Are you a gamer? If you’re French, it seems that you shouldn’t be using so much English in pursuit of your goals.
It’s a feature of an active language, that it will readily assimilate words from others. Pizza, karaoke, vuvuzela, parka, gateau, schadenfreude, they have all played their part in bringing a little je ne sais quoi into our everyday speech. This happens as a natural process as whatever the word is describing becomes popular, and sometimes these new words cause a backlash from those who see themselves as the language’s defenders.
Often this is a fringe activity such as the British politician who made a fool of himself in a radio interview by insisting on the now-archaic Wade-Giles “Peking” rather than the vastly more common Pinyin “Beijing”, but for some tongues it’s no laughing matter. Nowhere is this more the case than in the Francophone world, in which the Academie Francaise and the French and Quebecquois governments see themselves as very much the official guardians of French. And now it seems that the French ministry of culture have turned their eyes upon gamers.
It’s nothing new for words associated with technology to fall under this scrutiny, a quarter century ago in the CD-ROM business it was de rigeur for localized discs to talk about le logicel, l’ordinateur, and telecharger instead of program, computer, and download. The talk of the industry was that Sony refused to do this for PlayStation consoles sold in Quebec during the 1990s, and thus all their sales in the province had to be under-the-counter. But there’s a sense from reading the reports that this intervention is a little clumsy; while it’s easy to say logicel we’re not so sure that jeu video de competition or video game competition for e-sports and joueur-animateur en direct or live player-animator for streamer aren’t just too much of a mouthful for easy adoption. For the first one, we can’t help remembering that sport is also an everyday French word, so couldn’t they have come up with something less clumsy such as reseau-sports or network-sports?
Here at Hackaday more than one of us are unrepentant Francophiles, so the evolution of French words in our field is of interest to us. Habitez-vous en France ou Quebec? Donnez-nous votres idees dans les commentaires! (mais en Anglais s’il vous plait pour les Americains, excusez-nous)
Header image: Christopher Macsurak, CC BY-SA 4.0.
No schematics?
Remember visiting the Pleumeur-Bodou space/satellites/tech museum, as a kid in the 90s, and the lady had in her little speech a section about trying to get us to use “mèl” instead of “email”. It never really caught on, but for a little while you’d sometimes saw it used online by official/large company pages.
I’ve never heard mèl but I have used “couriel”.
Yeah this was very early, couriel did win out in the end.
You could see “mèl” on “voila” for example in the very early days.
“Courriel,” from courrier electronique. It was originally from Canada, because Quebec French tends to be a little less eager to use anglicisms. Which is of course why it’s hilarious that the Academie Francaise chose it.
I have this vague memory of the Academie Francaise raising a big stink in the 90s about using English titles on movie posters (with Jurassic Park being the one that sticks out in my head), so in some sense this is de rigueur for them.
Mèl is still on tax declaration forms!
Damn, i want to check that out, do you have the name/reference of the document or a link?
Here you go : https://www.impots.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/formulaires/2042/2022/2042_3926.pdf (there’s plenty of other examples, I choose one randomly, look for “cirfa déclaration import filetype:pdf” on a good search engine and you’ll find other)
Logiciel not logicel, (2nd I missing, not the same pronunciation), de rigUeur (same), compétition de jeu vidéo not jeu video de competition (meaning competition video game I guess), sport en réseau seems more natural than reseau-sports, we use e-sports anyway. It’s OK if you forget the accents. And we use “download” all the time, don’t think anyone listens to the Académie Française…
I see “télécharger” plenty of times.
My work’s browser has set itself to French, so Microsoft’s online office is in French too. Which is especially funny when you have to do excel formula’s (with =si instead of =if, =somme (=sum) etcetera.)
The CAQ provincial government of Québec has passed legislation determined to force residents to not only communicate in French but to think in French. It is now against the law to have computer operating systems or applications use any language other than French on any “work” computer including those used for remote access from home.
For excel, if you work in a multi-lingual environment, its not funny at all – a sheet with forumulae in French will not work on a english version and vice versa.
Poor multi-lingual implementation by M$ IMHO – instead of just mapping the formula names on the display it seems they are renamed in the files also…
Most likely to affect large organizations (companies and govt) only I suppose.
French here.
this will have almost no effect.
Too little, too late, and it’s not really important.
Don’t be bothered by the old “Acacdémiciens” who ramble.
Looking in from outside, that seems to be most of the problem, too late, the Academiciens seem to be a minimal 5 years behind the times in promoting alternatives, and seemingly 10 or more quite often. By that time everyone knows it by a non-French name and it’s too late.
I’m Dutch, my aunt and uncle lived in France so we visited them almost every year for holiday. My uncle had a knack for computers and later started his own computer repair shop, but before that I got many a diskette (which sounds French enough, I’ve never read “Disquette”) with copied games and other software, of course always in French.
The question whether you have a souris (litteral: mouse) is easy enough, but I have puzzled long about what a “Manche a balai” (litt: broomstick) was until I realized that no, I don’t have a joystick.
When I walk into a store looking for a SD card, I ask for 64GO (Giga-octet, gigabite). although I’ve never bought a disque dur (litt: hard disk).
Before his computer business he was a contractor and I find that some construction-related words I know better in French than in my native Dutch or English (bache, pelle, grue)
They were and spoke Dutch, but learnt everything computer- and construction-related while living in France so they only used the French words for everything in that field.
Reminds how the Académie decided to translate “Fake News” to “Infox”.
Ah yes, there absolutely wasn’t any words that work 1:1 and was commonly used by the entire french population.
“Intox” never existed and did not predate “Fake News” according to those braindead walking corpses.
Bloody idiots, none of them know how to even speak French and have no actual qualifications in linguistics
“on Fox” sounds perfectly reasonable for ‘fake news’ in the US.
You mean “Faux News” ? :-)
That’s a strange way to spell “CNN”.
Add to this that, even in the government, people are not able to use french word when they exist (maybe because they don’t understand what they are talking about ?), examples:
– use of “drive” and “cloud” when they share files (fr: “sur le lecteur partagé” / “sur l’espace commun”)
– “ASAP” (fr: “dès que possible”)
– “meeting” (fr: “réunion”)
– “call” (fr: “conférence/appel téléphonique”)
– …
Another example of “do what I say, not what I do”: public institutions must use open source software in France … in my administration we must use Word / Excel / PowerPoint just because our leaders do not want to use LibreOffice (even if they’ve made a law for this …).
To conclude: our leaders make laws for the “others” and do not apply these to themselves (and I am sure that this is not a French specificity). We pay taxes for this people to do something … but nothing useful emerges, it’s scary …
Repurposed words in English can be difficult, but also French overworks some words, the one I’m thinking of right now is jeu , while parallels can be drawn with the English set and that word’s tens of definitions, jeu is used where we would apply other words than set for best comprehension.
At the opposite we have many words
I thought to an American humorist (Sebastian Marx) that noted that there were many words in French to translate “ball”:
– balle
– boulle
– bille
– couille
– ballon
– pelotte
– boulette
(…)
Full spetacle is here (French ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-FN_IT5fU
“Infox” strongly reminds me of “faux news”
Infaux?
France was heavily involved in aviation in the early 1900s, so I wonder what the French for an aeroplane control stick or flight stick, which we also nicknamed a joystick is.
levier de commande (control lever)
or mache à balai (broomstick) or simply manche (stick, but so much more things)
Ah, broomstick makes more sense now then. I am vaguely recalling that in one early aeroplane, the control stick was very literally a broomstick repurposed.
Logic–>I<–el. Proofreading anyone ?
This Hackaday, you are surprised at seeing a misspelled word?
Sorry, not my first language.
Quebec is now claiming to be a nation within Canada (separation is pretty dead). So it’s aweird situation. They worry, I don’t, that the French language will disappear. Impossible, France was a colonizer, and the languge spoken in a bunch of foreign colonies, including what had been New France. Contrast that with the language of some of my ancestors, the Syilx people, about 150 fluent speakers. And sadly, Quebec takes too many cues from France.
I don’t remember the game console issue, not a gamer, but people have long complained about not being able to order things. An example would be a talking bear, they want to order because it’s not sold here in Quebec because it doesn’t speak French. But if they tryto irder it from elsewhere in Canada, they are told it can’t be shipped to Quebec. I’m still not sure uf there’s a rule, or the comoany interprets it that way.
There’s a fine line, some of the laws protect French, but they also seem to isolate the French speakers, as if the rest of the world doesn’t count.
I should add, Indigenous languages don’t let foreign words in. But yes, in order to be viable, the language has to be used, not just practiced in academic circles. So new words are needed for things like cellphones. But they use existing words and structure to create new words for new things.
So there is a Syilx word for “Merry Christmas”, xast sputa. Created sometime in the past 200 years, since contact didn’t really happen until about 1811. And I know this word because I’m on a mailing list for the Okanagan Nation Alliance. A few years back, I get email, with “seasons greetings” in the subject header. There’s an attachment, a photo with people and a sign that says “xast sputa”. I didn’t know what it meant, I did a search, and fkund it meant “Merry Christmas”. That’s how threatened languages get propagated, traditional words tossed into an otherwise English text.
The naming of things in a way defines them.
The government of the Canadian province of Quebec calls themselves the National Assembly.
The premier of Quebec is called its Prime Minister, not to be confused with the Prime Minister of Canada.
Most Quebec government departments or government-funded organizations are called the National something-or-other. Quebec National historic sites and National Parks are not Canadian National ones, and the list goes on.
Quebec tax and pension and healthcare regulation is different from the rest of Canada.
Heck, even my Quebec birth certificate is not recognized by Canada as Canadian.
It really is essentially a separate country.
For spanish and italian speaking countries, the adoption of english words that have counterparts on those languages it’s a plague, and a loss of culture. Just because they are cooler or just because people are not aware of their language counterparts. This is specially true for people such as streamers and youtubers which have raised this to a whole new level: “nerfear” (to nerf), “chasear” (to chase), “pumpear” (to pump), “dropear” (to drop)… Everything goes.
It’s true that the language itself is something dynamic and evolves, usually based on the efficiency (shorter words, easier sounds, a broader word…) and it’s ok to add new words for things that can’t be described on our mother language, but this is a totally different phenomena in which the only goal is to show off and so, i can see the point of the french people.
C’est cool
I’d say it’s nice to see it happening because people want to use these words this time rather than because some nation has invaded another. Something like 70% of the vocabulary of English is derived from Latin because of the Norman conquest of England. The French Academy being afraid is pretty hypocritical too considering how many languages French itself killed off.
The American language is slowly killing off the English language
A lot of the Latin influence comes from science, the church (although the Normans removing English from churches may have accelerated some of that) and it being a bit of a lingua franca for a good while.
Still, though, something like 30% of the English vocabulary comes from French (including sport!), making all of this very ironic. And that’s fine! Languages import words for all sorts of reasons- the new word eventually just becomes an intrinsic piece of the language. 1000 years ago an Old English speaker would have said “getheode” instead of “language”, but the new word got imported from Old French “language” (not pronounced the same as it is now- English is just conservative with spelling). Today the descendants in Modern English and Modern French are quite distinct, and are decidedly part of two separate languages, regardless of what got borrowed by which.
Agreed on that last bit- I would find this a lot more amusing if not for how regional languages of France are treated today.
Hon hon hon quelle tempête dans un verre d’eau.
Honestly I don’t think it’s relevant for your everyday French gamer. At least it’s not to me. When you’re a seasoned gamer you’re probably already speaking in a way about your games which would make any non-gamer think you’re summoning a demon or something.
So replacing some words here and there is useless, this ship has sailed. Most competitive games come with their own specific vocabulary, most of the time in English even if the game is translated in other languages. English is dominating and that’s for the best because when someone use a technical word, everyone used to the game understand what that person mean.
Long story made short, nothing to do, it’s fine as it is even if a frankly out of touch institution such as Académie Française says otherwise.
And if its an online game you are likely at least conversant in English sufficient to play to the game, with maybe a smattering of Russian and Spanish (largely depending on your timezone) – the folks you play against and with will come from all over the area and likely speak or at least be able to futz along well enough in context in the (other) major language of the region.
And yes French just about qualifies as one of the other major languages you might stumble through enough – but its the weakest of the lot where games are concerned as France and its colonies/former colonies are pretty small patches of French speakers surrounded by a sea of English and Spanish (derived anyway) languages in their timezone and/or in nations that are rather too poor to have a great deal of gamer and the internet sufficient for them to play…
Was it StarCraft that had a lot of Korean fans and we’d get a lot of kekekekeke turning up in the forums? Not sure if any other Korean-isms made it through.
jajajajaja is the same, but from some other country
In some cases, there are French words that already exist or/and you can make something fun:
– BYOD =>AVEC (that means “with” in french) for “Apportez Votre Propre Appareil de Communication”
– binge watching => Visionnage boulimique
In other cases, in my opinion this is ridiculous:
– Hashtag => mot dièse
– Webcam => cybercaméra
– Home cinema => cinédom
I prefer to use a French word when the word already exist. For example, i hate people who say “sticker” instead of “autocollant”. There is a french word for it, use it dammit !
Another example is the word “hashtag”. There is no simple word in french for this one, So i’m using the english word.
It’s interesting to see the difference between France and Quebec.
– Hashtag: mot-clic
– Webcam: caméra web, webcam, webcaméra
– Home cinema / home theater: cinéma maison
– esport: sport électronique
– live streamer: instavidéaste
You can search the database from Quebec here: http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx
I love FAQ: Foire aux questions (Question market)
Same letters but different meaning, smart and it works.
But the worse is digital. In French it means finger, and a lot of french people are using it not correctly. They speak about “digital transition”. I don’t want to know where their finger is going…
The correct French word is “numérique”
“But the worse is digital. In French it means finger,”
It means relating to fingers in English, too (or toes!), but strangely, it doesn’t seem to cause much confusion.
It does make me snicker when I see discounts on “digital inflators” (you set the pressure on the display and it fills the tire to that pressure). That said, now that I have one, it’s pretty great, so I don’t really care anymore if they’re inflating my bike tire by jamming their fingers in it or not.
(I think the most infamous digital as finger in American English would be the digital rectal exam. A procedure that does not feel very digital.)
I guess it comes to people raised English speaking pretty easily when one is likely to meet it at a time when one is still counting on one’s fingers… and it’s a fairly obvious connection that a single digit 1-9 matches what one can represent on fingers in base 10 (Sumerians may have differing opinions)
What they speak in Quebec can hardly be described as French. It sounds so horrible it hurts the ears!
Another observation: driving in Ontario I noticed all public (road) signs were bilingual. Makes sense, I thought, in a bilingual country. Then you get to Quebec and everything is in French only! At least they are keeping the French mentally alive.
Hehe, if you can’t stand Quebec French, then you better not visit New Brunswick, lest you hear any Chiac.
My father lived in France for a year in his twenties, my sister studied in Montreal for half a year and we visited her. My father couldn’t understand what people said there, then we went to la Gaspesie and my sister was lost, while my father’s French was ok enough!
I don’t know the extent of modern standardisation, but it was the case in France itself that Norman French was a bit different from Parisian French for example. In some areas they have different genders for nouns than the Parisian standard (It’s about 2 seconds after learning that, that I stopped caring whether I got it right LOL )
In the UK you can go up the country from, “You defecated in your trousers” through “You crapped your pants” to “You cacked your kecks.”
That seems to be some of the issue. The majority of English speakers are in the Montreal area. There’s some patches elsewhere, but small. Montreal is also loaded with immigrants. It’s also an economic force. But the rest of the province is insular. They don’t see a need for English because their lives are in French. And they are the majority. So politicians play to them.
in France , “police violence” is translated in “débordement de supporters anglais”. (sorry, I coulnd’t resist :-) )
Je n’habite ni en France ni au Québec, I’m a Belgian, we also speak french in the southern part of the country.
To be honest, I don’t think the Académie Française has any relevance to the vast majority of french speakers. Especially not to real linguists… All in all, a fake shit storm from people trying to justify their salary who will probably have zero impact.
Also, it’s not “logicel” but “logiciel”.
(and the plural of “votre” is “vos”, I know it doesn’t make sense ;) )
Last month, I had a woman who was raised in France, tell me the people of Quebec City don’t speak French, but English with a French accent.
B^)
The accent from Quebec can be difficult to get for a french but I find it very pleasing to hear. They also do a much better job at translating words, like “courriel vs mél” or “pourriel vs arrosage”. One of the worst translation is cédérom for CDROM…
I forget what they decided to call a Walkman.
magnetophone a tres simplement portez avec un homme seulement ???
Just kidding.
Je m’inscris en faux!
She went on to say that she really meant that a lot of English words were used in their speech.
Abstracting away from any language, its function is to transfer information inside one persons head into another persons head, typically in an efficient manner (although not always). Adding more words (i.e. making the process a bit more complex) sounds like a fantastic idea.
The role of l’Académie Française is to define the words that can be used in literal form, mainly for administrative and legal documents. Journalists love to say “don’t say this, but that” when they publish some rules like this to mock them, but in reality it’s very important from an historical point of view.
When you open a document that was written in 1940 with some strange word like “piquemillier” ou “humencule”, you must have a definition written somewhere to understand the document. It’s already hard to understand the grammar, if in addition you must find out the definition of some unknown word in an English or Vietnamese dictionary, you’ll just fail.
As for the “gamers” (joueur de sport électronique), you’ll get a good example of what you are declaring in your official livret de famille (an official document that keep trace of your familly members name, job, birth place and so on). Imagine you open such a document in 40 years from now, and you have “LoL pro gamers” written here. No one would be able to understand what that gibberish means.
+1 useful enlightening comment
Thank you for that explanation. However, I find French a very stable language.
Me (Dutch) can hardly read a Dutch text from 150 years ago, and from 70 it’s still weird with the different spelling.
English is about the same.
But I can read a 200 year old French text no problem (provided it is about something I understand, my French isn’t that good) and even popular argot (such as verlan) is in use way longer than in the Netherlands where using street language from 5 years ago would make you stand out as old-fashioned.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. It did seem like a rather pointless exercise without that context.
This will have only a small effect. New preferred words will be used for official and administrative paperwork (also a French love story, see CERFA for more details…)
In re Peking: there is some defence for this as the pronunciation most English speakers use when reading the word “Beijing” is so far from the Chinese as to be hardly any better. It is also not just a Wade-Giles spelling: that would be Peiching. “Peking” came about because the first European maps of China were drawn with the aid of Cantonese people, whose language is barely mutually intelligible with that spoken in Peking. A rough comparison would be a Chinese speaker compiling a map of America including cities such as Noo Yawk, Nawrluns, and Ellay.
Except you have to imagine that it’s New York as pronounced by the Cajuns, not by the New Yorkers.
I like “Nawrluns.” That’s how it sounds, damnit!
How about Bostonians who pronounce the name of their city as Bah-stun or Baaaww-stun? There there are the folks from New Jersey for whom there’s no such thing as a long vowel except at the ends of some words. Radiator isn’t ray-dee-eight-er it’s rah-dee-at-er.
It’s at if nobody in that area was ever taught the rule that a vowel is long if there’s only one consonant between it and another vowel, and short if there’s two or more consonants between it and another vowel.
Has me thinking that English needs a Romaji transliteration of itself. It’s easy to read a Romaji transliteration of Japanese. Still can’t understand it but can read it and pronounce it.
I wonder if he woulda got “Tronnah” righter than right though :-D
Also, we Germans still use “Peking”.
Could it be the case that it’s simply one of the of the Germanic parts of English language?
I mean, nowadays English consists of many different loan words and Roman/Latin/Greek influences.
And the use of German words had been filtered out over the years.
There are many German words that had been deprecated. They may sound old fashioned, also.
For example:
Folks (people; Volk in German)
Showplayer (actor; Schauspieler in German)
Kindergarden (nursery school; Kindergarten in German)
Wordstock (vocabulary; Wortschatz in German)
Rucksack (backpack, ..)
Gesundheit! (bless you, ..)
Hound (dog; Hund in German)
Ananas (pine apple; Ananas in German)
Stark (strong; Stark in German)
Auto mobile (car; Auto or Automobil in German)
Brabble (to bicker loudly about nothing.; Gebrabbel or Plappern in German)
Elegant (sytlish; Elegant in German)
Earthing (grounding; as in: mass connection of an electronic device/radio; Erdung in German)
Father (dad; Vater in German)
Papa (dad; Papa in German)
Mother (mom; Mutter in German)
Mama (mom; Mama in German)
Fiend (enemy; Feind in German)
Swine (pig; Schwein in German)
Foretell (prediction; Vorhersage in German)
Hare (bunny; Hase in German)
Bethink (think about it?; Bedenke in German)
That’s just a small list, of course.
It’s just meant as a quick overview, whatsoever.
It’s likely that I made sime mistakes, also.
A native speaker of English language would have less trouble listing corresponding words.
Also, I had to be careful not to use new words from Anglish community. ;)
“Ananas (pine apple; Ananas in German)”
“ananas” isn’t a German word, it’s the name of the genus and used by most of the languages. Pineapple has this odd origin where the original discoverer referred to it two ways, as a “nanas” (from the local word for ‘excellent fruit’) and “pine apple.” So most languages took the first part (“nanas” which became “ananas”, in German, French, Italian, etc.), English commonly uses the second (pineapple) and Spanish uses both (pina and ananas depending on the dialect). Obviously New World foods are going to be common in pretty much all European languages (tomato, maize, etc.).
Elegant and automobile aren’t of German origin either, they’re through French. It’s the same in both languages because German steals from other languages, too.
A lot of those words aren’t derived from modern German, but are Anglo-Saxon, so pre-date German and English and derive from the North European area around Denmark and Saxony. Anything with “th” in it is definitely Anglo-Saxon. Old English is nearer to Icelandic than German, and I believe Icelandic scholars are able to read Beowolf (the oldest “English” poem) in the original old English. Also I don’t recognise some of those words, such as wordstock (wordhord in A-S) and showplayer as a native English speaker; perhaps they are American borrowings from German settlers, like geshundheit, which I only know from US TV programmes.
Modern English really only started between Chaucer and Shakespeare, somewhere around the 16th century, Chaucer in the original looks very “Germanic” to modern eyes, but Shakespeare is difficult, but recognisable, English.
We do actually use quite a few words derived from modern German: iceberg, bergschrift, trauma, schadenfreude, blitz, etc, in our English dictionaries, but then we have far more French plus Inuit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Malay, Aboriginal, Maori and hundreds of other “foreign” words in everyday speech. The English language has nearly twice as many words as German and three times as many as French as we have borrowed and created (television is half Greek, half Latin) so many from other languages. However the 100 most commonly used words in English (the, I, me, you, he, she, one, two, three…, mother, father, sister, brother, etc.) are nearly all Anglo-Saxon.
” The English language has nearly twice as many words as German and three times as many as French as we have borrowed”
It’s not really a borrowing there: English in many ways is what happens when you take an Anglo-Saxon originated language and squish it together with French, so having double the words is basically what you’d expect. After the Norman invasion of England, you basically ended up with commoner words (Anglo-Saxon origin) and nobility words (French origin).
Since then obviously the borrowing’s continued, but when you basically flat out merge two languages, obviously the resulting language is going to have more words.
We should have banned English as a diplomatic language after Brexit.
Non mais sérieusement, le français c’est beaucoup mieux.
When in doubt, blame the Brits, it always works:
https://twitter.com/Bosco4Indy/status/1531244780981829634
There is still a country of native English speakers in the EU.
díreach
I noticed Dutch (state) news agencies now started to use a Wade Giles again, somehow writing Shanghai as ‘Sjanghai’ also…weird
I have not noticed that (and it’s not true, I find a few references to Sjanghai but many to Shanghai on NOS.nl), but many news agencies swapped their spelling of Ukraine’s capital from “Kiev” to “Kyiv”
For years I heard it pronounced kee-ev, but since the invasion, it is often pronounced keev.
Years ago, I heard the Arabian Gulf country Qatar pronounced “cuh-TAR~” (the “r” rolled),
But during the invasion of Iraq, “kutter” became the mainstream pronunskiation.
I read somewhere that the pronunciation that we knew was Russian. So now they’ve switched to the Ukranian pronunciation, in solidarity.
A guy I worked with was born there, self-identified as Russian, always pronounced it ‘kee-ev’. I’ve been wondering where this newspeak ‘keev’ came from.
Ukrainian vs Russian.
“Self-identified as Russian” you have your answer right there. ‘Kee-ev’ is the Russian pronunciation of the city, the Ukrainian pronunciation is ‘Kee-iv’. It’s not newspeak just because it’s new to you.
Mmm strange, did they change it up again? I swear i saw it a lot recently…this nets some results but all from around 10yrs ago: site:nos.nl “sjanghai” . Anyway they have an about page about their use of Peking ( https://over.nos.nl/faq/waarom-schrijft-de-nos-peking-en-niet-beijing/ ). Can’t wait to visit the Canton again ;p
Once in a blue moon, the French name for something is really cool. The No Name cheese spread here is/was called Cheesetastic, and the French name was Fromidable … which I thought was great and amusing, but I am an Anglo, so maybe it seems lame to Francophones. (Not sure if it was a French native that made it up or a second language speaker.)
I find that name Fro’minable!
Sounds good to me ;-)
Reminds me of this from many years ago: A hilarious “translation” of the Mother Goose Rhymes children’s book, using French words and pronunciation that *sound* almost right to an English ear, but are hilariously nonsensical in French. Even funnier are the annotations that purport to explain the translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures
more info: https://andrewhearst.com/blog/2005/02/mots-dheures-gousses-rames-the-dantin-manuscript
French is spoken all over and is not in any real danger of dying out completely but I do get at lest attempting to maintain the language over the centuries and between native speaking countries.
Other languages though it is a real problem. Finland for example has a declining population and a small population of native speakers anyway. There is a real
chance of that language going extinct. It also has a huge “problem” (according to some) with with, in particular, English loan words especially in tech industry. There exist Finnish words for email etc but no one uses them.
Source: my wife’s relatives.
When you grok all this, it’s seems sans raison that English doesn’t have an Academy, a pow-wow of all the apparatchiks, a battalion of vigilantes, to ensure that only pukka English words are in our arsenal and we don’t kow-tow to the zeitgeist willy nilly. If we don’t do this pro bono publico et patria, we may find there has been a coup d’etat on our lingua franca.
Thank you for bringing “lingua franca” into the discussion.
B^)
Eventually we may get to something like a techno-sabir, languages that were pidgins of other major languages sound a bit like that already. Youtube gave me a laptop repair vid I was watching for a couple of minutes before I realised the guy was Filipino and wasn’t just mumbling between every third word I could make out, something something solder the BGA something connect SATA something something keyboard port.
There’s the Chinook Jargon in the pacific northwest. It’s unclear if it existed before European contact. A mix of different languages, including English and French. My great, great, great grandfather made a list of such words.
Useful for trade, even before Europeans came over.
An example of a common language constructed for communication in a specific technical field already exists: Fanakalo (Fanagalo), largely from Zulu and English with a smattering of Afrikaans, developed as a common language for mine labourers.
Considering the number of users, maybe a modern common technical language for this millennium will be based on Mandarin.
Hello, i’m french (with very bad english so excuse my english)
A language is living by people who used it. So french language from belgium is not french language from canadian …. and same for french language from paris , north or south of france….
And all languages change with time
It’s the same in english for example restroom/toilet
Essential thing is to be understood
So some problems could exist with some expression like “tantot” which could be “later”, “this afternoon” ‘or something else… function who said it and so where he is coming from
If you’re in a transport cafe ask for the bog or the pisser.
This is particularly ironic as English is a hodgepodge of loan-words anyway – French, German, Latin, Greek, etc.
Sitting down to eat at an international conference, a French friend said to me “Good appetite?”
“yes”, I said “I’m pretty hungry”.
“No, ‘good appetite’”, he said, “it’s something we say in France before meals”
“Ah!”, I said, “Bon appetite”
“Yes! That’s it in French”, said he “what do to say in English then?”
“Err… Bon appetite”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
:)
It’s «Bon appetit»
Without the trailing e.
I know for sure in French, I thought it was the same in English but I might be wrong about that side.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bon_app%C3%A9tit seems to agree.
There was a point in time when France ruled over England and that caused English speakers to adopt a lot of French vocabulary, which is still in use today. For them it was a no brainer to learn some French, as it allowed them to do business with the upper classes.
Today France is ruled by the EU, and English was actually the most widely spoken language among member states prior to Brexit. And the EU central bank still conducts business mostly in English, so it’s a requirement in many places of high society.
Most people if given the opportunity to learn another language are going to choose a language that elevates their status in society. English just happens to be the high society language du jour, and simply padding the French vocabulary with equivalent terms won’t change that.
Reminds me of a certain video of the french trying Coca-Cola for the first time….
https://youtu.be/OuPvvTAGDaI
Don’t get me wrong, French has a certain elegance to it in certain circumstances, however it was never that fast at adopting new terms or phrases that facilitates ease of communication in highly technical fields. Hence why English is the universal language of business and computer science.
Lol Quebec. They wanted to leave Canada. They can gatekeep all they want. They’re like the dog that tries to bite you when it’s eating, and you’re a little too close to the food.
What’s this article got to do with Hackaday? Seriously, I’m from Belgium and I do headshots or scroll, this is no big deal at all … who cares?
As a Québécois, I just want to take my hat off to everybody here to have such a respectful exchange on my culture. Too often we are bashed, insulted, denigrated by canadians in their papers and the net. I just fall off my chair to see so many comments with not insults, so much openess to 8 millions souls that manage to survive and prosper in french while being surronded by 350 millions anglophones. Thank you guys. I really enjoyed reading you this mourning (as always actually).
And just to answer the main question: I love to play translated games. I’m used to play WOWS. The translation is near perfect and it just feels… hommy, confortable, at ease, at peace, easy, fluid, natural, so goooooooooood… It is definitly more addictive.
(And I feel sorry for the cultures who never thought asking for it. You are really missing something guys.)
That’s JUST Great!!! it’s good to see Francophiles, alleged and unrepentant, dooking it out with alleged authorities. But I wonder, not a little, if it would just go easier to just igmore the stalwarts and call yourselves “grammar Nazis”, just like the rest of us Normals do? LoL, stay well.
We also use same words for different sense
Example: security and “sécurité”; this two words are the same but total opposite in the concern domain
secutity = sureté
safety = sécurité
voilà!