The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by vixen99 on Monday April 01, 2019 @02:58AM (#19541126)

English speakers themselves are quite capable of sorting this kind of thing out for themselves without waiting for the deliberations of the appointed whose decisions they'll probably ignore anyway - as do the French, one gathers. Life and English are both messy but we muddle through.

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by jcelerier on Monday April 01, 2019 @05:00AM (#19541613)

> Life and English are both messy but we muddle through.

As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning.

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by akdor1154 on Monday April 01, 2019 @05:44AM (#19541776)

> As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning.

Huh I never noticed this peculiarity of English before. "I am an Italian/Australian/Canadian" - fine. "I am an English/French/Swedish" - hell no. Traditionally you'd say Frenchman, nowadays you'd avoid the gender and use "I am French" directly as an adjective.

Anyone know why -an words can be used as a noun and -sh words can't?

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by seszett on Monday April 01, 2019 @05:55AM (#19541809)

-an words are initially nouns that have come to be used as adjectives, while -ish words are only adjectives.

The English language readily makes adjectives from nouns, but not the other way round. Nominalized adjectives are used for collective groups at most (which is why you can say "the French") but rarely become regular nouns.

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by Retra on Monday April 01, 2019 @10:40AM (#19543690)

"As a french person" would be the typical genderless replacement, not restructuring the sentence entirely.

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by bryanrasmussen on Monday April 01, 2019 @05:22AM (#19541688)

muddling through, I have managed to deduce that by 'As a french,' you mean that you are French, am I correct?

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by dorfsmay on Monday April 01, 2019 @08:51AM (#19542721)

If you see biweekly somewhere, it is impossible to know what it means without more explanations, even context isn't enough. This has been like this for years and nobody's even tried to fix it.

What is the point of having such confusion?

Also, why having dictionaries at all? And who decides which one is right?

Why not have a body made up of experts who make that decisions once and for all when natural evolution leads to bad results?

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Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked by umanwizard on Monday April 01, 2019 @09:31AM (#19543022)

> Also, why having dictionaries at all?

Exactly the opposite of why you think we have them, apparently. In English-speaking countries, dictionaries document existing usage, they don’t try to influence it. No modern dictionary has any opinion on what usage is “correct”, and you can find a lot of extremely non-standard things in the most prestigious dictionaries.

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