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Posted on 07/12/2003 6:12:15 AM PDT by Lorenb420
MONTREAL - Parisians who tut-tut at the quality of French spoken in Quebec may have to bite their tongues now that the Académie française has declared the Quebec term courriel to be the official French equivalent of e-mail.
The rare acceptance by the Académie of a Canadian-grown word is seen as evidence Quebec has overtaken France in adapting the language to modern advances.
"It could not have been easy for them to accept that word, because France is supposed to be the francophone leader," said Gérald Paquette, head of communications for the Office québécois de la langue française. "Quebec has now moved ahead of France in proposing terminology that expresses the modernity of French."
One reason for that is North America's advance in the use of new technologies such as the Internet. Mr. Paquette said there is also greater incentive for Quebecers to innovate linguistically because the threat posed by English here is far greater than in France.
"The French use an entirely French vocabulary to describe the realities of the industrial society of the 19th and 20th centuries. But for the 21st century, they are more inclined to borrow from English, because they do not have the same linguistic insecurity that we have here," he said.
"They know that they are not going to lose their language by borrowing a few English words here and there. In Quebec, we think that if we are constantly borrowing from English, in the long term in a North American context, French will have a hard time maintaining its place."
In the case of e-mail, the French had tended to use the terms e-mail or mail, which amounted to pronouncing the English words with a French accent. The Académie's earlier proposal of Mél, an abbreviation of messagerie électronique that sounds similar to the English mail, had gone nowhere.
No one is sure who first coined the term courriel -- a melding of the French word for mail, courrier, and électronique. But it is clear that it took off in popularity in Quebec beginning in the mid-1990s. The Office de la langue française added it to its official dictionary in 1998.
Mr. Paquette said the spread of the word was part of the Office's policy to create new French words when no equivalent exists. A team of 15 to 20 wordsmiths scour English publications seeking out new words, then put their minds to finding or creating French counterparts. Only as a last resort will they borrow from the English.
While courriel was already in limited use when the Office began looking for a term for e-mail, it was the in-house linguists who came up with pourriel, to denote spam or junk e-mail, and clavardage, for electronic chatting. Pourriel combines the French word for garbage with courriel, while clavardage blends the French words for keyboard and chatting.
Neither of those words has been accepted by the venerable Académie, which was reluctant to have too many words with an -iel ending and found clavardage a little hard on the ears. Mr. Paquette said he has not given up hope.
"That could be the next step," he said. "It has already been difficult for them to accept the word courriel because it was a Quebec proposal."
News that courriel had received the stamp of the Académie, which was created in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, was celebrated at the offices of Quebec's delegation in Paris. The edict means the term must be employed by government bodies. "I think it is the strength of the word that decided the battle was won by courriel rather than mél," said André Soumany, a spokesman for the delegation.
The victory is especially satisfying because Quebecers sometimes have to put up with ridicule from French who consider Quebec's version of the language to be slang. At the Cannes film festival in May, Quebec director Bernard Émond introduced his film 20h17 rue Darling with a plea that people not be distracted by the language.
In his previous appearance at the festival in 2001, a woman approached him afterward and said, "I know your film is tragic, but when I hear the people's accent, it makes me laugh."
Mr. Émond told the audience this year that the French in his movies is "a language of the poor ... And if you don't understand, read the English sub-titles. Watch the film as if it was Serb or Chinese."
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Ironically, someone in Canada once told me that Quebecois is actually more "pure" than what is known as "continental French." Quebecois has only been influenced by one other major language, while continental French has been influenced by a number of different languages.
Pulleazey vous! Do they have time on their hands or what.
Also, email was invented in the English speaking world especially at universities in the US. Socialist countries like France stifle the individual initiative that creates new concepts like email. The French academy is always playing catch-up, because few of the concepts and inventions of the computer age originated from French speakers.
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