English, “Mispronounced” French: An Educator’s Humorous Persuasion

(AFP) – French linguist Bernard Sergigliini wants to send his new book, “No English – It’s Badly Pronounced French,” to a “humorous, deliberately bad-faith, arrogant, chauvinistic, written King Charles III.”

With this provocative title, the academic, who held various positions within institutions connected to the French language, did not want to choke the king on his morning tea. The Kingdom of England by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy in 1066, was best mocked by French opposition to “Anglicisms.”

“My book can be a tribute to the English language, which has been able to accept many words,” he explains to AFP. “The flexibility of English that strikes me is that there are Viking, Danish, French words, it’s amazing,” notes this vice president of the Fondation des Alliance Française, which is dedicated to the development of French culture and language.

The Norman Conquest introduced the vocabulary of the new ruling aristocracy to the English language and gave English words such as “cabbage” (cabbage), which actually came from the Norman capoche (head), which followed the accession to the throne for 150 years. William the Conqueror.

Borrowing from French exploded in the 13th and 14th centuries, and was later used in business, administration, and law. “A job, a fortune in land or money, the honor of a contract, freedom or even a person’s life depend on the mastery of the language,” writes the linguist.

Half of these borrowings occur between 1260 and 1400, from the French “bachelor” (bachelor) – a young man in training, especially in the world of chivalry.

Two centuries later, “40% of the 15,000 words” of playwright William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) “are of French origin”, Mr. Cerglini underscores.

But today, on the other side of the Channel, some argue against the place of “Anglo-Saxon” words in modern French, especially in the French Academy, which has preserved the language in its “pure” form since 1635.

– “Words that make up” –

“The language in France is official, state, national, so we must have an academy,” laughs Mr.

The Academy fought against new technical terms such as “big data”, not without success, as “software” has now displaced the once more prevalent “software” from the French language.

He also objected to the new wording of the Covid-19 pandemic, “cluster” or “trial”.

But for the most part the arrival of new words is “not an invasion” for linguists: “These are French words that have gone to practice in England and are coming back to us,” he jokes.

Bernard Sergiglini sees the rich cross-pollination between English and French as an example of La Francophonie – the organization that unites French-speaking countries.

Madagascar uses French as much as England did 800 years ago, he explains. “Administration, business, literature, everything is done in French” because “at present, with Malagasy, we cannot speak to the world, do business, or do science.”

Mr Sergiglini has high hopes for machine translation, which will help smooth communication while preserving local languages. For a long time, he “made fun of automatic translation”. “But now, it’s amazing, (…) we translate well. In fact, we can understand each other, there are a thousand ways than impoverishing languages.”

He says he hopes English will survive the trend towards a simplified form spoken around the world in recent decades – “globish” according to French detractors.

“This globish is a bracket, a poor English. We must save British English, Charles III must act (…) because, without learning English, this beautiful language, people will learn a bad language. And we will impoverish our conversations. .