French inferiority complex strikes again

[DEAD ZONE]

"The latest Americanism to make the French hit list is, yes, e-mail. So decrees the General Commission on Terminology and Neology of the Ministry of Culture, which sounds like a government bureau out of the late Soviet period in Russia.

Said commission has announced that the smooth, French-sounding courriel is to be used in preference to the businesslike, American e-mail. By law.

References to e-mail are to be banned from all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites. Call it a fait accompli.

The great river that is the English language continues to flow, and even flood the world in all its polyglot power. One reason is that it engulfs foreign words, and even delights in them, rather than shrinking back in horror.

Americans have never hesitated to borrow French and Spanish spellings of American Indian words and incorporating them into American English, as anybody from Arkansas should know."

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/paulgreenberg/pg20030830.shtml

[Serendipity]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... :wink

I studied French at university in 1998. Then the French word for email was courriel. Apparently it still is. It seems that some Americans take this as a snub, because those dastardly Frenchies want to decide how their own language works. How mean of them - they just can't stop being mean, can they?

The French have their own word for Big Mac too - le grande mélange de merde des vingt vaches.

Still, thanks for that post, c&p'ed from townhall.com, which sounds like a website written by smallminded old ladies for smallminded old ladies.

As the writer points out, the English language is quite amazing, and coins neologisms easily and regularly, borrows words from other languages freely, and is the global lingua franca for commerce. The French language operates in quite a different way and has done for a long time. Is anything wrong with that?

While the CS's doing the Journal Officiel do a lot of work, there is nothing to prevent one French person talking or writing to another about sending un email. That term won't appear in any official documents, that's all.

Check the link: Courriel in the Journal Officiel (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/cogeter/20-06-03-courriel.htm). As for this being a "hit" on an Americanism, that's bullcrap. I'm afraid that if you want to stir the soup, you need more ingredients than hot air. :p :lol

[DEAD ZONE]

Originally posted by Serendipity
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... :wink

I studied French at university in 1998. Then the French word for email was courriel. Apparently it still is. It seems that some Americans take this as a snub, because those dastardly Frenchies want to decide how their own language works. How mean of them - they just can't stop being mean, can they?

The French have their own word for Big Mac too - le grande mélange de merde des vingt vaches.

Still, thanks for that post, c&p'ed from townhall.com, which sounds like a website written by smallminded old ladies for smallminded old ladies.

As the writer points out, the English language is quite amazing, and coins neologisms easily and regularly, borrows words from other languages freely, and is the global lingua franca for commerce. The French language operates in quite a different way and has done for a long time. Is anything wrong with that?

While the CS's doing the Journal Officiel do a lot of work, there is nothing to prevent one French person talking or writing to another about sending un email. That term won't appear in any official documents, that's all.

Check the link: Courriel in the Journal Officiel (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/cogeter/20-06-03-courriel.htm). As for this being a "hit" on an Americanism, that's bullcrap. I'm afraid that if you want to stir the soup, you need more ingredients than hot air. :p :lol Missed the complete point. Their language is their business. But if an English word for something becomes more popular, they outlaw it ??
Whether in official forms or not is irrelevant.

:lol :lol :lol

Just how is that a threat to their language? You don’t see Americans or many others so petrified about it.

[Serendipity]

Who is petrified?http://www.dumblaws.com/forums/ubb/confused.gif

[Serendipity]

Let me put it another way: this email/courriel thing which has the townhall.com folks so excited is part of an ongoing process, one which started a good while before the USA was founded. What worries me is the readiness with which newfound Gallophobes gleefully point it out, without having or wanting to have the least clue about what is actually happening and what it really means - American "patriots" perceive it as anti-American because they are told that's what it is. These days just about anything the French do is perceived as anti-American, idiotic, or both. Like most foreigners who have studied French language and culture, I have a love-hate relationship with the French - but at least I know when not to try cheap shots, and this shot has missed the mark completely. Like most of the anti-French propaganda the American right is spewing, it's rather embarrassing in its ignorance.

[DEAD ZONE]

Let you twist it another way twist al you like.that has not been outlawed yet.
Email was before the U.S. was around.
Uh hu. And Al Gore created the internet.

It’s the last gasps of a dead or dying culture.
You can rationalize it or bad mouth tjose that see it for what it is all you like if it makes you feel better.:smash

[DEAD ZONE]

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=969692003


"BERLIN’S 140,000 public service workers could be banned from speaking or writing a curious new language which is taking over in modern Germany - Denglish.

Politicians want the mixture of German and English outlawed in an attempt to preserve the purity of the German language. The move echoes attempts in France to cut back on Americanisms.

[Serendipity]

It’s the last gasps of a dead or dying culture.DZ, I haven't laughed so hard at one of your posts since you quoted Conrad Black's letter to the Telegraph. :lol

[DEAD ZONE]

Originally posted by Serendipity
DZ, I haven't laughed so hard at one of your posts since you quoted Conrad Black's letter to the Telegraph. :lol Nd it refutes nothing. the last gasp of a dead argument.

No doubt a "yes it is " is next.:p

[AWPrime]

I see nothing wrong with protectijng your own culture.


ps. DZ better start learning spanish.:wink
It's becoming more populair than English in the US every day.

[Serendipity]

Originally posted by DEAD ZONE
Nd it refutes nothing. the last gasp of a dead argument.

No doubt a "yes it is " is next.:p DZ, as with many of the lines you take, you don't know what you're talking about. That's why I'm getting tired of discussing stuff with you - you think you know it all (about France, about the BBC, about every damn thing) yet you show repeatedly how little you are prepared to learn, preferring instead your own made-up version of events, gleaned from websites that reek of bias. How can anyone so reluctant to learn be so knowledgeable? http://www.dumblaws.com/forums/ubb/confused.gif

In the original post you quoted an article (with which presumably you agree?) claiming that this little French action is somehow anti-American. Please enlarge, explain and elucidate, because I for one do not follow the logic.

[DEAD ZONE]

Originally posted by AWPrime
I see nothing wrong with protectijng your own culture.


ps. DZ better start learning spanish.:wink
It's becoming more populair than English in the US every day. no kidding.

Protecting a culture her is labled racist

[DEAD ZONE]

Its strait forward serin.

[Serendipity]

Originally posted by DEAD ZONE
Its strait forward serin. What is straightforward? http://www.dumblaws.com/forums/ubb/confused.gif If you mean the alleged anti-American slur, then since it's straightforward, please explain it to me.

[DEAD ZONE]

Originally posted by Serendipity
What is straightforward? http://www.dumblaws.com/forums/ubb/confused.gif If you mean the alleged anti-American slur, then since it's straightforward, please explain it to me. Note the deliberate mistatement.

[Serendipity]

[exasperated tone]DZ, please explain what you are on about![/exasperated tone]

[DEAD ZONE]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34527 :rolleyes:

[AWPrime]

Would you like some of mine New York Pizza, you never know the differnce.:wink

[Serendipity]

While there are US biotech firms who think they have the right to patent the genetic codes of foodstuffs that third world farmers have been producing for centuries, I cannot take you seriously, DZ.

BBC leftists decide that World food 'under threat' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1407301.stm)

Meanwhile...

email or e-mail = ELECTRONIC MAIL
messagerie f or courrier m électronique

Dictionary of Computing & Information Technology - English-French / French English, Peter Collin Publishing, Middlesex, 1991, p.81
So the root of courriel (a contraction of Courrier électronique) has been around for at least 12 years. Those Townhall.com guys really have their fingers on the pulse, no? :lol

[Sephirstein]

While I'm never one to defend language laws and wouldn't mind seeing every member of both the Parti/Bloc Québéqurap suffer "unfortunate" accidents, this is not at all the same thing.

Making courriel the official government, business, and academic word for English in both Quebec and France in no way stops native speakers of the French language from using the word E-Mail in informal and colloquial environments.

Do we Anglophones communicate informally in the same way that we communicate formally? I didn't think so.

So please, lay off the French.

Same with the Germans. :)

[DEAD ZONE]

The government of France has ordered Corsair, a private airline, to withdraw from a contract to fly British troops to Basra, Iraq, London's Daily Telegraph reports. "[French] Transport ministry officials were reported yesterday as saying the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry," the paper reports.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/16/wcors16.xml

French block airlift of British troops to Basra
By Henry Samuel and Michael Smith
(Filed: 16/09/2003)


The French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra, a ban that will be seen as reflecting Paris's opposition to the occupation of Iraq.

Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend.

About 1,400 more troops are being sent to Basra as part of an attempt to prevent the "strategic failure" predicted by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, with a similar number expected to be announced within weeks.

A Corsair Airbus A330 was chartered to fly troops of the Royal Green Jackets from Brize Norton, Oxon, but at the last moment the French transport ministry grounded the aircraft citing safety concerns.

Transport ministry officials were reported yesterday as saying the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry.

The foreign ministry denied the report, saying there was "no political motive". But British defence officials appeared to confirm that the ban was political and not technical.

"We have used them time and time again to fly troops into trouble spots," one said. "They have been everywhere for us. We always thought they were pretty robust."

A Corsair spokesman said most of the flights undertaken for the MoD took troops to training exercises. For security and insurance reasons they rarely flew to war zones.

"We did fly to Pristina during the Kosovo crisis, but only once it had been cleared for civil aviation."

Basra is already open to civilian aircraft.

[Serendipity]

That's interesting, DZ. What gives the French gov't the right to intervene? Why does the British MoD use Corsair, a French firm? Still, the MoD only has to use another charter flight company.