Keeping the French Language Pure
Look how desperate The Times’ editorial staff has become for new French-bashing fodder (“Deja Vu All Over Again,” editorial, July 23). So an obscure French bureaucracy whose job it is to create French words for new stuff comes up with one for e-mail. Big deal. The French people will reject the new term for the same reasons that their United Nations representatives rejected our case for the invasion of Iraq: In any language, they know garbage when they hear it. Why has it taken us months to figure out what the French knew in minutes? Now, there’s a subject worthy of an editorial.
Joe Corso
Long Beach
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It is true that the French government keeps embarrassing itself every so often by issuing regulations to “protect” the national language. These are bound to fail, as in any open society you cannot tell people how they should speak and what words can be used. In any case, most of the provisions introduced to that end have time and again been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, as they run contrary to the principle of free speech.
However, I would have expected more humility from a country where lawmakers have decided to ban such words as “French fries” and “French toast.” In terms of embarrassment, that runs pretty high too.
Laurent Masmejean
Geneva, Switzerland
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I was amused by your editorial on the attempts by the French government to keep the language pure. We English have been puzzled for years at the thought of a French government department with the sole responsibility for new words such as courriel.
However, your assertion that it was U.S. culture that led to the eclipse of French as a potential world language surprised me. I had thought it was because we Brits, as the superpower of the time, spread the English language to most of sub-Saharan Africa, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada (well, most of it) and, finally, the U.S. itself. English as a global language was established long before Hollywood.
Quentin Brearley
Rancho Palos Verdes