Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/no-thanks-academy

by the-enemy • 5 years ago

42 109 5 years ago

Probably a good thing, considering how generally useless and obnoxious the Académie Française is. English speakers around the world have no need for a bunch of snooty, self-appointed busybodies trying to police language.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast. They don't like loan words in general, and have a particular grudge against English loanwords.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/27/france-invents-new-words...

chrisseaton4• 5 years ago

Do they have any practical authority? Why don't people tell them to mind their own business?

thaumasiotes3• 5 years ago

For other readers who want an example of this, look no further than how the Académie Française wants people to use the term "audio à la demande" instead of Podcast.

I can think of worse ideas. It's always shocking to me how people think that there's a difference of some kind between "podcasts" and "audio files that you download from the internet". The name really seems to be doing serious damage to people's understanding of what's happening.

leephillips9• 5 years ago

I can understand the reason for this. English has established a hegemony over the world, especially in science and technology. They are fighting this, and don’t want their language polluted with an increasing conglomeration of English words that are often unnecessary, as equivalent words exist in French.

Jermaine_Jabi• 5 years ago

And to complicate things further, the quebec office of the French language prefers podcasts be called balados i believe.

At least that has the benefit of being somewhat short and fun to say (but not shorter than podcast and thus will not catch on)

jraph10• 5 years ago

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated.

The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to wake up a few months later, telling everyone to say "la covid", out of dubious and easily countered justifications. The members of the Académie are not even linguists. They are regular, if conservative, speakers at best. I don't know why I would even trust them on handling the language better than random people on the street.

But actually, random people on the street are the ones defining the language. The right approach for covid would have been to say "ok, everybody here says "le covid". Canadians happen to say "la covid". Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

English is spoken a bit differently depending on the area of the world and there are rules which are discussed. So what. No academies will change that by the way. French is spoken slightly differently across France, never mind across the world.

Just pick your style and your version, and be consistent in your formal writing if you value this kind of things.

(And yes, you can split infinitives in English, obviously ;-))

leephillips9• 5 years ago

be consistent in your formal writing

But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK). The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

vagrantJin• 5 years ago

Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

gregsadetsky• 5 years ago

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF)'s relatively nuanced take on it is here:

http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=26557671

"On constate une hésitation dans le genre attribué au terme COVID-19" -- "One can sense some hesitation regarding the gender assigned to the term COVID-19"

The feminine form ("la covid") might come (according to the OQLF, at least) from "la maladie à coronavirus 2019" i.e. "maladie" (which is feminine) "transferring" its gender over to "covid".

---

Actually, now that I read the Académie Française's take on it, I don't find it too unreasonable:

https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19

They state (as does the OQLF) that the gender is transferred over from the "core" word of the expression. So, "la" (feminine) SNCF because SNCF stands for "Société nationale des chemins de fer français" and "Société" (the core word) is feminine.

"la" covid, again, because of "maladie" (which is feminine)

The Académie says: "Il n’en reste pas moins que l’emploi du féminin serait préférable" -- "That being said, the use of feminine would be preferable". Not _that_ prescriptive.

Should the Académie have a prescriptive (vs descriptive) role in every day French (in France / or Canada) is of course a whole debate topic. :-)

---

Shameless plug since we're on the topic: I run an Urban Dictionary-like site for French Canadians expressions -- https://www.laparlure.com/ -- it's purely descriptive and user-generated i.e. French (mostly in Canada) "as it's spoken"

jjgreen• 5 years ago

I await their verdict on liker (to like on Facebook) with interest.

jraph10• 5 years ago

It will be obviously rejected. It is too English-y. Better use good French-sounding words like "jogging" and "parking".

Have you heard how we are supposed to call a follower (on Twitter)?

"Acolyte des illustres"

This is not a joke, see for yourself this post dated "not a 1st of April": https://www.academie-francaise.fr/followers

tobylane• 5 years ago

If there was one, who’d follow it? York, New York, Melbourne (Ireland) and Melbourne (Australia) all have their variants from what London speaks.

HenryKissinger• 5 years ago

Americans, for one, would never recognize the authority of a foreign body over their language.

SllX• 5 years ago

We wouldn’t even recognize the authority of a Congressionally-chartered organization over our language.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

As an American, I don't even recognize the authority of the Chicago Manual of Style over my use of English.

neither_color• 5 years ago

But each English speaking country could form its own academy and work together, which is how Spanish speaking countries do it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_...

leephillips9• 5 years ago

They already do. The Americans who speak Spanish in Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, etc. recognize the authority of La Real Academia Española (even though their own brands of Spanish differ a bit from the kind spoken in Spain).

This is, by the way, not a criticism of your use of “Americans”, which I and all English speakers use the same way.

rarec• 5 years ago

English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.

Hokusai• 5 years ago

That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it.

"So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other? The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system. “The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/

bsder• 5 years ago

What language is more regular?

I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?).

All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

denton-scratch8• 5 years ago

print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one

You don't say!

It's almost always not one-to-one. The "ghoti" joke parodies this.

English language derives from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin vulgate, celtic languages, and colonial imports from e.g. the Indian subcontinent. The spoken language has moved beyond those roots, but the spelling hasn't. I appreciate those old spellings; I like to see the origins of words in their spellings. Sometimes these spellings become apparent in the way words are used and pronounced in regional dialects, and I deplore the steady homogenisation of English.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I like to think that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly and without an accent is The Queen.

Edit: I am only joking.

thaumasiotes3• 5 years ago

That definition seems difficult to project into the past, when the King of England might not speak English at all.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

The joke I tried to make was an allusion to how the Metric System's units like the meter and the kilogram were all based on reference objects before they were truly modernized. So despite the reference objects losing tiny amounts of mass over the years, they were, by definition, what a kilogram should be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the...

Admittedly, I now realize that I in no way made that allusion clear!

denton-scratch8• 5 years ago

The queen and her family (and by extension, many of the aristocracy) speak a dialect of English that is not any kind of regional dialect. It is not the form spoken by BBC announcers (who are often nowadays speakers of northern dialects, or even foreign pronunciations).

Their vowels are strangled, and they just sound weird to most native English speakers.

Grustaf• 5 years ago

Because when you have a Royal Society, you don't need an Academy...

nitwit0052• 5 years ago

People could have created a replacement if they cared to. They clearly didn't.

bobcostas55• 5 years ago

ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.
JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

Really, it's for the better. Languages change naturally over time and institutions like for French or Korean have little bearing on that. It's better to have style -guides- than to try and enforce usages of a language that differ from how it's actually used in real life.

tasogare2• 5 years ago

You are confusing language and its written representation. Sure languages change, that doesn't mean its writing system shouldn't be standardized, as there is a lot of benefits (efficiency) when it's the case. There isn't much discussion about language usage anyway save for a few points.

ByteJockey2• 5 years ago

English spelling being standardized so early is one of the problems with it. The language has changed since the spelling was standardized (minus a few debates on the letter u).

unixhero• 5 years ago

I have learnt Spanish in an academic setting and to have an Academia to refer to is invaluable.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

I study Korean, which also has a similar institution, and it's not really that helpful.

Real language usage is completely different than what's taught in classroom or academic environments. They are always out of date, and don't teach casual/slang usage (aka real usage by real people, not textbook language). Regular dictionaries have been invaluable.

denton-scratch8• 5 years ago

The author (Byron) seems to conflate "eloquence" with the Ciceronian use of flowery constructions and lots of subordinate clauses. For me, eloquence is the art of making yourself understood in speech. Elaborate rhetorical embellishments, it seems to me, impede that goal.

I find that I identify as a prescriptivist; at any time, there seems to be a small number of words that are widely used in a sloppy and ignorant way by opinion-formers, and that usage rapidly pushes out more precise usage.

Having said that, I welcome the fluidity of English, and would be horrified at the prospect of an Academy Anglaise with a goal of fossilising the language. I enjoy adjusting my register to my audience. And (my elitism breaks through) I enjoy exercising my knowledge of English vernacular (i.e. I like swearing) and formal registers. And I enjoy the effect it has when I suddenly switch registers - swearing during a mainly formal utterance shocks people. I enjoy demonstrating that I am a native speaker, even if that makes me harder to understand for an increasing minority of people.

I use quite a lot of americanisms; when I was growing up, American slang was hip (I'm from the UK). I get teased for that. I also use a fair bit of "archaic" terminology, partly because it seems more precise to me than the modern gloss.

So I guess I'm not really a prescriptivist; I just have some opinions that die-hard descriptivists seem to find offensive. Lexicographers (Websters, OED) have apparently all lined-up behind a descriptivist banner, and I don't know where one might find an authoritative prescriptivist English dictionary.

Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

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