Frenchie's Profile

About french legislation and FYI: The purpose of this french law is not protect the french language per se. The purpose is to protect the consumer/citizen from ads or user manuals that would not be written in french and therefore reduce his/her capability to understand the terms and conditions of a contract or just for safety reasons: what if you cannot read and understand how to properly use a risky device ? It is true that the government documents must be written in french but no more as official senate documents must be written in english I suppose... Can you imagine an american law written in, say, german or swahili ? French is certainly a dying language (by numbers) as are maybe 90 % of the languages on Earth. And this is terribly sad thing - from a cultural perspective - because language richness translates to conceptual accuracy and philosophical wealth; reducing the language(s) is reducing our capability to ... think as it is outstandingly described in '1984': to prevent political opposition, the government chose to narrow the capability to think by reducing the number of available words (NovLang). While the internet could have been (and certainly somehow will...) a thrilling opportunity to increase the cultural exchanges, the "free" market which is taking over it will certainly actually decrease them, by pushing everybody towards a common standard that, I am convinced, will not be the highest one... From this influence, the day-to-day french is acquiring a lot of english words that participate to its enlightment. But as does english with french words ("cliché", "force majeure", "coup", etc.). If the world ends up only with Mac Do, Disney and Coca-Cola and only them, we will be collectively losing. That's why, I think, this french law is a good thing. PS: Please excuse my poor english, which, obviously, is not my mother tongue. I am french: nobody's perfect... ;-)