Quote:
Originally Posted by YGG-
Are you aware that you are thinking of the f*cking Académie Française about 1,000,000,000 times more than any French? Doesn't this strike you as slightly off-kilter? (may I say that in English?) 
Are you that interested in the French poeple's freedom of speech? Or do you have some vested interest? Ulterior motives? 
You sound like you're mostly interested in making (French) people wrong; can you pick someone else now? Or quit doing that?  |
Please accept my apologies if that is the way my post came across - that was absolutely not my intention.
What interests me is the "descriptive" vs. "prescriptive" approach to language adopted by different countries.
The OED is the classic example of a "descriptive" dictionary - it bases its word definitions on quotations taken from published English - books, newspapers, etc, and uses those quotations to illustrate how the different meanings of a word have changed over the years.
The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, on the other hand, is the classic example of a "prescriptive" dictionary - one which describes not how a language actually
is used, but how it
should be used. The "Duden" fulfils the same purpose in Germany (it was adopted as the "official" standard for German spelling in 1902). There is, however, no such "prescriptive" dictionary of English, and there never has been.
I find it interesting that some countries have prescribed how their languages should be used, and some have not. There's absolutely no criticism inherent in saying that, let me hasten to add!