prestige of its members. Amongst the 40 Immortals, are present to-day :
Michel Serres, philosophe
Henri Toyat, écrivain
Claude Levy-Strauss, ethnologue
François Jacob, médecin (Nobel Prize)
Jean-Marie Lustiger, cardinal
Pierre Mesmer, former prime minister
Jean-François Revel, philosophe

With 33 others of the same caliber, they have proven that they were able to speak and write properly our language, and they attend it with great care and competence in order to let it evolve without loosing what we like so much.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Yet I'm the dumb one because I'm not making a knee-jerk assumption based on my own cultural prejudices.

You are too sure about this for me to believe that it's true.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov

Oh yeah, the article--from an American newspaper. I must point out how the Culture Ministry did not ban the use of "Spam" or "Chat," which were also given the alternative Frenchisms of "pourriel" and "clavardage." They didn't adopt them because they didn't think doing so was practical, as the English terms work fine. "E-mail" is not easy to say in French, that's just the way it is.

Actually chat was allowed because a computer illiterate at the Academie thought it was a French, when it is actually a false cognate.

[Richelieu]

Just checked the Canadian government website. The acccepted terms to use to translate e-mail are messagerie électronique, courrier électronique, courriel, mél (!), and imelle (!).
Never heard of the last two but they both appear to be ways to phoneticaly write "mail" and "email" in french.

[Rogan Josh]

As you may or may not know, I live in France, and I can honestly say it is the least xenophobic place I have ever lived.

If anyone is xenophobic it is you lot for your attitude toward the French. They are a great people - polite, friendly and welcoming.

And the word 'email' is not banned in the sense that you imply - that I am not allowed to say 'email'! It is simply that it will no longer be regarded as 'French'. So if something is to be written exclusively in French, 'email' cannot be used.

Seems fair enough to me. I don't see 'Yo nigga'' being used in many official US documents.

[mindseye]

France commits idiotic act to try to show it is superior to America... bans "e-mail"

Hey Vesayen, can you point out where in the article it says that France did this to show it was "superior" to the US?

I didn't think so.



French culture.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by mindseye
French culture.

Agreed but I think it exhibits more than a little paranoia on there part that they feel the need start "banning" English words. Hence the large amount of derision in this thread toward them.

/me points to his earlier comment on the English language

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Richelieu


They can try all they want to ban "jeans": it's never going to go away. That one is firmly embedded.

As for "weekend", that one is kind of interesting. The French actually use it much more than the Quebecois actually, as is the case for many english expressions. And i find that the use of "weekend" in Quebec is a good indicator of how pro-France you are.
I always say "fin de semaine".

Hmm. So do I, and I'm anglophone...

[KrazyHorse]

DD, in other words "weekend" is not really even as common as "email".

Weekend really is the sort of thing that shouldn't make it into government documents written in French. Not because you're polluting the language, but because it sounds uneducated (at least to me).