Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:12553 news.sysadmin:1557 sci.lang:3373 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!porthos.rutgers.edu!maffray From: maffray@porthos.rutgers.edu (Frederic Maffray) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,news.sysadmin,sci.lang Subject: Re: sexist language Message-ID: Date: 18 Nov 88 04:13:23 GMT References: <1460@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <698@packard.UUCP> <1988Nov9.200939.6069@utzoo.uucp> <10837@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1988Nov13.202622.23562@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <3803@imag.imag.fr> <7731@dasys1.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 103 In article <7731@dasys1.UUCP>, Jean-Pierre Radley writes: In article <3803@imag.imag.fr> pierre@imag.UUCP (Pierre LAFORGUE) writes: #> Why don't you use the latin language, instead of decadent ones #> as is the english ? Distinction between "HOMO" and "VIR" #> allows to avoid frustations. # As a native speaker of both French and English, I can say that # it ill behooves you to describe English as "decadent". He was obviously speaking with tongue in cheek, but he was misunderstood, as it happens all the time when someone forgets to cram his text with smileys. # It is, au contraire, [and we don't necessarily put a phrase like # "au contraire" in quotes] extraordinarily alive. Probably, but, precisely, I feel that you seem to make a big fuss of this ostentatious use of a foreign phrase... # Certainly it is more tolerant than French, more adaptable, ... # ... larger (just a count of the word-list), and still growing. I believe that any serious linguist would take such statement with some salt. When I look at any English-French dictionary, it appears that each language takes up about one half of the book, and that they have pretty much the same average density of words per page. Now when I look at an all-English language dictionary, I find that the number of "words" -- more properly 'entries' -- is artificially boosted by several features which are unique to the English language. For example, after the word sodium, you find a long list of various chemicals like "sodium chlorate," "sodium chlorite", etc. The same goes concerning "potassium", etc. On the other hand, in a French dictionary (and similarly for any Romance language) you will find the one entry "chlorate", and, in the description of this entry, you will read: "Exemples: chlorate de sodium, chlorate de potassium, etc." As a consequence, the French dictionary will have only one entry ("chlorate") while the English dictionary will count one different entry for each kind of chlorate. Similarly, you have three entries: "moon", "light" and "moonlight", whereas French will have only two entries: "lune", "clair", with the phrase "clair de lune" being explained in the body of the description of the word "clair", and NOT as a separate word. English is fond of such compound words and phrases and lists each of them separately. Another example is with pairs of words like Spanish/Spaniard, Arab/Arabian/Arabic, Jewish/Jew, etc. Romance languages usually do not distinguish between noun and adjective as far as nationality is concerned. So again they have only one entry where English has several. # Dieu merci, we do NOT have an Academie to protect English from # useful foregn words. I could bet this one would be mentioned... It's funny, I have come to realize that, should I want to know what the AF is up to, I would find out much more easily by reading an American newspaper than a French one. In reality, the popular reference on the French language (as used for example by the referees in TV word-games) is definitely not the AF, but the dictionaries of the major publishing companies (Larousse, Robert, Littre'), of which new editions appear every year around September. Then is the time when the media talk the most about the state of the language. Nobody gives a flying fuck what the senile sleepwalkers of the AF say. It takes them an average 35 years to come up with a new edition of their thing, so everybody knows perfectly it's obsolete as soon as it is released. Believe me, they have about as much influence on the language as the Pope has on Gay Paree. As for foreign words, English speakers like to boast that the English language contains a great many of them, but in reality, I've always been non-plussed by this claim. I don't find that the average American newspaper uses that many foreign words and phrases, and anyway very few of them are very common words. Oftentimes, these words are of a very specific, 'exotic', use, like "ayatollah" or "cappuccino" or "sierra". And how many people outside the elite actually use words like "Weltanschauung" or "nom de plume"? On the other hand, in French there are many foreign (in particular English) words which have passed into everyday use. It's possible that in sheer numbers, English has more foreign borrowings than French, in particular as a legacy of Britain's large colonial empire. But foreign borrowings in French are much more frequent and conspicuous, from "stop" to "stock" to "jeans" to "sandwich" to "freezer" to "parking" to "week-end" to "squat" to "hamburger" to "ketchup" to "prime-time" to "zap", etc. Robert actually puts out a 1300-page Dictionary of Anglicisms (i.e., borrowings from English into French). It may be precisely because of the heavy presence of foreign words in French that the dead members of the AF get so upset. In the 18th and 19th century, when French was the dominant language of Europe, people used to say that is was the language with the most clarity, with the most nuances, etc. They did not give a hoot for the current alleged superiority of English. Seems to me that any dominant culture likes to pretend that it is so because of some kind of built-in characteristic, like because it is naturally superior, richer, subtler, etc., while in fact this dominance is essentially due to demographic, political, and economic power. Language is politics. Fred