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Mind Your Language
Why are British newspapers reporting on the French Culture Ministry's latest effort to prevent English words from sullying the beauty of the French tongue? Both the Daily Mail and the Metro freesheet report on the latest recommendations emanating from the "Commission for Terminologies" - a blog should be a bloc, an iPod should be diffusion pour baladeur.
As one EURSOC correspondent noted, these new terms are hardly eco-friendly. If the media was forced to publish the sometimes tortuous French expressions in place of their English equivalents, French computer magazines would use 20 percent more paper.
Most of us are aware of the heroic idiocy of the Academie Française, which meets regularly to despair of the rising tide of globalised expressions, and issues directives governing how state bodies and public figures should refer to the modern world's newest phenomena.
Firstly, despite the arrival of a new summary, most of these are old news. The Academy offers a selection of terms relating to the fields of the internet, organic chemisty, international law, architecture and the zone euro.
Interestingly, the zone euro page has only one term, instructing Francophones that zone euro is the correct phrase for the internationally-used Euro Zone, euro area and single currency area. It explicitly states that the term "euroland" or "eurolande" should be avoided. And the Academy has a point - it's an ugly expression.
Some of the Academy's recommendations merely put English phrases into French spelling: cliquer is the verb "to click" (a button on a mouse). Configurer is to configure. In these cases, the Academy is merely handing down the correct usage for dictionaries and so on, Hardly the stuff of front-page news, even if it's difficult to believe that the French pay people to come up with stuff like this.
Some of these recommendation papers date back ten years, if hacks bothered to look for them. Moreover, some of the terms are preferable to their English equivalents. Courriel (which no French person uses) is much nicer than "Email." Baladeur (which no-one ever uses) is prettier than either "Walkman" or "iPod" and has the added bonus of not being a trademarked brand.
