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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 ;)
The more interesting fact is the word "courriel" was coined by a professor in Montreal.
If the French are working so hard to keep their language pure, why did they deicde to use a word a French-Speaking Canadian came up with?
Mike
France and other countries have had to suffer long enough using english vocabulary for tech related terminology.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I speak french, and I just find this "oh-quick-translate-this-english-words" habit sickening. This word, courriel, is crap. It just sucks hard. (and you're lucky, this is not the worst!).
I help translate the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter from english to french, but I'll really find me sick if I have to write courriel instead of email. English-speaking people don't bitch about "rendez-vous", "à propos", etc. This french habit is just arrogance.
I'll keep using email, internet, web, thank you very much.
theefer
I'm not quite sure whether it's clear to everyone here, but as much as the French may be nationalistic, their youth is hardly unaccostomed to borrowing from English, and if anyone thinks this is going to make a significant impact, they're probably mistaken, take it from someone living awefully close to France. Look even at the word download, important yet far less ubiquitous than e-mail - the term "telecharger" is used, but hardly always, and any avid French internet user will recognise "download" in a second... Had your "freedom fries" lately? What, you still call them french fries? Maybe a national lexicon isn't quite so easy to change...
About 4 or 5 years ago, the "Academie Francaise" ( ie "The French Academy" a society of about 40 french writers who decide what words must be use in correct french language) stated that the most valid french translation for "E-Mail" was "Mel" (with an accent) which doesn't get pronounced exactly like the english word "mail" but, well, almost. They got heavily criticized for that and some people argued that "Courriel" which was used in Quebec was far better. (which, I think, is true). Nowadays, the french state ( which is NOT the "Academie Francaise") choses to use the word "Courriel" at last. We're just 4 years late. Our canadian cousins were true.
Except that i think that the 'freedom' movement never got mucsupport even in Capitol Hill. Now if french fries were orginally Iraqi fries, I think maybe the whole freedom thing would have caught on. After all it happened before in United states. Have you ever eaten Home Fries, remember that before the World War (1 or 2 i forget) they were called German Fries.
Just a guy with an opinion
Firstly they are not banning the use of the word e-mail in the french language. They are setting guidelines for government websites and publications. Here in Iceland we regularly "domesticate" forreign words for daily use and often it works quite well. A few samples: Monitor = Skjar (Skjar was a word for windows (made from cow's stomachs) around 1000 years ago. Computer = Tölva (Made to match icelandic grammar and uses a form of the icelandic word for "number") E-Mail = Tölvupóstur/Rafpóstur (Computer mail/Electronig mail) Only used in "official" publications but usually not in day by day conversations. But then again...we have some fiascos as well that are never used by anyone :)
But I understand and support the French in trying to keep the language somewhat clean of forreign words where it is possible.
This is precicely why we don't care. Our language is already the mutt you describe. We have nothing to protect anymore. It wasn't always is such an aweful state. English was a beautifully expressive language back in Shakesphere's day. Now we don't even have a plural for the word "you" which is why people are always saying things like "yall" "yous" "alayal" and, the worst one IMHO, "you guys"! Actually "you was the plural. But you would get arrested for using the singular, "thou".
But I digress. The French just don't want this to happen to their language.
Did you know the german word for "Admin"? It's "Netzwerkadministrator" ...a word with fsckin' 21 chars :-/
Speaking as an American living in Germany, sometimes it amazes me how arbitrary the decision of using borrowed or translated computer terminology is. My favorite as of late is "worst-case Laufzeit" (worst case runtime). Worst-case is something which can be applied to many other fields, but run time is generally confined (at least as far as I know) to the time it takes for a computer to do something. Yet, they translate the individual parts of the English compound to form a new German compound, while leaving the more broadly used word in the original English.
Actually, I don't think this is a bad idea. I don't know if we should be regulating it as such, but its not exactly without precedence (child labor laws). The main problem is that the American 50 hour work week (Americans take less days of in a year than the *Japanese*) is destroying the social structure. You've suddenly got a whole bunch of children who effectively grow up with part-time parents, and it really shows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Since Hormel doesn't want their trademark for meat or whatever it is used to describe unsolicited commercial email, I propose we use the word curriel. It sounds just as descriptive as spam.
... we find these new words as stupid as the organizations who try to promote them, only some companies websites are using these words
Browser is also translated by "brouteur", which can means pussy sucker in some cases. Hey this new cunilingus (Mozilla) is pretty nice.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I worked with a component engineer whose job was to scour the world for cheaper parts. If he could save a penny on resistors for just one product, he paid his own way. He had shelves of data books, and said the absolute last resort was the French books. German, even Japanese, he could at least make a preliminary stab at understanding, because they used the common English words, even if the rest was Greek (ha ha) to him. The French ones used so many artificial bogus terms that he had too much trouble with them.
I always wondered how much business the French firms lost because their technical books were politically correct rather than useful.
Infuriate left and right
Some years ago, I read an article by a French scientist who explained why he wrote all his papers in English rather than in his native French.
He explained that, as a scientist, one of his important tasks was helping devise good scientific terminology. The scientific community has come up with a very effective approach: If someone has good terminology for what you need, you use it rather than inventing your own. But if you can give a good reason why preceding terminology doesn't work well, you are not only allowed but expected to propose better terminology, and explain it in your paper.
He went on to explain that, if he were to publish in French, any new terminology would have to get the approval of the government's language commission. It's highly unlikely that anyone in that body will understand his area of technical expertise, so their decision will almost always be wrong (in the scientific sense).
But there is no such government angency in any English-speaking country. In English, there are no legal barriers to inventing your own terminology. So when he sees the need for a new word (or redefinition of an old word), he can just use it (and explain it) in his English paper. His colleagues in his area of research will be the judges of whether his new word (or redefinition) will be adopted.
He also commented that he was far from the only researcher who used this approach, and the same argument is often heard in German. He suggested that, as long as the English-speaking world remains so open and free about "corruption" of the English language, it will remain the World's primary scientific language.
So those who like the idea of English becoming the world's dominant language should applaud and encourage anti-English actions such as what the French are doing.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I don't know it the Viking colonies were ill-fated. In Minnesota we have this Runestone, which may or may not be a hoax, and more importantly, we had a group of 'Native Americans' living up there and in Michigan, WI, and parts of Canada, who were fair-skinned and fair-haired, had blue and green eyes, and often lived in walled, barricaded villages with nicely laid out street plans and wells and houses and such. In other words, completely unlike most other indians.
I have read the Bible. In the current political climate here in the US, Jesus would be labeled a communist...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
While I agree that language influences the way you think, I've never agreed with the simplistic examples of "they have more words for X" or "they have a word that means Y". And I think your conclusion about linguistically caused colourblindness takes the idea way, way too far.
If, instead of colour perception, you had referred to the perception of verbal sounds, then I would have agreed more. If a sound doesn't exist in your language, the brain tends to "snap" it to the closest sound that does exist, and it's virtually impossible to hear it any other way.
But if you want to dig deeply into linguistic influences on thought, I think it's more instructive to look at things like grammar and fundamentally important language constructs.
In my native Japanese, for instance, the sentence structure places the predicate (the verb) at the end of the sentence. All your objects and completions come first, unlike English where the verb is sandwiched in between. You have to think about things in a different order when speaking Japanese.
Japanese has no future tense. You just use the present tense conjugation, and if it's not obvious from the context, you explicitly specify that it's in the future (e.g., by saying "tomorrow" or "next week").
Here's a biggie: Japanese has no direct translation for "to be." There are translations for certain specific meanings, like "to exist" or "to be [in a location]" and adjectives get conjugated like verbs if you are describing something. But Hamlet's "to be or not to be" would have to be translated into something completely different in Japanese.
IMHO, it's these sorts of things that influence thought, not some simple word-count.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I'm French, and I understand both sides:
- Too many foreign words in a language make its internal logic weaker, and messes up the sounds (that should be written 'i-mail' in French). A few words from all over the world make a language healthier, a massive amount from one single source (US) is cultural assimilation.
- This is still far less dangerous than attacking grammar, acronyms madness or putting all ads on French TV in English (yeah, even for Fiat or Alcatel).
- 'Courriel' comes from Canada, where they are much better than French to find 'good' replacement words. A bit too zealous sometimes but this is an everyday battle, like against MS.
- Anyway, finding a translation of word should be done rather early, not 7 years after everybody starts using it!
- In this particular case, I don't mind telling 'email'. In fact, it very often becomes 'mail', which fits perfectly in French (writing, pronunciation, and etymology). And it implies automatically that it goes through the Internet (they didn't try to change this last word BTW).
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
"In QC, Anglophones are a hated minority."
This is a total overstatement. If it wasn't of the ignorance of it's author I'd accuse him of plainly lying and giving a perfect demonstration of bad faith. Do you have any idea what's hate? There are more racial and hate crimes in Toronto than in Montreal. You would know that if you would be documented at all.
Maybe you meant that french and english are not living in total harmony? Oh my. Big deal. Is that situation unique to Quebec and unique to French Canadians and English Canadians? Put your personal resentment aside for a second and admit Quebec is an incredibly peaceful place. Or maybe you don't live in Quebec at all? In that case, how the hell you know what you are talking about? A friend of a friend maybe? Me too I have a lot of these!
Anglo-Quebecers often pose as victims, but the reality is they are better treated than the French ever was in Canada.
For years french-only speaking workers were paid significantly less than english-only speaking workers for an equal education.
About 30 years ago, french people couldn't be served in french in stores, even by french speaking employees. Everything had to be done in English. Remember Eaton anybody?
These days, the federal government is offering services in french and english in Quebec but does not offer the same level of service in other provinces.
In Quebec we have english hospitals, english universities, english schools. Very recently, Ontario's government did all it could to close the only french academic hospital in Ontario. Thank god they failed, but that was at the cost of a lenghty battle.
In the 1890, the government of Manitoba stopped funding french schools. New Brunswick did the same before in 1870. For some time it's been illegal to speak french in some provinces. Of course this has been made unconstitutional, but it has been made so after the harm was done.
And the list goes on. English being victims of evil French people really is a pathetic statement.
"the Quebec Office de la Langue Francais' attempts to get people to stop using hotdog and hamburger"
This example is a complete caricature. The person writing this really has no idea what the role of this bureau is. This bureau is promoting the use of good french. It is promoting the use of french in the workplace. It is promoting the use of french in the public space.
Quebec is a French province god dammit. What's so surprising about it's people trying to keep this identity? French Canadians compare less than English Canadians to Americans but yet English Canadians persist putting barriers to Americans entering the canadian market (all tv ads on canadian tv are canadian, even for american shows). I kind of feel like English Canadians want to integrate Quebec completely to their (english speaking) universe, but they wouldn't let themselves be fully integrated in the American (cultural) universe. Either nationalism isn't acceptable for anybody, or it is acceptable for everybody. Otherwise you got a double standard.
I read once that some German papers depicted this bureau of some gestapo arresting people for speaking english. This simply is insane. Guess where this paper was taking it's information from? English press!