Slashdot Mirror
French Government Bans Term 'E-Mail'
Licensed2Hack writes "'Goodbye "e-mail," the French government says, and hello "courriel" -- the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.' .
Curriel? 'Hey Pierre, curriel me those sales figures.' Just sounds wrong!" Especially if you don't actually speak french ;)
Uh, because the guy us a Francophone? It's still French whether it's in Canada or France. Mind you, there are definite differences between Quebec and France French, but they are still the same language.
In QC, Anglophones are a hated minority. Everything is tilted to the advantage of the French. Anglo universities don't get any of the juicy funding that the French ones do and so on. It is illegal to put up a sign where French and English have equal prominence. It must be all French or the English must be smaller.
Btw, there is no Canadian flag in front of the Quebec government buildings ;-)
Er- If you are Google Translator, yes.
Otherwise, it'd be more like
Hé Pierre, courriel moi ces graphiques de ventes !
Which sounds just as stupid, I agree.
theefer
Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
Greek: 5.32%
No etymology given: 4.03%
Derived from proper names: 3.28%
All other languages contributed less than 1%
I tried to find a word count for French vs. English lexicons, but unfortunately after about 15 googlings I came to the concensus that you can't count how big a lexicon is, only the number of words in a dictionary. I remember a high school teacher telling me that there are about 100,000 words in the French lexicon, though. English is a magnitude larger, and impossible to give a straight answer- do you include technical words? medical words? colloquial words?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Incredible, but the majority of the world do not speak English. And, more incredible than Ca, UNO did not prohibit the use of the languages not-English. The axis of the evil, one should add these monkeys which like cheese and always goes. And UNO, it is a friend of the terrorists who wanted to remove the language of God with these diabolic terms. When one writes "courriel", one gives support has Osama Bin Laden
One would use the verb 'envoyer', so no 'courriel' in that sentence. It's a very specific feature of English that almost any noun can be verbed, as you did.
It's "pourriel" which is a mix of courriel and "pourriture" (pourrie) which means "rotten".
I dont knw if the term has been officialy accepted, but it's been pending for a few years now.
couriel OR couriell site:fr 730 results
"courrier electronique" site:fr 1,340 results
From the article: "The ministry's General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail".
Interesting definition of "broadly" when it's apparently used 200 times less than "email".
What's funny is that William the Conquerer was a Norman. The Normans (north men) were Danes who had invaded and settled in the north-west of france. Marrying the local women, their offspring spoke a bastardised French that was quite different to the regular French language. When Will conquered England he conquered it from regular Danes who had already influenced the local language. If you listen to English people from the north or south of the country, you will hear French influenced intonation in the south, and Scandinavian influenced intonation in the north.
Come on, now: "admin" can mean a lot of different things, most of them not related to IT. If you mean "network administrator" you'll have to use, let's see, 21 characters. Don't be silly.
Actually there is a pretty common pidgin spoken in Quebec, particularly in the cities, which goes (half-jokingly) by the name Franglais. It goes way beyond the use of Anglicisms. Both French and English vocabulary mix together, but even more interestingly, the grammars seem to mix seamlessly, resulting in utterences like:
"Wanting you du biere?"
(translation: "Do you want some beer?")
lysergically yours
In Québec, spam is called "pourriel". See this link http://www.olf.gouv.qc.ca/ressources/bibliotheque/ dictionnaires/Internet/fiches/8875226.html
Anyways, I have heard the term "courriel" years ago. It is not a new word, it is just not widely used. As for the matter, most languages I know don't use "e-mail". Usually we refer to "e-mail" as "mail". That can be quite confusing when talking to an english person. If you say "mail me it", they often look in a confused way like "what? by snailmail"?
The only place where you will see "courriel" is in administrative documents. The general populace will stick to "mail" or "courrier éléctronique" (which *is* widely used)
I don't think you can blame the French to try to keep a national identity by adapting their language. After all, they have words for about anything in IT. Think of "télécharger" (to download), or "ordinateur" (computer), or "carte graphique" (graphics card). The funniest one for me is "octet" instead of "byte", but that is mainly because I always thought that the difference between "octet" and "byte" is the bit-alignment.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Are you kidding ? We love the Quebec accent :-)
sometimes they use some words we could find funny, but that's it. I never heard somebody saying that he "does not like Quebec french". And really, people love Quebec (at least that's my point of view, and I think it's shared by a majority of french ! ). Mind you, a french-speaking country in the love-hated america's continent...
Interestingly, the Commission gives IBM-France credit for "ordinateur".
see http://www.cfwb.be/franca/pg011.htm
>"ordinateur" a remplacé "computer" depuis 1955 à
> la demande d'IBM-France.
RTFA. They're not telling how people should speak, just that courriel is to replace "e-mail" in "government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites".
Total an utter slandering.
Ever heard of McGill University in downtown Montreal? Go take a walk there, you won't feel like it's not getting it's "Juicy Share". If 80% of the students are french, don't it make sense that french universities get 80% of the funding. There is no "tilt", it's just common sense.
If you don't know what the hell you're talking about, why do you bother talking about it, and why is this "informative".
FYI, the english are not a hated minority. Go to Montreal yourself, go to a restaurant, and you WILL be served in english with a smile. If you go outside of Montreal (like real far, 100+miles) you probably will run into some places where they don't talk english, because they don't need to.
I was born from francophone parents that were bilingual, and now I work anywhere from the southeast US to Northwest Ontario to the Maritimes. And I've been told in some backwater places that I shouldn't be allowed to speak french to my french technicians. But I don't judge every single anglophone because of a handful of bigot rednecks.
Remember bigotry starts with ignorance and gross generalization, it's seems to be just fashionable when it's against french speaking people. Quebec and France history has been separated since about thirty years before France's Revolution. The people in France and Quebec have a radically different history in the past 243 years.
More like :
:)
Hé Pierre, envoie-moi par courriel les derniers résultats des ventes !
But I don't mind some laughs at the babelfish/systran translation
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
why did they deicde to use a word a French-Speaking Canadian came up with?
Because the French may feel their langauage is threatened on a global scale, they don't worry about it as much on a *local* scale.
That is to say, the French obviously aren't worried about the French language losing its toe-hold in Paris. The Quebecois, on the other hand, have to be much more vigilant to prevent the loss of their language, surrounded as they are by the rest of (English-speaking) Canada and the U.S. So they are more likely to come up with new words.
Another example of this is the Flemish (Dutch-speaking Belgians), who are vigilant against the encroachment of (ironically) the French language. So you have the same situation: the Dutch themselves are more than happy to import English and French words (and they do all the time). The Flemish however will make up a 'real' Dutch word to use.
I remember the word "washing-machine" as an example, but I forget the words - any Dutch speakers out there want to tell me what the Dutch and the Flemish use to say this?
Speaking as another, more politically-and-culturally-minded anglophone in Quebec, for the benefit of all those on slashdot, while I agree that "hated minority" is an overstatement, it may not be too far off the mark and I would hardly call it igorance. It's an awareness. Not only are Anglophones in minority but they have fewer privilages with respect to their language than francophones. Anytime a government takes specific steps to inconvenience or discriminate against one group of people for reasons of beliefs, language, culture, etc, there is a problem.
This is not a case of poor application of "linguistic" equal opportunity. Nor is this a case of poor reasoning, "Oh, look, we have more than twice as many francophones as anglophones, therefore the french type on all signs should be at least twice as large!" This is not even a case of ignorance on the part of the Quebec government -- No, these laws are clear, direct, were passed with intent, designed to be abused.
Many laws specifically refer to english as it relates to french and many laws use the mother tounge of a citizen or of his parents as justification to alter the rules.
Case in point, English public schooling is a perticularly sticky topic here in Quebec: It's all here. Many francophone parents are realizing that learning proper English is important in today's world. Not that we all won't still have our mother tounges, with which we can speak whenever we want, but for business and academics, for critical technical discussion, English is the prefered medium. But because of close-minded aspirations of nationalism and cultural purity, generations of governements here in Quebec have managed to legislate, against the will of many Quebecers, any purely francophone couple sending their children to English school. This is discrimination against potential anglophones. One of many. Immigrants are not permitted to study in English-language schools either.
It is also wise to note that the Quebec laws are only operating under a loophole in Canadian law. Otherwise they would not be constitutional and certainly a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And if you're confused or maybe you disagree with my appraisal of the situation citing bais or prejudice, you need only look up a few choice addresses of either Levesque or Parizeau to get a good impression right from the horses mouth.
Apparently you did not look close enough:
"government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites"
The French are free to use whatever word they want.
In Quebec, the term courriel has been used almost exclusively since the beginning of email. In English, email is made from Electronic Mail and guess what! Courriel is made from Courrier Electronique, which literally means Electronic Mail. What I am saying is that France is lagging behind in the initiative to make "courriel" the official word. Nothing spiteful in the descision.
Most of the countires in northern europe speaks some branch of the germanic laungue-group (finnish and hungarian are the major exeption). The norsemen spoke - obviously as it may seem - a lingo often called norse, or old nordic. Even back then there was a noticable difference between what the swedes, the danes and we norwegians spoke. The old norweigans spoke a subvariant frequently called 'old norwegian' (yes, it is blindingly obvious), which were spread to Iceland, Greenland and the illfated colonies in Vinland (north america). In fact, the spoken language of Iceland is very close to the norse tounge.
Useless fact; the english didn't have a seperate word for dying of hunger until the vikings had been visiting for a few years.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
In my opinion, email is fairly neutral-- its basis may be English, but global usage has sanitized it of any sort of unique nationalism. Perhaps then this is just a tit for tat move to highlight the pettiness of a certain anti-Gallic linguistic maneuver made by Americans earlier this year, i.e. "freedom fries"?
In any case, the ban only refers to governmental related documents and web material. There is surely a similar provision in place in the States for federal documents.
Nothing is ever black or white, especially in politics ! There was and there still is abuse on both sides. But you clearly don't have any clue about what's going on over here ....
OK The hows this for black and white. Quebec forces the whole of the rest of Canada to be Bi-Lingual (costing billions of dollars and effectively rendering Canada banckrupt for several generations).
This means all public signs and official documentation must give equal prominence to French as English even in far flung places as rural BC where a French speaker is about as common as rocking horse shit, and then several years later passes a law to exclude itself from its very own law so that Quebec can legally be 100% French language (or have English displayed less prominently). In fact as if that isn't enough they then make it ILLEGAL to display English equally as prominently as French on signs in Quebec.
Can anyone lucidly and consisely defend this outrageous behaviour? I thought not. Like most things French it is indefensable (including France apparently)
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They used to have a word "mél" (for "message electronique"), which was officially encouraged in place of email, the trouble is nobody used it. Courriel however is widely used, though until now unofficial. They also have official words for "web" and (I think) "internet" but nobody uses those either. The trouble with "email" is that it (or rather, "émail") already means "enamel" in French.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Minor nits on the status of English schools in Québec.
Any private school is free to offer an English only curriculum, as long as they don't receive money from the government (the vast majority of private schools receive some, usually more than what parents pay per child, and not that far from what public schools receive).
Also, children of parents who studied mostly in English in Canada (not only Québec) can attend public English school, which offer the same things (although in English rather than in French) than other French public school. Are there Spanish public schools in the southern US?
Another point: all this applies to elementary and secondary schools only. College and up are not bound by those rules, so you're free to get your higher education in whatever language you want, even in public institutions.
Two last things: please note that the teaching language is an object of debate here since quite a few years now, and that the main goal of the past and existing (and probably future) laws on the subject is to facilitate the integration of immigrants to the majority French-speaking population. And it's entirely possible to attend public French school and become quite accustomed to English, provided you practice outside. A second language practiced a few hours per week won't be perfected, you need much more practice in reading, listening, speaking and writing for that.
well, i'm French student, so forgive me if i make some mistakes.
1) In France this news had not been commented. Personnaly i read this news on 'slashdot'...
2) Governement don't want to impose one way to speak French.
3) Spoken language and written language are two things completely differents. So with official papers, they must use french language. It is not a 'nationalist' behavior but it is for respect the 'traditions'.
4) Personnaly i think in my spoken language i will use 'email' term and in written language i will use 'courriel'.
5) I think the word 'courriel' is pretty, it is a good translation.
Sébastien from Marseille (South of France), France (Old Europe), European Union.
Child Labour in Europe
Worst Forms of Child Labour Data: Iceland For the year 2000, the ILO projects that there will be 0 economically active children between the ages of 10-14. (ILO, International Labour Office - Bureau of Statistics, Economically Active Population 1950-2010, STAT Working Paper, ILO 1997)Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I'm quite amazed by these allegations... See, I work for a national laboratory in France, so I know quite a bit what it is to work as a scientist, and I can tell you that I can introduce new terminology without having some kind of government approval! (hey, I do science, I don't design government forms!). I publish what I want, basically.
I publish my papers in English not because of some terminology problems but because of very simple realities: if I publish in French, I reduce my readership to French-speaking countries; furthermore, the selectivity of the journals or conferences in which I publish will be lower, thus less considered scientifically.
The problem with French terminology is when people insist on translating English words in their own way. For the same English phrase, you get several French ones, depending on who thought it was a good idea to do in this or that way. The official terminology commission would perhaps be of some help with settling on a common word if it knew anything about science.
For me, the problem arises when we write our official reports. Since these are official government reports, they must be written in French (if only because citizens must be able to read reports about government activities). We have our moments of "how the heck do we translate 'branching-time logic' into French?".
Apart from that, the point is that:
- this terminology commission acts on official government communication; private corporations or individuals may follow its advice if they feel like it;
- anyway, except for public relations and administrative services, few people in government give a damn about it; we also ignore official rules on WWW sites.
You're missing my point. Either this word is not really arabic, or it _has_ been changed in pronunciation and/or spelling, which is essentially what the French have done:
Algebra: From al-jabr. Different spelling and pronunciation.
Admiral: Probably the closest one, but this is mostly from Old French and Medieval Latin.
Algorithm: From "algorism". Different spelling.
Assassin: From "hassass", or "hashish user". It wasn't the present form until it passed through French and Italian, at which point it came into English.
Arsenal: Actually italian "arsenale", which is from arabic "assina'a".
Anyway, I could go on and on. The point here is we've changed all of these words in some manner or another to fit into our language better. It flows better and sounds better. This is simply what the French are doing with their own choice of words.
-Shippy
Feel free to emigrate. No really, feel free. If you really are as unhappy as you say you are, then nobody would want you to have to put up with that.
I am really curious which countries you are talking about that do not have corruption, greed, or advertisements, because I would like to put those next on my list.
These are unfortunate facts of most countries, and while you may be too involved with the romantic adventure of your travels to see them, I would bet they exist right in front of your eyes, wherever you are.
The trick is to see the people and who they really are, and not to pass judgement on a people because of their government or the actions of a minority. -- Even your home country, but that is usually the most difficult.
Happy travels, and next time buy a one way ticket, you just might be glad you did, I know we will.
it's not silly !
first : "Tchatche" is the way to write in french the english word "chat", as a feench word "chat" already exist, it's a cat.
second, "tchatcher" that means "speak a lot" was already existing !
what do you want more ?
every thing that is not US-identified is silly for you ?
The Romans had a perfectly good word for 'king': rex. This is cognate with words like rajah in Indic languages, righ/rí in Irish gaelic and the suffix '-ric' in Early German names like 'Alaric'. For political reasons, rex became disparaged after Rome became a republic. Thus, when Julius Caesar et al became effective kings of Rome, they could not call themselves that, so they used a perfectly acceptable military term: 'commander' imperator. Julius' surname later became synonymous with the position as well.
Thus in French you get Roy, derived directly from rex, which is found in England in Norman names like 'FitzRoy' (Son of the King). English imported many Latin words directly, so someone can be 'regal'. Imperator turned into Empereur (my spelling may be off, je ne parlez pas Français...) and 'Emperor', which was used as a rank of kingship over and above that of 'king'.
'Caesar' was borrowed into the Teutonic and Slavic lands, as you said, as Kaiser, Tsar (and Czar comes to mind also, but I am not sure from where. Hungary?).
'King' derives from the Germanic word which was 'cyning' in Anglo-Saxon, and is 'könig' or similar in many German and Scandinavian languages.
Mind you, that many of these terms are understandable, and even familiar, means that the chains of borrowing are extensive and convoluted.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Seen from Scandinavia, this seems rather funny. I live in the southernmost country of Scandinavia, Denmark, and our language has always been thwarted with foreign words (or so we like to think). Lately, English is on the rise, as most terms in the ever more ubiqotous (English is not my native language...) computer-oriented world, are easier to express with the given name/term/identifier/handle than it would be to express the term in a meaningful way in one's native tongue.
:-)
The only example, that I am 100% sure of is Iceland. I do not write Icelandic fluently, so I will make my points via translations to Danish and then continue...
In Iceland, a computer is called a "telda". That means "A device for counting". We may snicker at that, but it applies to all sorts of words: Here in Denmark, a hairdresser is called a "frisør", which obviously is lent from French "friseur". In Iceland, it is "hårskærer", meaning "cutter of hair"
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
I'd like to clear up a few points. French words will be emphasized.
The decision referred to in the article is purely administrative: it sets a standard for use in government documents, not the for the people at large, who are still free to speak and use words as they see fit. A lot of foreign words have their official French counterparts, but quite often people do not use them. For example, when Sony coined the word "walkman", l'Académie française, which is the highest authority on the French language, coined and try and impose the word "baladeur" to take its place, but it never took off. Funnily enough, in the unlikely field of computers, a few words coined to take the place of English words did enjoy great success, such as ordinateur for "computer", logiciel for "software" (so "Free Software" is Logiciel Libre), informatique for "computer science" or "computer-related", etc.
On the other hand, French speaking people do use a lot of "foreign" words. For example, just restricting oneself to fast foods, the French eat a lot of sandwichs, some of them being hot dogs, others hamburgers (which simply means "from Hamburg" in German, but still, the word with this meaning came from English) or paninis, but most of the time they still are the traditionnal jambon-beurre (butter and ham sandwich). All these words are in my Larousse 1998 French dictionnary, except for the last. Go figure. And a lot more words were originally foreign but are now felt as perfectly integrated into the language, sometimes with a few alterations, such as budget, (same word), or paquebot (liner, comes from the English "packet-boat").
As for the word e-mail, it stands for electronic mail, the correct translation of which is of course courrier électronique, which is quite cumbersome to use. People, being lazy and bad typists, felt the need for a shorter word, just as the English has, and so, with no better idea, they used e-mail or even mail. In Quebec, they coined courriel which is a smart and evocative contraction of courrier électronique, just the kind of thing that the Quebecers would do. In France, they coined the ugly mél, which sounds about the same when read as mail (to sound exactly the same, they should have written meille, which is too cute; if you want the "e-" part, just add "i" in front the word for the sound, or "é-" for the abbreviation), but it was never widely used. So after a few years, they finally decided to go the Quebec way, since at least it seems to enjoy some kind of popularity.
A few other points: Internet is considered a proper noun, so it does not need to be translated, just to be capitalized. There are French words for "net" and "web" (réseau and toile, so Internet would be "Interéseau"), but most people would use le Net and le Web. French nouns cannot be used as verbs as-is as the English usually does. One has to add some kind of ending to make it work, which gives for example un voile, voiler for "a veil, to veil" (but note that "a sail, to sail" is une voile, naviguer).
Do I make sense? Please report if not.
The real "canadiens" were french speaking until about 150 years ago.
The English residents of Canada considered themselves "British Colonial" subjects or English. - even until quite recently (witness the flag debate in the 1960s - very very heated and vitriolic exchanges). "Canadian" was a term almost exclusively synonymous with "french Canadian".
Once French was crushed and destroyed as a viable language outside of Quebec and English Dominion Subjects began to refer to themselves as Canadian - French Canadians in Quebec (in conjunction with the "Quiet Revolution" and growing nationalism) were driven to culturally disociated themselves from the term adopting instead the term "Québecois".
Vive le Québec.
Beep Wrong, the french say "McDo", and pronounce it something like McDoh....
D.
Another possibility offered by the Académie française is to use "mél". This word sounds like the English word "mail" and comes from "message électronique". So what do you prefer ? French people use "e-mail" and don't care...