I wonder if the Académie is insisting on following correct etymology. A lot of people are saying 'docteure' as a feminised form of 'docteur'; yet, if you go back to the Latin 'doctor', derived from 'doceo' ("I teach"), and change masculine agent noun suffix '-or' for the feminine agent noun suffix '-trix', then the derived French form should be 'doctresse' (edit: apparently a word 'doctoresse' exists); yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur', which would surely offend the sensibilities of the Académie.

On the one hand, the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum, but the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) in Quebec often has its own, separate ideas about how the French language should evolve, and there could be two feminised terms for the same thing, differing based on the region.

Not to mention the other Francophone regions and nations whose curricula aren't tied to the French or Québécois ones.

Actually, Michel Serres (an immortal/academician) wrote something on this subject one year ago : http://www.academie-francaise.fr/la-bataille-ideologique.

I have tried to translate the relevant paragraph (the 5th) below :

"I will finish with the words ending with “-eur”. Should we say “auteure” or “autrice” or “auteuse”, etc. ? The question doesn’t stand, since the words ending with “-eur” are statistically divided in two partsm, one feminine, and the other masculine: “la douceur” [“the sweetness”] and “le malheur” [“the misfortune”], “l’horreur” [“the horror”] and “l’honneur” [“the honor”]. Thus, “Madame Jacqueline Unetelle, auteur de ce livre” can be said without malice. This simplicity can be seen in the following example: since the growing feminization of the medical profession the “doctoresse” term tend to disappear. “Madame Unetelle, docteur généraliste” si getting more and more common. Which is normal for a word ending by “-eur”. The arbitrary decision to distinguish, amongst those words, the names of the roles from all of the others, shows a subtle hypocrisy, as it allow to impose the imperium which was insufferable before."

This isn't snark, I'm honestly trying to understand: Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century? Didn't they branch like 1,500 years ago?

When the French created a new word for, I dunno, "computer" or whatever, they didn't go back to Latin roots to figure out what it should be...or did they?

I don’t know French, but according to Wiktionary the main French word for “computer” is “ordinateur”, which is:

> From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”).

> In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter).

The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”.

Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur:

https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...

Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French?

Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer

To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)

But doesn’t this directly follow the latin computare?

> Why is what Latin did relevant for French in the 21st century?

Scholars have always gone back to Latin to influence modern language. Most technological, scientific, and plenty of engineering terms, for instance, derive either from Latin or Greek.

Modern French didn't 'branch' from Latin so much as the Latin dialects in the areas that have since become modern France evolved from Latin into what it has since become. Therefore, going back to classical and vulgar Latin tells us a lot about how the language has evolved, what features still provide valuable meaning, allowing people to guess what a word means based on their existing base knowledge of the language.

Doubly so considering the French curriculum remains relatively old-fashioned compared to the Anglophone world, such that explicitly teaching grammatical concepts at a very young age has not yet gone out of fashion in France and other Francophone regions and nations), so that the general population has a firmer understanding of the derivation of terms, the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and so on.

Not only that, it allows the modern French language to maintain a sense of consistency by going back to the roots and origins of words in order to determine how best to coin new words without causing needless difficulty, having to create exceptions where unnecessary. Hello, English language, especially in the past hundred or so years with 'electrocution' where the most important part of one of its components, 'execution', is entirely missing (such that it's not clear just from looking at 'electrocution' that being killed, 'executed', is a key part of the word).

I think one of the reasons is elegance. As in coding, you try to minimise special cases, so whenever you need to introduce a new word you go back to the roots of the language and try to derive it from what's already there. In this way the chosen word is more integrated in the language (has more connections with other existing words), its pronunciation is more predictable, and its derivation follows the same rules as the majority of the other words. Thus minimising entropy and surprise.

But according to the OP following Latin increases surprise. Hence my question.

"yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur"

It isn't "elegant" if the public is "far more likely" to do it a different way.

Good point. I guess that, as always, what counts as a "surprise" depends on your overall knowledge of the system. (For example: an eclipse of the moon is a surprise if you don't know astronomy, the absence of an expected one would be a far bigger surprise for those who do). I've found the following declaration from the Academie:

"formes telles que professeure, recteure, sapeuse-pompière, auteure, ingénieure, procureure [..] sont contraires aux règles ordinaires de dérivation et constituent de véritables barbarismes"

So, it feels wrong to them, who know the derivation rules. Probably it feels slightly more obvious to those who don't.

That depends heavily on your idea of elegance. Even if the French say they ignore the Académie Française, the really is that their pronouncements carry a lot of weight since those enter the language through the public education curriculum.

The further the romance languages deviate, the less mutually intelligible they are. I am no etymologist, so I'll leave it to speculation as to whether that is the best choice. But I don't know French or German, and having a Latin vocabulary allows for some understanding, especially if a sentence has English loan words in it to boot.

Computer has a longer history than what you think.

"The first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”"

https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2015/the-etymology-of-the...

> or did they?

Yes, they used the Latin word with the closest meaning. It is the same etymology as "order" in English. They come up with a lot of official words for things, but in the streets a lot of them are ignored. Some stick in some regions while brands or borrowed words are used in some other region.

The ironic aspect is that the closer you get to Paris (seat of the a Académie), the more borrowed words are used. In Quebec, even this close to the USA, there isn't all that much borrowed words beside pieces that are directly imported from the US such as automobile parts and tools (because until the 70's, the labels were in English only).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur

Edit: ... 3 people replied at the same time, whatever.

"computer" is also from Latin "computare"

FWIW, doctoresse is in the French dictionary.

> the Académie could make a recommendation on such titles (and it may have done, I don't know) and those would be carried into the French public school curriculum

Actually, the school curriculum (both public and private) follows the Ministry of Education recommendations which are based on the Conseil supérieur français de la langue française, and which are not necessarily the same as the Académie française. Although the Académie usually approves them, it is purely symbolical.

That’s a good question. Hopefully they choose one or the other and not choose to make up a totally synthetic and nonsense suffix (as when they want to invent new French words so as not to corrupt French with loan words (have they come up with a native word for sushi, by the way?)

French is almost completely impervious to "totally synthetic" suffices or words, almost all new vocabulary is created from Latin (or Greek for the more technical or scientific words) when it's not borrowed from a foreign language. Creating a new suffix from scratch actually sounds like more of an American answer to the "gender problem".

There is also no reason to invent a word to replace "sushi", just as nobody is advocating for a replacement for "fish and chips" or "hamburger".

It seems a more natural route for English, where there is no grammatical gender. So the imposition of gender on the nouns for a subset of professions was inherently an odd feature.

Whereas, German and French both have a grammatical gender. In German I suppose you could neuter all the professions Whether that's feasible or not I couldn't say; I don't speak German. French doesn't have a neuter gender, though, so eroding the feminine gendered trade words could be (quite rightly) taken as an overt act of erasure. It means you'd be using male-coded pronouns and declension whenever you refer to a woman in terms of her profession.

AFAIK, there are no neutered professions in German. So that would be a big change, it's hard to imagine.

I know very little French, but if I understand correctly, because person in French is female (la personne), you could have a sentence mentioning "the persons" (plural) (les personnes?), and then later on using the pronoun "elles" (female version of "they") to refer to them. So a female-coded pronoun would refer to a mixed-gender group of people.

Yes, your understanding is correct.

Grammatical accord overrides physical gender for pronoun choice in French.

The situation in English is a bit more complicated though. We have words of Norman French or Latin origin that contain gender information, like actor vs actress, and then we have the ending -er that is of Germanic origin, and we can use that to make new words. I don't believe the French/Latin endings are "productive" in English: you can't really make up new words that have those endings, but you can readily make new words from verb + er (and I suppose in old English and its ancestors there must have been a feminine version of -er, like Dutch -ster and German -erinn, but we lost that along with all kinds of case endings and so forth a very long time ago). That's because we imported the "foreign" words as whole atoms when we bolted Norman lexicon on top of our Germanic grammatical base, and perhaps we've mashed them around a bit, but they're not really composed of phonemes that we can work with individually in quite the same way as we can with Germanic words. Those are the ones that some people are trying to kick out of the English language, with the idea that "actress" is somehow inferior or has connotations other than just gender, or that marking gender is unnecessary, and it's natural to get rid of them by analogy to our more Germanic words. But those types of endings are entirely productive in French -- they're in the toolbox of living phonemes you can make new words with, bolting on -eur, -rice/-euse/-resse etc (though I'm never sure to choose among those...) So it makes sense that French speakers are trying to "fill out" the missing logical combinations of gender-marking endings, and the English speakers are trying to "remove" the unnecessary variations that we see with just a few of our words. Perhaps someone who objects to "actress" should argue for "acter" instead of using the masculine ending "actor"! (Not a serious suggestion, just a shower thought really, as someone who's spent a bit of time in English and French speaking countries...)

Though the grammatical gender of words have a lot of oddities too. E.g. German Maedchen (girl) is the neuter gender.

That particular example isn't really an oddity; it's a pattern. The "-chen" used in "Mädchen" is a suffix/diminutive and it nearly always transforms the original word to the neuter gender. The original word modified in this particular case has fallen out of common use AFAIK, so it stands out as unusual if you aren't looking more broadly.

Sure. The point is that in languages with grammatical gender, the grammatical gender doesn't necessarily match the semantic gender anyway. (e.g. -chen)

There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders.

Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop having them reflect gender doesn't flow very naturally in the language. "Une boulanger", "un hotesse", "une acteur" etc... All that is very grating to the ear and somewhat un-french sounding. It basically breaks very common patterns in the language that every French speaker consciously or unconsciously integrated as part of learning French.

Compare for instance:

Un boulanger fier (a proud baker, male)

Une boulangère fière (a proud baker, female)

Note that both the adjective "fier" and the noun "boulanger" decline similarly. If you "erode" boulanger to be neutral you end up with:

Un boulanger fier

Une boulanger fière

Suddenly the pattern is broken. Do we erode "fier" and similar adjectives as well to remain consistent? But then of course it has a cascading effect throughout the language.

I'm not saying that this means that it cannot or shouldn't be improved, I dislike the heavy knee-jerk backlash every proposed reform of French grammar gets (no matter how small and obvious it is, like simplifying some ridiculous rules for the accord of the passé composé) but it's definitely a complex topic.

French (and German) is a gendered language: we say «une»/«un» and «la»/«le». And we don't even have a way to opt-out the gender (German does).

In the 18th and 19th centuries, L'Académie Française tried to get rid of the feminine version or many existing names, and promote the idea of the masculine as «gender-neutral». The most (in)famous example is the masculine auteur (the French for “author”) replacing autrice for both sex. But this unification around the male version always felt artificial and somewhat offensive for women, because of the gendered articles.

I think that approach might be politically easier to accept if the plan had been to drop the masculine version for half the nouns, and the feminine one for the other half.

But it's also hard to imagine the members of an old men's club voluntarily deciding that they should henceforth be known as autrices instead of auters. Doubly so 200 years ago.

> waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter

I use all of those other than baxter! Seems only polite; I'd be offended were I an actress and others called me an actor.

It's rather a slap in the face to non-binary and gender non-conforming people, though.

Superimposing an extremely recent political movement onto linguistic gender seems like the mother of all category errors.

Nonbinary people existing is a political movement now?

Then the existence of binary people is a political movement, too.

Do those exist in France? I have always thought it was an American (or Anglo-Saxon) cultural phenomenon.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?