French Replacements for English Loan Words 1. The Role of Latin

The most characteristic recurring device is the replacement of anglicisms by pseudo-gallicisms (i.e. learned words viz. direct borrowings from Latin). The word ordinateur (‘computer’) represents a highly successful French substitute for the English name of the fetish-object of information science. In French, we do not compute (‘calculate, count’) with the help of computers but ‘put in proper order, arrange, govern’ - this is the etymological sense of Latin ordinare, from ordo ‘order’. In Imperial Latin, ordinator had the sense ‘the one who puts in order, directs’, whereas in Christian Latin it referred to the ‘leader of the ceremony of conferring holy orders’. The Latin word was available in the previous centuries.⁵ The item ordinateur has been used in informatics in French since 1956. It was introduced by the company I.B.M.-France and ousted the English term computer, which was already on the way to being adapted as computeur. The word also occurs in compounds like micro-ordinateur

‘microcomputer’ (1971), familiarly shortened to micro (1974). The term micro-ordinateur is today seriously endangered by the expression P.C., the shortened form of Personal Computer (‘ordinateur personnel’, 1982), originally the trade-mark of the I.B.M. Corporation.

Words of Latin origin are an important part of French and English vocabulary. Most of the Latin words were primarily transmitted through written texts about ecclesiastical, legal, political, technical or scientific subject matters.

French terms that derived from the same Latin etymons as their English equivalents also abound in the vocabulary of informatics. Their spelling and morphology were adapted to French: compatible / compatible, compiler / compilateur (m.), to connect / connecter, disk, disc / disque (m.), error/erreur (f.)

the latter dictionary, the etymological data in the two French dictionaries complement each other. Whenever I use other English or French sources, I quote them separately.

5 The word appeared in French in the original Latin sense in 1491. The Christian Latin sense first occurred in 1703 in French and in 1609 in English.

external / externe, to format / formater, hypertext / l’hypertexte (m.), memory / mémoire (f.), menu / menu (m.), monitor / moniteur (m.), multimedia / multimédia, select / sélectionner, text / texte (m.), virtual memory / mémoire virtuelle etc.⁶ English icon is rendered by two French words. In the sense

‘graphical symbol’ the corresponding French term is icone (masculine noun spelt without an accent), whereas the traditional spelling icône (feminine noun with accent circonflexe) is used to refer to ‘religious picture or statue’. It must be mentioned that the English word has also a spelling variant ikon that carries both senses in that language.

Other English words of Latin origin have no related equivalents in French.

The corresponding French terms are different words, with obviously no etymological connection whatsoever to the former. The difference arose from the particular development of the two languages and not from artificial consistently replaced in French. I illustrate the replacement of a borrowing from English by a French neologism through the example of the English term hardware, which was replaced by matériel in French. According to the OED, the English compound was first attested around 1515 in the sense ‘small goods of metal, ironmongery’ (though the CDE dates it back to 1440). The word first

The term software (1960) is a neologism created on the model of hardware.

Its model motivated the invention of the word. In the same way, the officially recommended French term logiciel (1970) is a motivated neologism in French coined from logique ‘logic’ and the suffix -iel, as found in matériel.

Earlier borrowings from French are subject to de-anglicization as well. An example of a term of informatics, which is apparently of English origin and derives ultimately from French, is the English word file. Who would think that

6 The French can be proud that, at least according to the entry INFORMATIQUE in Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, the first person to use it was Ph. Dreyfus in 1962. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the immediate source of the English word informatics, first recorded in 1967, is the Russian word informatika, first attested in 1966.

file is related to the French words fil (‘thread, line’) and file (‘line, queue’)?

Perhaps the English diphthong [ai] confers an English character to the word. The term first occurs in English in 1473 in the sense ‘to place (papers) in consecutive order for future reference’. The meaning refers to the image of documents hanging on a line like drying laundry. In informatics, file was first used in 1954.

The officially accepted and actually used French equivalent is fichier, which also underwent specialization from ‘catalogue’ to ‘file’. The identity of the first two graphs fi- and the first phoneme /f/ in the English term and its French equivalent facilitate the association of the two terms.

The partial frenchification of the term e-mail is worth examining. In present-day French, the following terms are used: e-mail and its shortened form mail as anglicisms, courriel as the officially recommended form and the abbreviation mél, only before electronic addresses. The English word mail ‘letters, parcels, sent by post’ was first attested in English before 1200 in the sense ‘travelling bag’. Its immediate source is Old French male (‘wallet, bag’), itself a borrowing from Frankish (compare OHG malha, malaha ‘wallet, bag’). The sense of a ‘bag of letters’ was first recorded in 1654. The term e-mail was first used in 1982 as the shortened form of electronic mail. The term occurs in French as an anglicism. It was calqued from electronic mail as courrier électronique in 1994.

The two words courrier électronique were clipped into courriel. Courriel first spread in Quebec and Belgium. The official recommendation proposes the abbreviation mél to introduce electronic addresses, but, in contrast to the English email, which functions as a common noun, it cannot be used in other contexts (i.e. other than immediately followed by an e-mail address). The spread of the term mél was obviously made easier by the similarity of its phonetic form with the original English word e-mail. As an additional bonus, mél can be interpreted in French as the contraction of messagerie + électronique.

2.3. Suffixation in French Creations

The term logiciel illustrates the birth of the new suffix -iel, which occurs in further French neologisms: progiciel (1962) from pro(duit) + (lo)giciel, which replaces ‘package’. The derivation didacticiel (1979) can only be rendered in English with the help of the long paraphrase ‘educational software programme’.

The term ludiciel was coined from ludi(que) et (logi)ciel (1980) and corresponds to ‘computer game’. Except for progiciel, a native suffix is added to a learned lexical morpheme in these examples, thus creating hybrid formations. Another relatively frequent French suffix is -ique. Originally it was used to form adjectives. Today it is often added to borrowings of various origins and forms nouns as well. It then refers to activities related to informatics: bureautique (‘office automation’), monétique (‘electronic banking services’, productique (‘industrial automation’), and robotique (‘robotics’).