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 ;)
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
we would now be calling it 'freedom mail'. while I think the french culture police are a bit over the top, the same can be said for a lot of people on capitol hill.
Interesting, the submitter of this story didn't even manage to write courriel correct... despite it being displayed two lines above...
"Crossandwitch."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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
In other news French legislation against junk e-mail has been delayed until the French can come up with a French sounding substitute for the word spam.
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...
'Hey Pierre, curriel me those sales figures.' Just sounds wrong!
Of course it sounds wrong... especially since the rest of it would probably sound more like:
Hé Pierre, curriel je que ces ventes figure!
You know, since they're in France, and everything.
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
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.
McDonald's ?
there's no place like ~
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
English is probably more open to importing words from other languages because England was invaded several times in the middle ages(Normans, Vikings), and is populated with people originally from an area in northern Germany. Thus, English gets its Germanic roots, and large numbers of words from(or through) French and more German(Vikings spoke... something. Norse variant of German is as far as I got on short notice).
This story is just goofy, though. "Mail" comes into English from French. "Courrier" came into French from Italian.(Electronic and variants come directly from Latin)
Languages survive through the adoption of new words, whether they be homegrown or imported. Attaching more value for one method over the other is just silly.
(More info on borrowed words in English. French and Norse invasions mentioned a few paragraphs from the bottom of the page.)
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
What's the difference between the USA and yoghurt?
Even yoghurt develop its own culture after a while.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
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.
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
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.
Will SPAM now become Pâté? Also, the SPAM song won't be as funny if you sing...
Pâté, Pâté, Pâté... wonderful Pâté!
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.
When you're looking down from a position of linguistic dominance, it's very easy to ridicule other culture's attempts to preserve their identity. Language is the cornerstone of most cultural identities - right down to the accent that identifies which village you come from.
And language is more than merely a tool for communicating. It influences the way you think. For example, not all languages have the same number of words for basic colours. (English had no word for "orange" until the middle ages. It was considered a shade of yellow). Neurological studies have shown that without the word for a colour, your brain doesn't even recognise that shade as being different from whatever other shade the language assimilates it to. (So in a language where red and green are the same word, the entire population is red-green colorblind). [If you wonder how different societies can end up with different words for colours, imagine you spend your life in the arctic. Differences in shades of white will be far more important to you than telling red from yellow.]
Also, before laughing at the French, Americans should look at their own history. Following independence, there was a deliberate attempt to cement the new American identity by differentiating the language from "British" English. A certain Mr Webster took this to heart and drew up a dictionary where he deliberately created differences from accepted English spellings (there was no such thing as truly standard spelling in those days). And that's how the US ended up with color, thru and -ize.
So should the French government be trying to protect the French language? Well let's just say that it's not as crazy as it sounds.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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.
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.
The french don't have a word for 'Entrepreneur'
Mind the frickin' laser...
...I say we rename FreeNet to FrenchNet. That'll show 'em.
...actually, no...wait, switch that.
Err... uh, nevermind...
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
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.