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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
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.
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...
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.