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.