----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Off-topic, but interesting. This just crossed my desk.... > http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=518&u=/ap/20030718/ap_on_re_eu/france_out_with__e_mail__3&printer=1 Yahoo's title is obviously overblown ("sexed up" like the BBC says). The word is not banned, the governement simply decided to use in its own texts another term (viz. � courriel �) without imposing this decision upon anyone else. Obviously, the AP has found someone to say it is artificial. Actually, a study made by the Quebec linguist Marie-�va de Villers(*) shows that newspapers (like Le Monde) in France as in Qu�bec tend to use more and more the term now preferred by the French government. In the same vein, the Times of London (**) had a sarcastic article, of course, describing the quixotic efforts of pigheaded Frenchmen to use French words to describe modern concepts. How quaint ! Needless to say, this article caused many a Gallic roar of laughter on French terminology lists. More particularly because the articles contains several factual errors (hacker is not translated by fouineur, but a series of other terms like pirate, casseur, mordu, etc., computer is used less and less and ordinateur or ordi are firmly established). More seriously, it is interesting to note that this must be one of the first times that a modern computer term coined in Quebec (or at least mainly used in Quebec) is accepted by an official body in France. In Quebec, the term is used systematically in books, documentation and advertising. P. A. - 0 - 0 - 0 (*) http://www.ledevoir.com/2003/07/11/31543.html (**) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-740610,00.html
