Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
oh, but the Académie is not there to combat our very own slang (we have a very long and rich tradition of it which is one of our national prides), but the attempts of you heathen yanks to soil our beautiful language with such impurities as "weekend", "email", "hot dog", "spam" etc. (if you speak french, you will immediately realize that this is in fact hilariously tongue in cheek, since they *did* try --unsuccessfully-- to prevent the adoption of all of those english words, which are now commonly used and may even be in the dictionary).
life is very hard for them, poor dear Immortels, and i think they must be under an exceptional amount of stress. quel fromage. 
plus i imagine it enrages them to no end to know that those pesky québécois colonists have a much more efficient Académie (although i think it's called something different) and have given the francophone world such pearls as "courriel" (email : from "courrier" mail + "électronique" which i think you can translate on your own), "pourriel" (spam ; from "pourri" rotten +"courriel"), and "chien chaud" (quite literally, "hot dog") (correct me if i'm wrong, yvan). |
I remember a long-ago article on the Académie that attempted to explain it to us poor clueless Americans. They provided a handy table to give words the Académie complained about, along with their english translations. A few examples:
"French" --> English translation
"le drugstore" --> the boutique
"le movie" --> the cinema
All entries in the table were words being borrowed into the French language, paired with a prefectly good English word that "just happened" to have been borrowed from French. Hilarious!
Xenophon