Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
by Beldin on Monday April 01, 2019 @01:21PM
(#19545690)
Interesting... when I asked a few years ago, I was told by a French guy that nobody uses courriel in real life and that I'd sound better if I used 'mail' (in french pronunciation).
He was from île de paris; your mileage may vary.
Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
by GuB-42 on Monday April 01, 2019 @02:47PM
(#19546704)
He is right. We all use "mail". And it always means email.
"Courriel", or its complete form "courrier éléctronique" is more common in formal, written conversation.
I think the translation came up too late. An early french proposal was to use the "mél" abbreviation which is terrible and never took off... It is still preferred by the Académie Française, another case of being completely off.
BTW, it is "Île de France", the region where Paris is ;) But the situation is the same for all of continental France. I don't know about the overseas and other French-speaking countries.
Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
by cbnotfromthere on Monday April 01, 2019 @06:18PM
(#19548913)
"He was from île de paris"
There is no "île de Paris" in France.
The problem I think most of us have with the Académie Française is the disconnect between their decisions and the reality of the french language. Not that they are completely against change, but that they are regularly missing the point when they actually make changes.
An example is about CD-ROM. They proposed to rewrite it "cédérom". Basically turning an acronym into a completely made up word. It is ridiculous in many ways. CD-ROM is already a stupid word: both audio CDs and CD-ROMs are read only memory, so why keep that? We already had a word for audio CDs that was in common use: "disque compact", which is perfectly acceptable french, why not build on that? We translated many computer-related words in the past with great success: disquette (floppy disk), mémoire vive (RAM), logiciel (software), etc...
Sometimes, a new french translation appears that really sound good. Courriel is one of them: it sounds good and it is definitely french (from courrier (mail) and éléctronique (electronic)). And guess what... it comes from Quebec, like many other good proposals.