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improfundis.....

Forty years after they began the task – and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission – sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary.

The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Collège des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine.

This is where the 40 wise men and women of the French Academy – so-called immortels (immortals) chosen for their contributions to French language and literature – have met since the body was first created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635.

Their task at the start was to “give certain rules to our language, to render it pure and eloquent” – to which end they set about writing their first dictionary.

However, the job has proved so slow – the first book was not produced until 1694 and today it takes more than a year to get through a single letter of the alphabet – that the relevance of the enterprise is increasingly in question.

“The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,” a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday.

This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935. Work started in 1986, and three previous sections – up to the letter R – have already been issued. 

Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.

In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a “mirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,” and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version.

But many of the “modern” words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date. And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in.

Thus common words like tiktokeur, vlog, smartphone and émoji – which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries – do not exist in the Académie book. Conversely its “new” words include such go-ahead concepts as soda, sauna, yuppie and supérette(mini-supermarket).

For the latest R-Z section, the writers have included the new thinking on the feminisation of jobs, including female alternatives (which did not exist before) for positions such as ambassadeur and professeur. However print versions of the earlier sections do not have the change, because for many years the Académie fought a rear-guard action against it.

Likewise the third section of the new dictionary – including the letter M – defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is.

“How can anyone pretend that this collection can serve as a reference for anyone?” the collective asks, noting that online dictionaries are both bigger and faster-moving.

Under its president, the writer Amin Maalouf, the dictionary committee meets every Thursday morning and after discussion gives its ruling on definitions that have been drawn up in preliminary form by outside experts.

Among the “immortals” is the English poet and French expert Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond (undeep).

“French needs it, because as every English student of French knows, there is no word for ‘shallow’,” he said. Sadly, he failed. 

Discussions – lengthy ones -- are already under way for the commencement of edition 10.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly03ve799go

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without larmes de rire…”

         Gus Leonisky

kultur phrancez....

La neuvième édition du dictionnaire de l'Académie française a été officiellement remise au président Emmanuel Macron, jeudi 14 novembre 2024, marquant ainsi la fin d'un travail de près de quarante ans. Cette nouvelle version du dictionnaire, qui comprend 59 000 mots, fait suite à la huitième édition publiée en 1935, et à la première version datant de 1694.

Lors de cet événement, le président s'est rendu à l'Institut de France où il a prononcé un discours devant les "immortels", accompagné de la ministre de la Culture, Rachida Dati, et d'autres invités.

Une référence ou loin des réalités ?

Cette remise officielle a été un moment symbolique pour une institution qui, malgré les critiques, reste une référence incontournable dans le monde francophone. Cela n'empêche pas des avis contrastés parmi les linguistes et les experts. Certains considèrent ce travail comme obsolète, estimant que l'Académie peine à s'adapter aux évolutions rapides de la langue française. D'autres, comme le linguiste Jean Pruvost, défendent l'ouvrage, soulignant sa gratuité en ligne, une initiative unique qui permet aux locuteurs du français d'y accéder facilement.

Pourtant, des critiques émises par le Collectif des linguistes atterrés pointent du doigt la démarche de l'Académie, jugée déconnectée des réalités modernes. Ce collectif considère que les académiciens manquent des compétences techniques nécessaires pour réaliser un dictionnaire qui réponde aux enjeux contemporains.

Un débat animé a également eu lieu sur France Inter entre Julie Neveux, membre du collectif, et l'académicien Antoine Compagnon. Julie Neveux a exprimé sa déception de ne pas voir mentionner le terme "mail" dans la définition de "courrier électronique", alors qu'Antoine Compagnon a lui défendu l'Académie en précisant qu'un lien vers le guide "Dire, ne pas dire" était inclus pour déconseiller l'usage de ce terme anglo-saxon. Ce débat illustre bien les divergences d'opinions concernant l'actualité du dictionnaire et son adéquation avec le langage contemporain.

Cette dernière édition du dictionnaire est désormais disponible en librairie. Publiée par l'Imprimerie nationale et les éditions Fayard, cette édition en quatre tomes a été publiée progressivement. Le tome 1, couvrant les lettres A à Enzymologie, est sorti entre 1992 et 2005. Le tome 2 (Éocène-Mappemonde) est paru entre 2000 et 2005, suivi du tome 3 (Maque-Quotité) en 2011. Le dernier tome, le tome 4, qui couvre les lettres R à Z, a été publié cette semaine.

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/livres/emmanuel-macron-recoit-le-nouveau-dictionnaire-de-l-academie-francaise-sous-la-coupole-de-l-institut_6897053.html

 

LISEZ DU HAUT...

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without larmes de rire…”

         Gus Leonisky

 

 

resurrecting patois....

Provençal, Occitan, Picard... They are part of the country's heritage

Are our regional languages ​​in danger?

FRAGILE, these dialects have seen their speakers disappear over the years. However, they have not said their last word

and are supported by ardent defenders.

 

On May 29, 2021, Bretons, Basques and Alsatians demonstrated all over France to defend their rights.

 

They said it in Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, because it is precisely the future of regional languages ​​that is at stake. A few days earlier, the Constitutional Council had censored the Molac law, which had just been promulgated, which aimed to protect and promote so-called "minority" languages ​​in public services, and to defend their teaching. In its opinion, the Council declared that immersive teaching - which consists of teaching most subjects in a regional language - was contrary to the Constitution. It also prohibits the use of specific typographic signs in administrative documents, such as accents on vowels in Catalan.

Which de facto excludes certain first names. The supreme institution justifies these prohibitions by recalling Article 2 of the 1958 Constitution: "The language of the Republic is French." However, another paragraph of the same constitution, Article 75-1, mentions that "regional languages ​​are part of the heritage of France."

So, are we heading towards a language war? Defenders of regional cultures are not the only ones to be worried about it. In May 2022, the United Nations expressed its perplexity about the policy of the French state towards its linguistic minorities.

In France, a language with a "historical anchor" of national dimension, which was spoken on the territory before the generalisation of French, is called "regional." According to the 1999 report by linguist Bernard Cerquiglini, there are 75. Among them, overseas languages ​​are the most numerous. The specialist lists 28 in New Caledonia alone and 12 in Guyana.

In 1951, the Deixonne law authorised the teaching of four regional languages ​​in secondary school: Basque, Breton, Catalan and Occitan. Corsican (1974), Tahitian (1981), the languages ​​of Alsace (1988) and the Moselle countries (1991), those of Melanesia (1992), Creole (2002) were then authorised.

However, not all of them enjoy the same anchoring. In mainland France, they are fighting for their survival, while overseas they are very much alive and spoken daily from childhood.

 

How did French establish itself?

At the time of the Villers-Cotterêts ordinance, the first measure of linguistic unification decreed in 1539, France was a linguistic melting pot! Depending on the place, people spoke Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Provençal, Occitan, Basque, Picard, Gallo, etc. With this text, François I imposed the primacy of French over Latin in administrative documents (laws, notarial deeds).

It was above all the Revolution and the birth of the Republic and the public school that would change the situation.

In 1794, Abbé Grégoire wrote a speech with an evocative title: "Report on the necessity and means of annihilating patois, and 'universalising the use of the French language'". In it, he advocated "the unique and invariable use of the language of freedom". The Convention would deal the first blow to the vitality of patois, considered harmful to the "one and indivisible" Republic, comments the linguist Henriette Walter. The steamroller would set in motion, accompanied by a policy of devaluation of regional languages. The term "patois" (from the old French patoier for "gesticulate"), which designates a language spoken on a small geographical scale, quickly became synonymous with rudimentary language. While "French is only a patois that has succeeded", according to the formula 'Henriette Walter. In 1807, patois was still spoken 80% of the time in everyday life, including sometimes at school. But the pressure in favour of French was already being felt. In 1854, seven Provençal poets felt the need to protect the langue d'oc, and for this purpose founded the Félibrige. Still active, this movement ensures the defense of the langue d'oc in its different dialects: Provençal, Occitan, Auvergne, Gascon, Languedocien...

Despite this resistance, the First World War and the generalisation of the monolingual public school will accelerate the disaffection of regional languages. Their use becomes shameful.

"They were marginalised in such a way that the population integrated the fact that they had no value", explains Fulup Jakez, director of the Public Office of the Breton Language. Born in 1967, he heard his grandparents speak Breton, his parents much less. When he decided, at 16, to study the language of his ancestors, he faced a certain incomprehension: "For my parents, abandoning Breton allowed them to enter a kind of normality, he specifies. We were in the Trente Glorieuses, Brittany was changing, the change of language was part of the transition to modernity. For my father, learning Breton was a return to the Middle Ages.

 

TRANSLATION/ADAPTATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR OF AN ARTICLE IN ÇA MAGAZINE 2021....

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without larmes de rire…”

         Gus Leonisky