Academie francaise

This ranty post is because I never tire of trying the content management system on weird characters for its URLs.

No, this post is really because David Mitchell himself has a new post up I find interesting. It very much follows the same general direction his posts usually do (if you discover his weekly column with this link and like this episode good news! The archives have plenty more that you may like. But don't read all at once to avoid an indigestion).

This week David Mitchell concludes with a quip on the Académie Française. France doesn't have a royal family. Every country should have a reason for articles to be written in foreign newspapers about scandalous recent developments: that's just good economic sense. How will potential visitors think of your country if it does not have a reason to linger in the back of their heads? Advertising isn't cheap.

He is right about the last eccentricity. The Académie is probably doing it on purpose: everyone must be able to see that this is clearly wrong. Again the royal family recipe. It unites somehow.

The new section in question contains quantities of lessons. For instance if you are looking for the welcoming and friendly tone of an administrative form from the 1980s do use the infinitive to express an imperative mood as in "dire ne pas dire".

Moving past the title the first bullet point is about the use of preposition "sur" (literally "on") to express large scale vicinity. The Académie suggests one should say one lives "à Paris" (that's the "dire" part) instead of "sur Paris" (the "ne pas dire"). Unfortunately the two do not nearly mean the same thing. When I visit my family for the Christmas holidays 500km from Paris and a friend of my father's asks me about my work or place of residence it is accurate to say that I live "sur Paris" (meaning in the general area of at a scale relative to the distance whence we are talking). I do not live "à Paris" a privilege I leave to people either richer or less demanding living-space-wise.

The Académie would expound that "sur" was not used this way in any written work until the 19th century. Well yes. The "sur" form isn't very useful in an era when people do not generally move at more than 50km/h. This new use is a remarkable adaptation of the language where a very short word magically took on a meaning that was suddenly very useful without any ambiguity. If I was a linguist I would like to study this.

But it could have been worse: the Académie could have invented completely new words and suggested people should use those. We had to endure a wave of that in the late 1990s when Internet use spread.

Internet widespread use came relatively late in France because of the "Minitel" prior technology. This is no time to start a second rant but I must point out that neither the Minitel nor the late adoption of the Internet were the failures that some make out here and abroad. In particular the Minitel elegantly solved the problem of micro-payments something I haven't yet seen a good solution for on the Internet. Go back to that Guardian page and tell me that advertising is fine — and the Guardian is probably still operating its website at a loss. It would have to split an article as David Mitchell's on three pages to make enough impressions to recoup the costs of producing quality contents.

The Académie's website is not all like that fortunately. It does have useful suggestions and the words introducing the very "dire ne pas dire" section constitute a pleasant statement in stark contrast with the title. It's a good thing we have foreign newspapers to remind us to take a look once in a while.