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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 ;-)
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.
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)
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.