The war on words

The French are known for fighting for their language. You know it. Oh yes, you all know it, and I know you know because you keep reminding me every time I meet your for the first time.

So it's about time we get down on the issue of the Académie Française.

Nearly 400 years ago, this institution was given the job of unifying the different French dialects that were used at that time troughout France into a single language that could be spoken and understood by everybody. If you have seen the movie Hero, well, it's exactly the same story here, except less sexy: Although the Académiciens do have a sword, their arthrosis prevents them from doing any backflip jump or mawashi geri kick to the throat, and I am almost certain Zhang Ziyi is not part of the cast.

A few dozen thousand pages later, the grand task is done. The One And Unique Pure French is finally on paper, if not spoken on the street. Now, with plenty of time on their hands, and not unlike kids that would have drawn a hopscotch on Broadway, the Académiciens can spend the rest of their lives fighting to preserve it, and that's indeed what they have been doing ever since. Not always the same ones, mind you -- although by the look of it, it might be that we still have some survivors from the earliest times.

Part of the misunderstanding is that, since the Académie has been lying in the middle of Paris for centuries, folks out there think we care. I mean, come on: Isn't the UN based in New York?

The Académiciens. Oh well, you know how we French people are with our old folks: We respect their privacy a lot, so rather than embarrassing them with our presence, we would rather store them away in some shelter. Well, the Académie is one of them, but an elite one, because although it takes a fair share of squared meters in the heart of Paris, there is room for only 40 old goats, and one cannot enter if the rest of the herd bloats in protest. And I am sure that there are a couple of unofficial rules as well, like being over 95, reading exclusively from dead authors, or not having been in contact with fresh products, farm animals or young people in the last 20 years.

You will probably be surprised, like the rest of us, that these revered wise old men call themselves les immortels -- yes, you read it, 'the immortals'. That's not exactly the first thing that comes to my mind when I look at their pictures, but hey, I guess that's good news: You can work all your life on grammar and still keep your sense of humor till the end. That, or their ego is even bigger than the encyclopedia they edit.

However, they are known throughout the world not because of their ability to speak in a delicate, beautiful, tear-drawing French with all the liaisons done on the fly (beat that, Deep Blue), but because they are officially in charge of adding new words to the language, and that usually involves not simply taking the ones everybody is already using and familiar with. First, because new words are mostly imported from other languages, and French should remain as French as possible. Second, because the immortals know better.

Actually, I don't know why people make such a fuss about the French trying to coin French words for new concepts everytime they can. In languages like Chinese, they go through this process all the time, mainly because, lacking a phonetical alphabet, they have to. But so far, I haven't heard of any Chinese that has been taunted on that topic.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the words picked by our favorite shut-in antiques click. The most representative, I think, is logiciel, which stands for 'software'.

That's where it should stop. Unfortunately, the immortals are as stubborn as old folks can be. They want to control all the words. And that, my friends, is a very bad idea when you live in a technology-driven world where words and idioms are born and die faster than Microsoft can patch Windows (hell, the 'e-' and 'cyber-' prefixes were so cool just a few years ago!), while you just have a bunch of 40 old bookworms, for whom the word 'chip' is invariably associated with 'fish', to do the job.

I was talking last time about the word 'blog', for instance. As far as I know, there is yet no such French equivalent (that is, except 'blog' itself, of course), and thus, given the recent burst of popularity of this medium, you would expect urgent and intense debate on that topic.

Ooooh, not so fast.

Right now, fiercy battles are fought over this word by your average foot soldier engaged in the language war. Foot soldiers that are way, way upfront in the battle. A handful of guys debating over it using the internet, with actual computers. And believe me, the fight is ugly. Our crusaders draw their pens and lash some blogue, journal virtuel, journel, joueb, cybercarnet, carnet Web, fighting against anglicism until the last drop of ink, even if it means creating words even more obscure, hideous and unpronounceable than the original.

What do our dear rosy oldsters have to say about that? Do the generals have a plan? Knowing some of their previous suggestions for other words, there is absolutely no doubt that they couldn't care less about what the rest of us think, including those aforementioned brave bloggers. Sometimes, I even wonder if their sense of humor does not reach unsuspected levels -- after all, given their age, the whole Après moi, le déluge philosophy might apply.

If you take a look at the last edition of their encyclopedia, though, the list of new words includes the state-of-the-art... fax and disquette (floppy disk). *Sigh*. Note, this could have been different if our hard-working immortals would have dare to update the encyclopedia since the last 1994 edition.

In the meanwhile, Merriam-Webster celebrates 'blog' as the word of the year 2004 -- along with its definition, naturally.

I guess we will have to wait another 10 years to start blogging legally in French.

The French language

You may see the French as a proud and arrogant crowd -- and you would not be completely wrong, but then at this point most people jump to the conclusion that these traits somehow unite us against foreigners in a French conspiracy involving rude service and €7 expressos. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and you might get some comfort in knowing that being French won't spare you the attitude from the waiter -- that is, unless you are a pretty-looking girl having lunch with an empty seat of yours, in which case we enter a completely different world I save for later.

However, there are some topics which every French foetus is genetically modified to agree on and that could even league holigans from Paris and Marseilles soccer teams together, although nobody ever dared to try. And this is one of them: French is the most beautiful language in the world.

When I was born, genetical engineering was not yet as accurate as it is now, and while I never doubted about this fundamental truth, I was curious as a child about what made our language so great. As I grew up, it progressively came to me that the main reason why French people love so much their language is that they can't really master another one.

One point I have often heard, is that French sounds good. I can't really say myself; it is tricky to figure out how your own language might sound to the ear of other folks. However, many of my foreigner friends think so, and in the sweat illusion that friendship is not based on mainly insincere compliments and feel-good soothings, I have come to admit this is true.

Now that's hardly enough to make French the number 1 language. Well, sure, if you sound like Dutch, you are not even qualified for the race, but we can't pretend to take over the world on bases where Italian has a lead.

Another point I have heard is that French, as opposed to English, is rigorous and accurate; and when it comes from such writers as Samuel Beckett, you have to pay attention. I am not sure what is exactly meant by that, but as far as I understand, the accuracy of French is precisely what makes it not as flexible as English. It is a trade-off, really.

Let me illustrate this point with an everyday situation I am sure you have already experienced. You receive an e-mail from your buddy to meet him at 5, and he asks you to please, please not forget your rabbit shoes, this is of the utmost importance. Now you are in trouble: which rabbit shoes is he exactly talking about? Your shoes made of rabbit fur that your wife bought you the year you forgot her birthday? Your shoes in the shape of a rabbit that your daughter made for Father's day, which reminds you that you still haven't retaliate on her teacher? Is it those special shoes you use whenever you do your rabbit business, whatever that could be? Or is that those shoes for rabbits that a fashion designer in love with his favorite pet has created, and that you own for mysterious reasons? Well, at time like these, you are sorry your friend is not communicating in French, because then he couldn't have use such loose relationship and he would have had to explicitely say whether he is speaking of the chaussures en lapin, the chaussure pour lapin, the chaussure à lapin, or your chaussure en forme de lapin.

Personnally I find it a small advantage. I don't own any rabbit shoes and don't plan on owning some -- of any kind.

Now that we are still not convinced and have run short of labeled advantages, we are on our own and have to plunge head first inside the language. That's were trouble begins.

French is an extremely chaotic and complicated language. If you ever wondered why the inventors of fractals like Mandelbrot and Julia were all French, look no further.

I am not even talking about genders here. Genders are usually the first thing that discourage English-speaking folks from learning further -- and yet this is the easy part. You just have to acknowledge that the gender (either masculine or feminine in French) of a word has nothing to do with a sex all French mentally visualize while talking. (Well, we do, but that's an other topic and irrelevant to grammar.) This is true not only for objects but even to some extent for people: For example, a guard in French is une sentinelle, and although it is feminine, it is hardly a job anyone would associate specifically with women.

Plus, once you have learned genders for French, you are mostly good for other Latin languages, such as Spanish or Italian. See? We do make some efforts for you. That, and the euro.

French can be a mess, and unfortunately it takes an outsider's look to realize it. Same thing with art, if you ask me. So whenever you meet one of your French or artist friend, help him and talk to him. As for me, I started to realize how irrational French is when I was asked by puzzled foreigners to explain some very simple points -- say, when to use bien and when to use bon, both meaning 'good' -- that I never even considered.

The first difficulty comes from the spelling. Some languages have a very simple relationship between speech and writing, like Spanish, Italian or German: basically, there is only one way to pronounce a letter, and one way to write a syllable. These are mostly WYHIWYW languages (What You Hear Is What You Write).

Well, I don't know which unit they use to measure the closeness of pronunciation to writting in a language, but I am sure they always need extra paper when French is in the graph. There are many consonants that you do not pronounce (unless you do), or that are doubled; there are many ways to write the same sound; and we are perhaps the only language to use accents (like î ) for absolutely no reason at all, except historical ones.

The fact is, this is far too complicated for most French people as well. Writting a cover letter without any spelling mistake requires locking the kids away in the garage and a tablet of this medicine you used as a student to focus during your math exams. And, as it happened to me, no matter how much time you spend perfecting your application and tracking every single small spelling mistake, including all those damn plurals, the refusal letter you get back might contain some big ones.

The next difficulty is the liaisons, the fact that silent consonants at the end of some words should be pronounced if the next word starts with a voyel. In theory, this is all nice and simple. Keep in mind that French do all kind of complicated tricks to actually keep things simple -- to speak. So the idea here is to never have to pronounce two consecutive voyels, because that would keep you mouth open for too long and you cigarette might drop. Ever wondered why French has some extra t's in such expressions as où va-t-il? Same reason.

Now, you are probably thinking, 'Wow! When they chat, those French dudes actually have to think whether a word ends with a silent consonant, and the next word starts with a voyel, and then make the correct liaison! They must have an entire lobe dedicated to speaking.' Well, that's precisely where the nice and simple theory ends. In practice, liaisons are almost never made, except by some old guys gently dozing at the Académie Française, still trying to figure out a French word for 'blog' that Victor Hugo would not mind. In some cases, a liaison would even sound weird (like in tu parles a qui?: a liaison there is sure to raise eyebrows) . So you never care about it -- unless you absolutely have to. (If you are not familiar with this kind of logic, you are probably not advanced yet in your study of French). And you generally have to when words involved are common and frequent, like vous allez or deux amis. Even the illiterate would make the liaison there, simply because we would barely understand otherwise. Still, this is just a vague guideline, because for instance, in je vais aller, 'I am going', which is obviously a pretty common combination, virtually nobody will do the liaison there. Sorry folks! So forget about the rule and just do as we say. This would also be your first lesson in French politics as well. (Wow, I am starting to realize I have blog material for the next decade).

French also uses a lot of structures that doesn't make much sense to me. To ask "What is it?", instead of a simple Qu'est-ce? that you might find in pedantic books, we prefer to say Qu'est-ce que c'est?, litteraly "What is this what this is?". Est-ce que does it make any sense? No. So eventually people ended up asking questions by simply raising their voice at the end of a sentence. Tu pars, "You are leaving". Tu pars?, "Are you leaving?" C'est quoi? Much simpler.

Worst of all are the verb tenses and conjugations. We have loads of tenses -- passé simple, subjonctif, whatever -- and believe me, none of us really know when or how to use them. We are aware there are some rules as for which past tense to use in which situation, and sure, if we were to write a book, we would certainly open those dusty grammar books again. As far as real life goes, however, we mainly do as we please, and that usually means that we stick to the simplest form. (For example, you will hardly hear any passé simple or subjonctif forms, and most future use the simple aller+V immediate future form).

I never realized as a kid that my French teachers were genuine heroes.

It all started with a movie

Let me get this straight: As a Frenchman working in the USA, you won't find many of my compatriots thinking I am a fully functional representative of the species. Even within the category of expatriated traitors, I raise suspicion since I don't particularly like to hang out with other French dudes talking for hours about how things as fundamental as cheese and bread are so much better over there. I guess this will get even worse now that I have started this blog -- in English.

Well, don't call me an American either. Frenchs would say so of me. Now, when Americans start agreeing with Frenchs, you know something went wrong. And wrong it would be. Before you start calling me 'buddy', consider this: I haven't own a TV for the last past 7 years. I chose my place so that I could shop walking. I couldn't care less about baseball, basketball and football. And today, Black Friday, when frantic housewives in pajamas were lining up at 5 a.m to buy cartloads of eletronics, I was still sleeping and not feeling guilty about it. I haven't set foot even in a medium-sized mall since.

And yet I started this blog feeling that it is about time France and the rest of the world get a little update on each other. Granted, I am certainly not the best guy for the job. I tend to look at facts first and have a reasonable and moderate opinion, which makes me clearly an outsider of both sides. But that's okay, because nobody cares. French would freeze in the middle of a bewildered smile when suggested that maybe not all Americans are fat evengelical trigger-happy ignorant Republicans. 83% of Americans slip into mild coma when realizing that showers are standard appliances used by a significant percentage of French households.

These cliches have been around for a while now, but I understand that things are only getting worse. A petty but reliable indicator in the last few years has been this new fashion to put some low-key, useless bad French guys in movies -- you know he is French, not because you understand the insults he mumbles, but because of the accordéon melody that precedes his appearance. He would also have one or more of the following easily recognizable features: a dark navy stripe shirt, a mustache, a beret, a long nose, a terrible accent, a composed name like Jean-Marie or Pierre-Jacques. I have just seen The Incredibles (an otherwise very funny flick), and it has to be there. It was quick, it was subtle, it was tempered -- but it was there.

Usually, I would rather count blows while lying in my bathtub filled with a warm and comfortable mix of irony and cynicism. This time I decided to stick my head out of the water.

But as I step out of the bath and make my first steps on unfamiliar ground, I would ask you to look away until I grab a towel.