

France Gives in to the Hashtag - bane
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/opinion/france-gives-in-to-the-hashtag.html

======
gregoire
"Mot-dièse" isn't even a correct translation. It is literally translated as
"sharp-word", so there is a confusion between 2 distinct signs:

\- #, the "croisillon" sign (hash)

\- ♯, the "dièse" sign (sharp)

Therefore the literal translation should be "mot-croisillon", not "mot-dièse".

And on the subject of the the Académie Française, the Commission générale de
terminologie et de néologie and the Délégation générale à la langue française
et aux langues de France (DGLFLF), the problem is that they often try to find
translations to words that, in my opinion, shouldn't be translated.

For example, the DGLFLF has a website [0] where people can suggest french
translations for english words. Here are some words from the website that it
is pointless to try to translate:

\- BitTorrent

\- barcamp

\- Facebook

As a result, the proposed translations are often ridiculous (filoutage,
langage à objets, offre groupée).

Another problem is that the people working there are not technology-fluent.
That's why they come up with wrong translations such as "accès sans fil à
l’Internet" ("access without wire to the Internet") for Wi-Fi, which is
incorrect as a Wi-Fi connexion does not always imply an Internet connexion.

That said, some english words have a great french translation :

\- firewall -> part-feu

\- mailing-list -> liste de diffusion

\- byte -> octet

[0]: [https://wikilf.culture.fr/](https://wikilf.culture.fr/)

------
emilecantin
I think the Académie Française is doing a very poor job. In Québec we have the
Office Québécois de la Langue Française, which is much better at finding
French equivalents to modern technology terms. A few examples:

\- Cloud Computing -> Infonuagique

\- E-Mail -> Courriel (vs. France's mél... how the hell do you pronounce that)

\- Hashtag -> Mot-clic (it is indeed a keyword, "mot-clé" that you can click)

And a whole lot more...

~~~
reblochon
Don't forget the wonderful "pourriel" mixing "poubelle" (trash can) and e-mail
to designate spam, If only it would have crossed the ocean.

~~~
vmarsy
I always thought pourriel was from "pourri" (rotten/lousy) + "courriel".

Both convey a correct meaning for spam!

------
FreakyT
Linguistic purity movements continue to strike me as largely pointless. It
seems better that language evolve naturally -- as long as it remains effective
as a communication medium, what is the issue?

~~~
dorfsmay
No.

Everybody knows that languages naturally evolve on their own. The advantages
of the "Académie" are:

    
    
      - it slows down the evolution allowing better choices.
    
      - although the language is still driven by everybody using it, it is stirred in the right direction by linguists and authors, usually making choices consistent with the rest of the languages, its history and roots.
    

The best example of what happens when such a mechanism isn't in place is the
"biweekly" and "irregardless" mess in english!

I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than
their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to
reflect their modern pronounciation.

~~~
seszett
> _I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further
> than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to
> reflect their modern pronounciation._

The Académie does that too, but people are so used to having irregular or
(apparently) illogical spelling that the new spellings catch on very slowly.
It works though, and today you rarely see someone write "clef" instead of
"clé" or "cuiller" instead of "cuillère". A few verbs got their accents
changed from "é" to "è" too, following modern pronunciation. All that was in
1990.

~~~
alricb
I think it's partly because when spelling was standardized in the 17th-18th
century, it was done with a "learned" view that spelling should reflect a
word's origin. So you get "doigt" for finger because of the latin _digitus_ ,
the circumflex to denote an S that has become silent (hôpital vs. hospital),
and even overcorrections (that have been recorrected since), like nénuphar ->
nénufar (ph is used to denote places where there used to be a greek phi, but
nénufar comes from Arabic)

------
Jun8
Here's an interesting question: How do the French decide on gender (and hence
the article to use) of imported English words (same question can be asked for
many of the European languages that have grammatical gender, e.g. German)?
This Guardian note provides some answers
([http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-125...](http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1251,00.html)),
in French imported words are mostly masculine.

Some examples I pulled from this
([http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-3917...](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-391745.html))
thread for the gender of Internet in various languages:

    
    
      * Spanish: Generally assumed to be masculine but the Real Academia Espanola page lists it as "amb", i.e. undecided gender (http://buscon.rae.es/drae/?type=3&val=internet&val_aux=&origen=REDRAE)
      * Russian: Интернет - masculine
      * Welsh: rhwngrwyd - feminine (but that's because "net" (rhwyd) is feminine, itself borrowed from Latin neuter rete, retis "net.")
      * Czech: masculine
      * Hebrew: masculine, although the more commonly used "net" (reshet) is feminine.
    

It's commonly taught that grammatical gender in languages (at least in IE
languages) is semantically meaningless, i.e. they are just arbitrary
classifications. this may not be totally true. If you have 10 minutes this
article (PDF file:
[http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf](http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf))
by Lera Boroditsky has an in-depth discussion on this topic.

French and German native speakers: Can you provide examples of English
borrowed words that have feminine gender?

~~~
rbehrends
Grammatical gender in German isn't really arbitrary; it is usually determined
by the word's suffix (though there are plenty of exceptions). For example,
computer is grammatically male in German, like most words ending in -er.

Things can get complicated if a loanword does not have a suffix that exists in
German (or is reasonably close to an existing suffix). In this case, you may
get regional variations (that can be pretty random) or the grammatical gender
of the German translation of the loanword may be adopted instead.

Examples of feminine loanwords: E-Mail (because the word "Post" in German is
feminine), URL (because words ending in -el tend to be feminine).

~~~
creshal
> E-Mail (because the word "Post" in German is feminine)

Tell that to the Schluchtenscheißer, they insist it's neutral.

~~~
rbehrends
As I said, there can be regional variations, but most people classify E-Mail
as feminine, not neuter [1].

[1]
[http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/E_Mail](http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/E_Mail)

------
netrus
I will start a tumblr account dedicated to news published all arround the year
that are april-fools-worthy.

~~~
RyJones
[https://reddit.com/r/nottheonion](https://reddit.com/r/nottheonion) ?

------
jstoiko
I grew up in France and my favorite (french) literature teacher (and best one,
IMO) once told me that it was in the nature of languages to evolve. This was
especially true with French as a result of the abondance of cultural exchanges
throughout the centuries.

Over the years, French has had influences from many languages including
Arabic, e.g. the word "Abricot" (the fruit) comes from that language. It also
provides an indication as of where a given new word has been originated.

He also said that it is up to the people to dictate the usage of new words.
Some new words have been suggested by the Académie Française to replace words
that had been taken from other languages. But in the end, if people dont use
that replacement, then it is the (foreign) word that will be adopted in the
dictionary.

He gave the example of "shopping", a word taken from the English and widely
used in France but reluctantly used in Quebec for cultural (political?)
reasons.

------
Zikes
> accès sans fil à l’Internet

Replacing an English word with a phrase containing an English word.

Hard to imagine why it failed to catch on.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Add to that, "wi-fi" doesn't imply "internet access".

------
maelito
C'est classe, mot-dièse

~~~
alricb
Did you hear about that new language Microsoft has come up with? They call it
"do dièse" (and they have a project called "fa dièse" for some reason).

------
column
"access without wire" vs "wireless access"

~~~
nmc
Of course the proper translation for _" accès sans fil"_ is _" wireless
access"_, but the author points out that it is translated _" literally"_, and
indeed _" sans fil"_ literally means _" without wire"_.

------
ErnestedCode
So...they surrendered?

