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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 ;)
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.
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 ;-)
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...
This will be about as successful as the Quebec Office de la Langue Français' attempts to get people to stop using hotdog and hamburger. (They invented words for those too.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Actually there are lots of linguists in Quebec that works hard at defining French words for a lot of things that didn't have one.
email => couriel
BBS => babillard
Frequently Ask Questions => Foire aux Questions
I think it's perfectly legitimate for a language to have new words for new technologies/items and use words proper to the language rather than import words from other languages. That's what it is to be living language.
English is pretty open into importing/incorporating any words (even abbreviations like WMD) in the language, but I don't believe most other languages on Earth are.
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.
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.
Speaking as an Anglophone in Quebec, I think "hated Minority" is quite the overstatement. But hey, you can spread your ignorance however you want, I guess.
"I think it's perfectly legitimate for a language to have new words for new technologies/items and use words proper to the language rather than import words from other languages. That's what it is to be living language."
No, its not normal. Normally, lanaguages evolve by their speakers, not by a government based commission.
Still more proof that french culture is dead.
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.
For the last six years I have been living two miles from Quebec and one thing I notice is that from the french people's POV, no matter what country you are from, either your "one of us" (French) or "one of them" (non-French).
For the last 51 years I have been living in the USA and one thing I notice is that from the American people's POV, no matter what country you are from, either your "one of us" (American) or "one of them" (non-American).
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
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!
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.
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
You gotta be shitting me... Oh wait, you're right.
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