Académie Française, on a quest to ‘preserve the purity’ of the French language, has taken aim at tech and gaming jargon
The Academy rose to proclaim
That while playing a video game
Nobody in France
Should e’er take the chance
Of uttering an English name
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Je fais le babysitting pendant le weekend quand ma femme sort au village pour le shopping.
wash out your filthy mouth ! ;)
Maybe say that with a scouse accent
Do they have a point or does it choose it ignore how language evolves, is living and ever-shifting and represents the cultural present? Don’t most languages come from a branch on the linguistic tree? Common people divided by common language and all that in terms of the romantic anyway.
I don’t know if being puritanical about it helps but i guess the speakers will decide.
Noticed yesterday that in Spanish you say telefon intelligente for smartphones when in French it’s just smartphone… où sont les téléphones intelligents bordel?!?
they actually say, portable
I love one thing about the Académie, similarly sometimes as in Irish, is how when new words come about, they try to construct a new word based on correct. Just as a car is a ‘gluaisteáin’, but commonly called a ‘carr’, so I was intrigued when the space race brought a new challenge – how to say ‘splashdown’ in French? So they turned to an existing word, created when the advent of manned flight brought in the era of take-offs and landings. Then, the Académie came up with the term ‘aterrisage’ for landing, and so adapted to ‘amerrisage’ for splashdown. Seriously, genius.
One of the fun things I think about French as a language is how different it is from one Francophone country to another, much as English is. For example, in one country alone – the Democratic Republic of the Congo – their French is different in the east versus the west. The East is heavily influenced by Swahili, which in itself there is influenced by the Belgians, particularly the German/Luxembourgish dialects.
The result of this was one time, in a café in Goma, I ordered a bottle of water, using the word ’bouteille’. When that did not work, I tried ‘ballon’, reaching the limits of my knowledge of bottle in French.
Being met with blank stares, I looked at my colleague, a gentleman from the Valais region of Switzerland who, in his native Swiss French tried himself, and used what I thought was was the same terminology.
Light eventually dawned when the guy understood, and said (phonetic spelling here, open to correction) ‘un flaishe’. Closer to a flask in both English and French, it is a holdover from the significant Belgian and even German influence in the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nice to know, when even my Little one gets confused at my English words. I guess those Francophone countries are just like the Anglophone ones: countries divided by a common language.
In honor of your travels Slightly
Aucune marche
Aucune navigation
N’égalent celles de la vie
S’actionnant dans tes vaisseaux
Se centrant dans l’îlot du cœur
Se déplaçant d’âge en âge
Aucune exploration
Aucune géologie
Ne se comparent aux circuits du sang
Aux alluvions du corps
Aux éruptions de l’âme
Aucune ascension
Aucun sommet
Ne dominent l’instant
Où t’octroyant forme
La vie te prêta vie
Les versants du monde
Et les ressources du jour
Aucun pays
Aucun périple
Ne rivalisent avec ce bref parcours
Voyage très singulier
De la vie
Devenue
Toi.
– Andrée Chedid, la vie voyage
Why thank you, my lady! That is lovely.
I had not read it before, and I hope my understanding does it justice. If I am right, then it is right, and at he end of the day there really is
only you!
:)
Ah anseo; faigh seomra.