>ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.
>JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.
Really, it's for the better. Languages change naturally over time and institutions like for French or Korean have little bearing on that. It's better to have style -guides- than to try and enforce usages of a language that differ from how it's actually used in real life.
I study Korean, which also has a similar institution, and it's not really that helpful.
Real language usage is completely different than what's taught in classroom or academic environments. They are always out of date, and don't teach casual/slang usage (aka real usage by real people, not textbook language). Regular dictionaries have been invaluable.
You are confusing language and its written representation. Sure languages change, that doesn't mean its writing system shouldn't be standardized, as there is a lot of benefits (efficiency) when it's the case. There isn't much discussion about language usage anyway save for a few points.
English spelling being standardized so early is one of the problems with it. The language has changed since the spelling was standardized (minus a few debates on the letter u).
If only there was a society of learned people, writers, academics, and civil servants, united for the advancement of language, empowered to regularly update the standard so that it remained convenient even as the vernacular evolved!
I wonder if the Royal Society had any plans to create such an organization in the 17th century... ;)
There are plenty of institutions that do this already. Dictionaries, University English departments, other academic institutions. I don't see why having a single centralized office to do this would be better, especially with a language like English where it's spoken in so many different countries.
Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.
You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated.
The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to wake up a few months later, telling everyone to say "la covid", out of dubious and easily countered justifications. The members of the Académie are not even linguists. They are regular, if conservative, speakers at best. I don't know why I would even trust them on handling the language better than random people on the street.
But actually, random people on the street are the ones defining the language. The right approach for covid would have been to say "ok, everybody here says "le covid". Canadians happen to say "la covid". Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.
English is spoken a bit differently depending on the area of the world and there are rules which are discussed. So what. No academies will change that by the way. French is spoken slightly differently across France, never mind across the world.
Just pick your style and your version, and be consistent in your formal writing if you value this kind of things.
(And yes, you can split infinitives in English, obviously ;-))
"On constate une hésitation dans le genre attribué au terme COVID-19" -- "One can sense some hesitation regarding the gender assigned to the term COVID-19"
The feminine form ("la covid") might come (according to the OQLF, at least) from "la maladie à coronavirus 2019" i.e. "maladie" (which is feminine) "transferring" its gender over to "covid".
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Actually, now that I read the Académie Française's take on it, I don't find it too unreasonable:
They state (as does the OQLF) that the gender is transferred over from the "core" word of the expression. So, "la" (feminine) SNCF because SNCF stands for "Société nationale des chemins de fer français" and "Société" (the core word) is feminine.
"la" covid, again, because of "maladie" (which is feminine)
The Académie says: "Il n’en reste pas moins que l’emploi du féminin serait préférable" -- "That being said, the use of feminine would be preferable". Not _that_ prescriptive.
Should the Académie have a prescriptive (vs descriptive) role in every day French (in France / or Canada) is of course a whole debate topic. :-)
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Shameless plug since we're on the topic: I run an Urban Dictionary-like site for French Canadians expressions -- https://www.laparlure.com/ -- it's purely descriptive and user-generated i.e. French (mostly in Canada) "as it's spoken"
The explanation is not unreasonable, but you have reasonable explanations for the masculine too. Wifi is a good counter-example: Fidelity is feminine, yet the masculine gender is widespread for Wifi. You can also justify the masculine form by metonymy (at the beginning of the pandemic we mostly said coronavirus, and we shifted to covid but kept the masculine of the former).
If you'd like some background on this (in French):
In short: you cannot argue against the usage, even with the most logical explanation that goes against the usage. Natural languages are far from being formal, entirely consistent and completely logical.
I was speaking about French. In French, most nouns have genders. Usually, the gender is well defined but for some nouns like Wifi, the gender is different depending on the area or even across people. Where I live, wifi is mostly masculine, but you hear the feminine form often enough. Usually from people from the South West of France but not exclusively.
You can notice the gender of the noun from the article: le wifi, un wifi, or from the adjectives qualifying it, if any.
> I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?
Easily, by the language making it an obligatory grammatical category for nouns. Grammar says there's concord in the language and some words have gender? Suddenly all nouns require gender for concord, regardless of whether it seems reasonable to you or not.
English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. GP is pointing out that the Académie Française chose to assign covid the feminine gender despite the popular use of the masculine gender for it in widespread use before their decision.
And so while "tavolo" in Italian is masculine, our table is feminine. And while our planète is feminine, Spanish's planeta ends with an A and is masculine.
English generally doesn't have genders on common words, except for cases like vehicles that can be found used as feminine (ship, car, …) [1], but that's fairly anecdotal.
It’s kind of a quirk of history that English lost grammatical gender when importing French, German, and Latin words.
The closest idea to gender would probably be the idea of weak/strong vowels that while no longer codified, is what results in things like see/saw, run/ran, mouse/mice. IIRC Old English had a much stronger sense of these and conjugated many of their words in this way.
An example:
Mouse -> Mice is valid.
Moose -> Meese is not.
I actually did have that in my original comment but it didn't survive an edit. Vehicles, vessels, countries and a few others seem to get a gender, but it's not actually a part of the language in the same sense as in Spanish, Italian, German, French, and others. It more seems to reflect a kind of personification (the nation as an entity becomes a she, same with a ship). That's distinct from the grammatical gender in other languages.
> But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK).
Yep, that's what I meant. Within a (set of) text(s).
Each newspaper has its set of rules to follow to ensure consistency, so if you need consistency across an organization you can do this. English newspapers do that too.
> The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.
...And that people don't consistently follow, because this standard does not reflect the reality of how the language is spoken or written. Almost by definition. Anyway, we are still waiting for their dictionary, which first edition should have been released maybe a century ago. They have one important task and they can't manage to finish it. Not a big issue though (except for the money thrown out of the window), if you need a dictionary that actually works you have the Robert or Wiktionary.
Anyway, each individual is going to speak the language with their own quirks and particularities. Consistency across everybody is unreachable. But that's fine.
For Covid, the Académie has ironically been a source of inconsistency. Before their intervention, everybody had been saying "le covid". All was well. Now, usage is uncertain here.
For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast. They don't like loan words in general, and have a particular grudge against English loanwords.
I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.
Linguistic hegemony can be felt as related to cultural and political hegemony. Just as something would be lost if the world only had one language, it’s natural for people to ask why, if our language has a fine word for something already, we have to throw it out and use a foreign word instead. Language is bound up with history and culture. People have affection for these things, and don’t always want to toss them away willy-nilly. There also is the aesthetic dimension.
It may be harder for us US people to understand. Ours is a dominant society, and English dominance is only gaining ground. We are not the ones losing our traditions. Preserving something of your heritage is not xenophobia.
Not sure if France, whose government eradicated many local languages and dialects in geographical France throughout the 19th & 20th centuries and is not very eager to protect what survives of them now is the best example in this case, though.
e.g. in the mid 19th century 4/10 of all people in France spoke Occitan as their native language, how many do now?
It's not xenophobic, but it is nationalistic and atavistic.
There was a time when French had a chance of establishing itself as a "Lingua Franca" (sic); French is still considered the primary language of international law, I believe. The distaste for loanwords seems to be a sort of harking back to what might have been.
> For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast.
I can think of worse ideas. It's always shocking to me how people think that there's a difference of some kind between "podcasts" and "audio files that you download from the internet". The name really seems to be doing serious damage to people's understanding of what's happening.
'Audio files that you download from the internet' could be absolutely anything - a song, an opera, a news broadcast, a test signal, a play... tells you nothing. 'Podcast' gives you a general idea of the medium and intent. That's useful.
Otherwise we might as well call everything in the universe 'stuff' if you really don't like nouns that may have a slight overlap.
One is a subtype of the other. Would you insist on using "radio broadcast" instead of "morning show"? Aside from that, a podcast is still a podcast regardless of whether you downloaded it, streamed it, or distributed it over media like flash drives and compact discs. That's why it's useful to have a new noun.
"suiveur", in French, is connoted pejoratively and means "someone without initiative". So I guess most people would find it uncomfortable to use this term in this context.
But there's a word that works great for this in French and that everybody who needs it already understands well: follower. It's borrowed from English, like so many other words. It's only fair, a big part of the English vocabulary directly comes from the French.
I believe you, and I can't explain why it did work for English speakers and not for the French ones. Maybe I'm wrong in my hypothesis by the way, that's just how I feel it. Follower does not bear this pejorative meaning for French people.
Maybe Twitter did push for this word in English and it worked? And then people who translated Twitter's interface in French and decided to leave follower "untranslated" actually sealed the destiny of this word in the French language?
Although it can have that connotation in English, it has to be activated by context: “Jim is not a leader, he’s a follower”. But in phrases like “a follower of the Chicago school of economics” it’s neutral. Maybe in French the negative connotation is more tightly bound to the word.
Interesting. No, indeed, we can't use suiveur neutrally like this in French as far as I know.
We'd probably say un étudiant or une étudiante (a student) in this specific case. Or un membre (a member).
But we actually can follow a lesson (suivre un cours) without it being pejorative, so while the noun is probably always pejorative, the verb is generally not if not activated by context, as you say.
The author (Byron) seems to conflate "eloquence" with the Ciceronian use of flowery constructions and lots of subordinate clauses. For me, eloquence is the art of making yourself understood in speech. Elaborate rhetorical embellishments, it seems to me, impede that goal.
I find that I identify as a prescriptivist; at any time, there seems to be a small number of words that are widely used in a sloppy and ignorant way by opinion-formers, and that usage rapidly pushes out more precise usage.
Having said that, I welcome the fluidity of English, and would be horrified at the prospect of an Academy Anglaise with a goal of fossilising the language. I enjoy adjusting my register to my audience. And (my elitism breaks through) I enjoy exercising my knowledge of English vernacular (i.e. I like swearing) and formal registers. And I enjoy the effect it has when I suddenly switch registers - swearing during a mainly formal utterance shocks people. I enjoy demonstrating that I am a native speaker, even if that makes me harder to understand for an increasing minority of people.
I use quite a lot of americanisms; when I was growing up, American slang was hip (I'm from the UK). I get teased for that. I also use a fair bit of "archaic" terminology, partly because it seems more precise to me than the modern gloss.
So I guess I'm not really a prescriptivist; I just have some opinions that die-hard descriptivists seem to find offensive. Lexicographers (Websters, OED) have apparently all lined-up behind a descriptivist banner, and I don't know where one might find an authoritative prescriptivist English dictionary.
English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.
That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it.
"So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other?
The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system.
“The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/
> print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one
You don't say!
It's almost always not one-to-one. The "ghoti" joke parodies this.
English language derives from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin vulgate, celtic languages, and colonial imports from e.g. the Indian subcontinent. The spoken language has moved beyond those roots, but the spelling hasn't. I appreciate those old spellings; I like to see the origins of words in their spellings. Sometimes these spellings become apparent in the way words are used and pronounced in regional dialects, and I deplore the steady homogenisation of English.
All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.
Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written.
English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.)
Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)
So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?
Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.
It is. A "rooter" is a piece of network equipment; a "rauw-ter" is a machine for finishing a hole in a piece of work, such as a drill-hole.
I'm perfectly willing to accept american pronunciation of technical terms in IT; IT tech-talk is a kind of jargon that most non-techs are bewildered by. There's little benefit in clinging to customary pronunciations.
But the machine for cleaning holes isn't in that category. If I were talking to e.g. a woodworker, and referred to a "rooter", I expect that would result in some mirth at my expense, for exposing my ignorance.
> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.
I have recently been pulled-up by a fellow native speaker over my pronunciation of the word "poor" ("poo-uh"). She pronounces it the same as "pore" or "paw". Many other words have exhibited the same shift: e.g. moor/more, boor/bore. My natural accent is RP, but I think the distinction I like to draw is not RP. Most of the people I meet that draw this distinction are from the North. Scots, in particular, seem inclined to draw the old distinctions more than southerners.
I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.
I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.
Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.
I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.
I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.
Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.
I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.
Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.
Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.
Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.
Wrong, Korean writing is morpho-phonologic and has complex rules for transforming letters to actual pronunciation. And those rules applies at three different level (whatever position in the syllable, across syllable boundaries or not, or just within syllable).
But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound.
Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.
I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.
But why? There are specific dictionaries and a variety of widely-used style books both specific and less so. There are some disagreements which may result in, say, a given company following different style rules for different purposes.
To the latter point, for example, a lot of companies use Oxford comma in general but don't for press releases and related because AP doesn't follow Oxford.
In general, though, it all works out. I see very little appetite for another group of authorities than the ones who already exist.
Right. I think people forget that there are many dialects of English.[0] I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well.
You might be interested in "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch. McCulloch is a linguist, but it's a light/layperson's book. I really enjoyed it.
IANAL(inguist) but internet speak and memes have been studied for well over a decade by linguists. huge opportunity for publishing, and if they're lucky they might get hired by google. no i do not have an optimistic outlook for the field outside academia.
They already do. The Americans who speak Spanish in Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, etc. recognize the authority of La Real Academia Española (even though their own brands of Spanish differ a bit from the kind spoken in Spain).
This is, by the way, not a criticism of your use of “Americans”, which I and all English speakers use the same way.
My two Spanish teachers, who live in two different Latin American countries, use the RAE as a fallback authority in cases where it’s not clear what usage is preferred. So it is kind of a weak authority. And, believe it or not, the concept of correctness in language exists in Latin America, regardless of what the “locals” speak, and it matters to a lot of people, who love their language and treat it with respect.
My Spanish teachers from Argentina did the same. When coming across words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with (hey, they don't have the dictionary memorized either) they almost always sent me something later (or brought it up in the next session) citing RAE or a source that itself cited RAE.
Also, the best online dictionary for Spanish is the excellent one at the RAE site (although it only works once you know enough Spanish to read the definitions!).
Well, but the baker and the policeman in Paris are not preoccupied with conforming their speech to the dictates of the French Academy, either. But it is still recognized as a kind of authority for many purposes, although, I’m sure, often begrudgingly.
The joke I tried to make was an allusion to how the Metric System's units like the meter and the kilogram were all based on reference objects before they were truly modernized. So despite the reference objects losing tiny amounts of mass over the years, they were, by definition, what a kilogram should be.
It doesn't come off as a joke because that is in fact how a language standard is usually defined. What made Parisian better than Provençal? What made Castilian better than Catalan?
Is this thread written by contestants in a Turing test? 8)
I'm an expert in English humour. If you say "four candles" in my hearing, I will spontaneously wet myself. It's an unfortunate consequence of being 50 years old and very English.
I've consulted the video referee. We all agree it's a fair riff on the term - "The Queen's English" (formally King) and henceforth it can be safely categorised in section 3.3.2.II.b in the canonical JbMF (Joke book of Monster Fun) version 5 (five.)
I pronounce the joke tendered as valid as formerly described. Judgement in favour of the plaintiff.
The queen and her family (and by extension, many of the aristocracy) speak a dialect of English that is not any kind of regional dialect. It is not the form spoken by BBC announcers (who are often nowadays speakers of northern dialects, or even foreign pronunciations).
Their vowels are strangled, and they just sound weird to most native English speakers.
>JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.