[PLUG] Do you like my courriel?

[Kyle Hayes]

On Saturday 19 July 2003 15:46, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> "The French Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of
> 'e-mail' in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web
> sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the
> French lexicon."
>
> The approved term is now "courriel":
>
>   http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/18/france.email.ap/index.html
>
> Gotta love the French. :-)

I worked in France for a while.  I went out and found a special dictionary of 
French computer terms and diligently learned them.  Then, once there, I found 
that the French had such charming terms as:

"le computer" NOT "l'ordinateur"

"le network" NOT "le reseau"

In fact, they quickly made me stop using the French terms almost entirely.  
The only one that they consistently used was "clavier" for keyboard.  They 
even said "mouse" instead of "souris" about half the time.

When I asked why they weren't using the French terms, they pointed out that 
they learned all this from English books.  Most computer books are printed in 
English.  If they are translated to French at all, it is often more than a 
year later.  Since most of the well educated French can read English fairly 
well, they just use the English books and do not wait for the French version.

The word 'email' has been in fairly high usage for about a decade.  So, as 
long as L'Academie Francaise takes this long to come up with new words for 
common things, the French will be speaking English with a funny accent 
relatively soon.

Best,
Kyle