Purity of French Language no longer to be maintained

I read in the New York Times
that the battle to keep anglicisms out of French has been officially abandoned. Well, there is another source of entertainment gone. I was always tickled with Des Cartes’ coinage quantity of movement for momentum, so phrases like angular momentum energy density tensor can be long-winded in French. I do hope French retains some of its more technical terms. I imagine that if Top Gear had a French correspondent he would be called something like Josquin de Vilbrequin.

I think it was a bit of a losing battle. The introduction of Anglicisms (or other non-French stuff) was instituted by the people. There are probably proper nice French (long winded) versions of “le parking” and “le weekend” but given that this is a country of people who would rather say “saprem” (phonetic) in preference to cet après-midi, you can understand that preferring verbiage would be met with a less than enthusiastic response. After all, why should us English have the joy of referring to the part of the week when one doesn’t go to work using a single short snappy word when the French are laboured with something nasty like “le fin du semaine” or whatever it is. Blah-blah-blah or “weekend”? Easy choice…

Of course, to balance the score, one could always point to how much French there is lurking in the English language. It’s give and take. They gave us loads in the 11th century, now they’re taking some stuff back. :-)

I read somewhere that the development from Latin to modern French has been one of the most analysed and studied; I suppose because for most stages of it there is ample surviving literature.

Let me recommend a superb CD Airs de Cour
by Linn Records sung in the French proper to its time, ~1600. Pay no attention to the anachronistic sleeve illustration which is out by at least four centuries.

Incidentally, Linn Products made an interesting, but disastrous, foray into computing.

To understand why I will quote (with the author’s
permission) article 36365 of alt.folklore.computers, written in answer to a query from William B. Swinnell of Pittsburgh University:

“Does anyone know what happened to the Rekursiv chip, which was a microprocessor built in the UK?
I think there was a write-up on it in “Byte” a
couple years ago."

“Welll… It’s an interesting and somewhat long story. The upshot of it is that ( a) the company building the machine failed to get a patent on it in Japan, ( b) by the time the machine had gone from lab prototype to marketable board, the 486, Sparc &c had come along and the rekursiv was more or less obsolete as a consequence, ( c) Linn (the company building it, who normally make expensive hi-fi) were in financial difficulties, and couldn’t really afford the project, ( d) nobody at Linn understood the machine, or had the foggiest idea how to market it, or who to market it to, ( e) the Linn van driver drove the Linn van into the side of David Harland’s (principal Rekursiv architect) Porsche and Linn wouldn’t pay for the repairs, which was the last straw as far as David was concerned, and he stopped coming in to work, and ( f) Linn then shut the project down.

They said at the time that they were putting it
into a state of ‘hibernation’, but I think that
it’s a fair bet you won’t see it again. The
name of one of the Rekursiv chips was subsequently
re-cycled by Linn as the name of the decoder for
their new CD player (‘Numerik’ was originally
the Rekursiv’s ALU chip).

The full chipset was Numerik (ALU), Logik (sequencer), Objekt (object-oriented MMU) and Klock (various timers &c).

It’s a great shame. In retrospect, though, it’s
easy to see that the project was seriously out of
touch with reality: the Rekursiv was designed in
the days when Vaxes ruled the roost; by the time
the design had been condensed down to the 4 monster gate-arrays, hefty PCs and Sparcstations &c had
started to appear, and the machine just couldn’t
hold its own. It could only really have succeeded
if it had been backed by one of the really big
computer manufacturers, who could have made the
investment required to keep it ahead of the
competition.

It was a really interesting and unusual design:
the main memory was in effect a persistent object
store, with every object having its type, size and
position in memory known in hardware, so that
(for example) the hardware could prevent you from
‘running off’ the end of an array and corrupting
surrounding memory. Paging of objects into and out
of main memory was handled by the host machine
(generally a Sun 3), and was completely transparent, even at the microcode level. This meant that you could write arbitrarily complex algorithms in microcode, even recursive ones, hence the machine’s name. Every object had a unique identifier (a 40-bit number), and the MMU chip would translate that into the object’s store address (if it was in main memory). Since only the MMU knew the object’s address, an object could be moved around in memory without having to update references to it (since they were in terms of its object number); this made garbage-collection particularly straightforward.

The support software (microsimulator and so forth)
was written to run under X10, and wasn’t well enough behaved to run with the X10/X11 protocol converter that went the rounds for a while, so they were well and truly stuffed when X11 started to gain serious acceptance (particularly given that the X10 that we had wouldn’t run under sunos 4.*).

I’m not sure what happened to the people on the
project after it was shut down. One of them
(Brian Drummond) stayed on at Linn to provide a
certain amount of support for Rekursiv users
(about 30 machines were sold) and to try his hand
at loudspeaker design. Ian Ellsley was last heard
of in China, swearing he’d never touch another
Sun again. Bruno Beloff worked for Oracle in
Chertsey for about 2 weeks, before deciding that
Surrey didn’t suit him and going to South Africa
to take photographs of riots. Duncan McIntyre was
apparently heading for France. David Harland is
rumoured to be alive and well, but working on
something much more ambitious :-).

I spent two and a half truly ghastly years cooped
up in a poky little office* in Edinburgh University’s amazingly unfriendly Computer Science department, microcoding a Prolog instruction set for the Rekursiv, being yelled at for no apparent reason by other members of staff, and generally having a thoroughly miserable time, which makes it all the more bizarre that I look back on the project with a certain amount of affection even now. I still have a T-shirt (daft promotional effort) with ‘Rekursiv’ written across the front in large colourful letters. I think they only made about 20 or something; maybe it’ll be valuable some day. More to the point, I also have a full set of chip databooks & software manuals &c. I have a QIC tape somewhere that may or may not have a Rekursiv software release on it. There is apparently a PC version of Lingo (the Rekursiv’s principal language, very like Smalltalk), but you’d have to ask Linn about that.

James
(rekursiv project survivor)
—

*actually, several offices: from time to time, someone would come to my office and say ‘Right, you’re moving offices. Now.’ and I would just have to drop whatever I was doing and go. They never gave you any notice, or for that matter any reason. I got the impression that they did this just to foster a degree of paranoia among the staff. Definitely a place to avoid."

Here are some constructs and idioms that English language currently lacks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYlVJlmjLEc
Actually, one short story I reminded from my early days in computing was the release of BASICOIS which was a French version of Microsoft BASIC (every keyword was translated to French language, but basic syntax rules remained unchanged) (AFAIK, it was supported by ministry of Education at the time) which was a complete mondane work, a bit like the “Maginot” line from past century..

“Resistance is futile” claimed the Borg queen.. but at the end of every “Star trek” film/episode, the human race fighting the Borgs prevailed. So I keep using French terms as long as the chances I be understood be significantly positives in the hope that such terms currently and commonly defined as “franglais” be either assimilated (with some benefit for the locutor) or forgotten.

French has more than left its mark on English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin
;-)

French has more than left its mark on English.

Is there a language on the planet that hasn’t “contributed” to English?

Is there a language on the planet that hasn’t “contributed” to English?

Probably not. If there’s a good word, we’ll nick it.

French, however, has possibly the largest contribution at 29%. Latin is also at 29% but this includes words of botanical and medical origin, so one could argue that French offers more words known to the general public. Your average person might not know a Tropaeolum from a Helianthus, never mind a Parietal Peritoneum; but they may understand Gaudy Decadence, the Irony of Inconvenient Incontinence; as well as Melancholy, Jealousy, and good old-Fashioned Responsibility (capitalised words are of French origin).

The French, on the other hand, seem quite adept at stealing English words and adding “ing” to the end to come up with some rather peculiar sort-of-close-but-short-of-the-mark words such as footing, brushing (usually means blow drying (!), Google is too literal here), pressing, smoking, and standing (often meaning ‘high quality’, again Google too literal).

Google won’t tell you that s*** appears to be a euphemism for weed, leading to some double-take newspaper headlines like “Du s*** retrouvé au St. Malo”. I can only imagine the French have some weird image of a guy that looks like a hippy version of Woody Harrelson toking and saying “that there, that’s some good s***”, so they must think it is called s***. ;-) Still, it might be equally hard to explain malherbe…

I recommend this site. I expect you can work out what particitrousers is all about.

I also recommend Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler, ISBN 0-00-711871-6. It will answer for you questions like Why did French gain such an association with high culture in Europe?, and the importance for the French language of the Ordinance de Villers-Cotterests in 1539.

Ah, the joy of translating between cultures.

One of my more recent favourites is this memetic translation effort for the fansub of Steins;Gate (that has itself turned into a meme):

The original Japanese was something quoted as likely only making sense to 2chan users, so it was translated in a way that would say “this guy is utterly hopeless” with equivalent slang that would be understood in the west.

That said, Kurisu could put out some comically cutting remarks if she felt like it. This is one I have remembered in case I ever have a need of it → placeholder for ridiculously long URL ;)