This morning we woke up to a loud voice. I was sure it was a car radio broadcasting from the street. It was a man shouting. I opened the bedroom curtain. I almost expected to see him on my fire escape. I could see him across the yard in the neighbors alley. He was tall and had a huge belly and a stud earring in his left earlobe. He held his phone six inches from his face. This was a heated conversation at 6AM on a Sunday morning.
LA TIMES STAFF WRITER
PARIS —
By day, Prof. Daniel Oster heads a learned team laboring to update the official French dictionary, painstakingly building a final barricade against, among other things, the march of English words and “Franglais” into French.
But by night, as Oster digs into the latest edition of the newspaper Le Monde in his Paris apartment, his 15-year-old daughter frequently exhorts him to “ soit cool, Papa. “ Be cool, Dad.
So what does the professional arbiter and gatekeeper of French do? “I don’t punish her,” Oster said, shrugging his shoulders. “She’s just saying it because the other kids say it. One has to be free to express oneself.”
But, he added, “this Franglais, this mixture of English and French, is a completely artificial language. It’s made by disc jockeys, journalists and all sorts of media. When I hear someone speaking that way, I know they’re just being manipulated.”
The French government, for its part, is coolly taking major steps to rid the country of some of these dreaded foreign words. The clear, though unnamed, target is English, especially that language the French call Americain.
For the first time in 19 years, the National Assembly earlier this month approved a new law to protect the French language. This one is the toughest yet. It will make the use of French obligatory in instruction manuals, legal contracts, scientific conferences and all advertising.
The penalties won’t be specified until later, but the Culture Ministry has said they will probably include fines of up to $100 per infraction and a six-month jail term and $8,500 fine for anyone preventing the law from being enforced.
The new law probably won’t change the nature of discourse in the Oster household or on the street, where jeans-wearing French youngsters spice their language with words such as super (pronounced soo-PAIR), where people in le marketing practice le brainstorming in hopes of hitting le jackpot , and where politicians give le briefing off the record .
But it could mean a big change in advertising on billboards, posters, TV and radio, where American slogans have been warmly embraced, especially by companies going after the youth market.
McDonald’s, purveyor of le fast food , uses the slogan “Say Cheese.” Coca-Cola uses “There’s Always Coke.” For Pepsi, it’s “Think Different, Think Pepsi.” Even the new tunnel under the English Channel (or, if you prefer, La Manche) will no longer be Le Shuttle. Instead, it will be La Navette.
And Nike, the top sports and fitness company in France, is asking its lawyers whether it will have to change its slogan “Just Do It.”
“It won’t make our life easier, that’s for sure,” said Stephan Wahlen, Nike’s advertising manager in Paris. “We’ve made a lot of attempts to translate ‘Just Do It.’ But it doesn’t work. If you had a strict translation, it would kill the slogan.”
The new law doesn’t ban all English from advertisements, but it requires advertisers to offer a suitable French translation.
“I’m not sure this is the best way to protect the language,” added Wahlen, who is French. “We have to live with today’s reality, and today’s reality is more global than the French language.”
However, Jacques Toubon, the government’s minister of culture and author of the law, insists it is “not an attack on English. It is an attempt to preserve this language, this irreplaceable capital. If it is not preserved, it will die.”
It is also, he added, part of France’s long and until recently successful effort to assimilate immigrants into one common culture--to, in effect, make them French.
Let there be no doubt, the French love their language, and an overwhelming majority believe strongly that it is worth protecting. About 110 million people, 58 million of them in France, speak French as their main language. And 50 million others are fluent.
In French schools, students learn to write their mother tongue properly in countless dictees , in which they take dictation from their teachers. But the learning doesn’t stop there. Hundreds of thousands of adults tune in to an annual, nationally televised dictee , a kind of prime-time spelling bee for grown-ups, to test their spelling, grammar and ear for the language.
For 20 years, each government ministry has maintained a “terminology committee,” whose primary purpose is to find French equivalents for English words. The work of those committees led to publication this year of a new Dictionary of Official Terms, which lists 3,500 “foreign or improper terms to avoid.” And it helpfully provides French replacements.
One no-no is le planning , used even by the French offices of Berlitz, the language school. Planification is better, says the tome. E-mail should be messagerie electronique , a drive-in cinema is a cine-parc , and air bags are les sac gonflables . Fast food should be restauration rapide , and brainstorming is le remue-meninges . User-friendly? Try convivialite .
But, as lexicographer Oster observes: “You can invent words. But whether the English word will then disappear, you never know.”
Walking along the streets of Paris, though, one might wonder whether the battle for French purity already is lost.
Many French youths, like young people in the United States, find foreign words appealing and, well, tres cool . And plenty of others think government attempts to protect the language by law are Draconian, at worst, and humorless, at best. As the Sunday Times of London put it recently: “Face it, France, you’re the shrill nag of Europe.”
The new language law and Toubon, its author, have become the butt of many jokes, especially from radio stations already chafing under another Toubon-inspired law that will require them to devote at least 40% of their music air time to French songs beginning in 1996.
A French radio commentator, reporting from the Cannes Film Festival last month, helpfully translated the name of the president of the festival jury for his listeners. That’s how Clint Eastwood became Clint “Bois de l’Est.”
And some disc jockeys have begun referring to Toubon as “Monsieur All Good”--his last name roughly translated into English.
One might expect Le Figaro, a government-supporting newspaper, to be kinder. But in a front-page editorial cartoon on the anniversary of D-day, the newspaper showed an American soldier trying to woo a young Frenchwoman, circa 1944. As the soldier vainly attempted a greeting in French, she interrupted him: “Don’t be afraid. You can say, ‘Hello, baby.’ Jacques Toubon is still only 3 years old!”
In his defense, Toubon says the newspapers don’t represent the French silent majority, which he believes supports the law.
Whatever they think of the new law, though, the French long ago turned debates over their language into a kind of national sport.
A 2-year-old group calling itself the Assn. for the Respect of the French Language has 500 volunteer observers who monitor television, radio, newspapers and magazines for signs of bad French. When they spot an error in usage, the observers fill out a form and send it to the association, which in most cases forwards a letter to the offender.
Earlier this month, during commemorations marking the D-day anniversary, French President Francois Mitterrand was overheard uttering, “OK, let’s go,” to President Clinton. Le Monde, partly tongue in cheek, suggested the phrase was “sacrilege to the Francophone cause.”
The final word on the French language is determined by the Academie Francaise, a Left Bank institution founded in 1635 with the sole purpose of raising French to the status of Latin and Greek.
The ninth edition of the academy’s dictionary, which will replace the 1935 edition, is now being created by Oster’s team. So far, only one volume has been published, from “A” to enzyme , and the academy has finished work up to filon (a noun borrowed from Italian that means a vein of minerals). Oster said “it’s not at all impossible” that the dictionary could be completed by the turn of the century.
Ironically, the dictionary lists many English words that the academy has decided have become part of the French language. Among them are best-seller , blazer , blue jean and cowboy .
But just because French people may use an English word doesn’t make it acceptable, Oster said. His rule of thumb is that an English word can become part of the French language only “if it designates something that is not in French.”
That’s why, he said, “ cool is not in the dictionary. It will never be in the dictionary. There are at least 20 French words that describe the same thing.”
The problem, as Oster sees it, is not that young people use words like cool . He doesn’t even mind the use of English in newspapers and magazines, just as long as the word is set apart from good French by quotation marks.
But Oster and many in the government fear that Franglais is creating confusion among young people, who need to be better educated in proper French and English usage.
“When my daughter has to write an essay in French, she knows she can’t use the word cool ,” Oster said. “But what about the kid who doesn’t have the knowledge? If we don’t tell him, he’ll never know. And what will happen then?”
But can a country really legislate the use of a language?
“We can, and it’s our firm intention to do so,” Prime Minister Edouard Balladur said. “The French language is an essential component of our identity and also a major factor in the unity of our country.”
However, Balladur added in a recent interview: “One has to have an open mind about this. Words like le weekend are part of the French language now. But you shouldn’t overdo it. When the precise French word exists, there’s no point in not using it.”
