I just read online that the academie francaise have banned the phrase "hashtag " to do with twitter etc and teachers / officials are to be instructed to use the phrase "mot diese" instead (what a mouthful)
a bit like saying courriel instead of email -
totally pointless exercise
This academie has a website where you may see the members who decide on such matters and the phrase "boring old farts" came into my head whilst having a look ................
apparently its to protect and promote the ongoing use of the french lingo & french influence in the world.
Dictatorial controls like this never work as history has shown repeatedly.
i think if they want to promote the use of french then make it easier to learn without all the male female nonsense and 27 different ways to conjugate !
weekend
parking
chewing gum
all bad anglo american words apparently and are a threat to french culture haha
Our primary teacher friend was in IT until he was almost 38, did one year training and has taught for four years since. As he said, he learned French at school, studied and forgot most of the grammar and orthography, worked in his profession using the language of his field. Then during his one year training for primary teaching they taught them which books to use, not French all over again, so that most of them teach straight out of a book. Inspires one, doesn't it?
Many don't! My OH (French) always gets me to check her letters and emails and she often makes mistakes. As for one of my nieces (french), the last email she wrote, although making sense phonetically, broke just about every rule in the book! I've also corrected rapports de stage for my OH and the level of their grammar was laughable!
whenever i chat to French friends about their language & all the complexities - they agree its a nightmare and they often dont understand all the rules anyway !
Well it keeps me gainfully employed teaching people that le parking is not actually a car park and that you have to go camping rather than staying on one....:)
Oh yes, Italian verbs kill me. My relatives in Ticino smirk a lot when I try! What is good about French when writing is that the rules help whereas in English they can as easily confuse.
PS there are just as many ways of conjugating verbs in English which is a nightmare to learn for foreigners, and French is quite easy to conjugate compared to Italian for example where all 4 tenses of the subjunctive are used even in everyday speach...! :-O
Courriel was adopted by the Quebecois before here, the Academie 'ordered' it be used as part of the French language but more than half of all officialdom still uses 'mail' or 'email' so it is becoming rather self defeating, slowly but inexorably. They have all but banned the language used by youth groups, which has been a great incentive for them to use more, patois is still 'officially' non-existent but even many teachers now used it plus the Occitan language has been accepted as a language and is even being taught in schools or used as a teaching medium. The other language groups are becoming itchy and Corsica is even seeing 'terrorism' from parts of the separatist, Corsican speaking minority. As with the bonzos who determine what is and is not in English, their best bet would be to shut up and let the language evolve in its own way instead of forcing it to be what it can no longer possibly be.