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
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
Let's try and do a better search... For example, let's use google.com, not google.ca, type in real French words, and search all sites written in French, not .fr sites only; let's also take into account a very common mispelling. Which gives:
What can we conclude? I don't know, except that the article I'm responding to is not very accurate.
Xavier
Do I make sense? Please report if not.
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.
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.
Your numbers are not accurate -- you got them mixed up.
Here are some *real* numbers, using the same searches as you made (all french language sites):
"courriel" -- 247,000
"courrier électronique" OR "courrier electronique" -- 423,000
email OR e-mail -- 3,050,000
---
Clearly, the original poster's conclusion was accurate -- "email" is still the most widely used term on french speaking web sites by an order of magnitude.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
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.