{"id":251726,"date":"2024-11-16T04:18:07","date_gmt":"2024-11-16T04:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2024\/11\/16\/frances-new-dictionary-struggles-to-keep-up-with-the-times\/"},"modified":"2024-11-16T04:18:07","modified_gmt":"2024-11-16T04:18:07","slug":"frances-new-dictionary-struggles-to-keep-up-with-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2024\/11\/16\/frances-new-dictionary-struggles-to-keep-up-with-the-times\/","title":{"rendered":"France’s new dictionary struggles to keep up with the times"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

Forty years after they began the task \u2013 and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission \u2013 sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary.<\/p>\n

The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l\u2019Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise<\/em> was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Coll\u00e8ge des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine.<\/p>\n

This is where the 40 wise men and women of the French Academy \u2013 so-called immortels<\/em> (immortals) chosen for their contributions to French language and literature \u2013 have met since the body was first created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635.<\/p>\n

Their task at the start was to \u201cgive certain rules to our language, to render it pure and eloquent\u201d \u2013 to which end they set about writing their first dictionary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

However, the job has proved so slow \u2013 the first book was not produced until 1694 and today it takes more than a year to get through a single letter of the alphabet \u2013 that the relevance of the enterprise is increasingly in question.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,\u201d a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday.<\/p>\n

This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935. Work started in 1986, and three previous sections \u2013 up to the letter R \u2013 have already been issued.<\/p>\n

Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a \u201cmirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,\u201d and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version.<\/p>\n

But many of the \u201cmodern\u201d words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date. And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in.<\/p>\n

Thus common words like tiktokeur<\/em>, vlog<\/em>, smartphone<\/em> and \u00e9moji<\/em> \u2013 which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries \u2013 do not exist in the Acad\u00e9mie book. Conversely its \u201cnew\u201d words include such go-ahead concepts as soda<\/em>, sauna<\/em>, yuppie<\/em> and sup\u00e9rette<\/em> (mini-supermarket).<\/p>\n

For the latest R-Z section, the writers have included the new thinking on the feminisation of jobs, including female alternatives (which did not exist before) for positions such as ambassadeur<\/em> and professeur<\/em>. However print versions of the earlier sections do not have the change, because for many years the Acad\u00e9mie fought a rear-guard action against it.<\/p>\n

Likewise the third section of the new dictionary \u2013 including the letter M \u2013 defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can anyone pretend that this collection can serve as a reference for anyone?\u201d the collective asks, noting that online dictionaries are both bigger and faster-moving.<\/p>\n

Under its president, the writer Amin Maalouf, the dictionary committee meets every Thursday morning and after discussion gives its ruling on definitions that have been drawn up in preliminary form by outside experts.<\/p>\n

Among the \u201cimmortals\u201d is the English poet and French expert Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond<\/em> (undeep).<\/p>\n

\u201cFrench needs it, because as every English student of French knows, there is no word for \u2018shallow\u2019,\u201d he said. Sadly, he failed.<\/p>\n

Discussions – lengthy ones – are already under way for the commencement of edition 10.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty years after they began the task \u2013 and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission \u2013 sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary. The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l\u2019Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":251727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFrance's new dictionary struggles to keep up with the times - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2024\/11\/16\/frances-new-dictionary-struggles-to-keep-up-with-the-times\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"France's new dictionary struggles to keep up with the times - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Forty years after they began the task \u2013 and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission \u2013 sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary. 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