I NFORMATICS IN F RENCH 1
6. Partially Successful Nativization
14 The OED supplies ten examples from the period between 1656 and 1874 to illustrate the sense
‘of or pertaining to a finger or fingers or digits’.
word developed from ‘crawling insect’ to ‘a defect or flaw in a machine probably caused by a bug’ by metonymic and metaphoric processes. According to an 1889 quotation in the OED, a bug provoked the malfunctioning of Edison’s phonograph. In order to frenchify the word, a French word with similar phonetic and graphical form had to be found. The word bogue was proposed as an option.
Unfortunately - as it often happens in French - the most suitable word is a homonym:
1. bogue f. n. : ‘chestnut bur’
2. bogue m. n. : ‘a kind of fish’ (Box Boops)
3. As the third member of the set of homonyms we must add the frenchified form of bug.
Because the first two words refer to rare creatures, the extension of the homonymic set does not impede comprehension.
In order to see in how far the recommended form le bogue has been successful in actual use, I tested the frequency of the occurrence of the two forms on the web. I carried out my search through altavista.fr to find the French equivalent of the expression millennium bug.15 The expression le bug de l’an 2000 yielded 16000 results, while the form le bogue de l'an 2000 yielded 2560 results, which corresponds to one sixth of the result with the anglicized form.
After even more than twenty years of coexistence, the recommended form could not be enforced.16
Based on the basis of the new computer concept bug, the English verb debug was coined, meaning ‘remove a bug’. The corresponding French form déboguer (1983) seems to occur more frequently than the option débuger, probably because it facilitates phonetic and morphological integration.
Another example of a partly successful nativization is the previously discussed co-existence of e-mail as a direct borrowing from English and the calqued form courriel as the officially recommended form. A recent search by google.fr yielded the following results17: envoyer un e-mail occurred 3 100 000 times, envoyer un mail 1 920 000 times, envoyer un courriel 1 520 000 times, and *envoyer un mél 35 700 times (* means ‘unacceptable’). The numbers show
15 I performed my search on 23 October 2005.
16 I repeated my search two years later, on 20 November 2007 through google.fr and google com.
The search through google.com for “le bogue de l’an 2000” produced 6860 hits versus 9970 hits for “le bug de l’an 2000”. When I restricted my search to google.fr, the search produced 2580 hits for “le bogue de l’an 2000” and 6640 hits for “le bug de l’an 2000". During the years that passed, the frenchified form improved its position. Interestingly, the improvement is more noticeable when the search covered the whole web.
17 I carried out my search on 5 December 2007. In order to provide the same context, I searched for the phrase envoyer un courriel (‘to send an e-mail’) as well as its anticipated equivalents.
that the original anglicism e-mail is used twice as often as the officially recommended term courriel. Even the anglicized short variant mail occurs more often than the official term. The occurrences of e-mail and mail outnumber the official term courriel by nearly three to one. Surprisingly, we also come across the unacceptable *mél form, which occurs occasionally. The abundant use of e-mail and mail in English seems to be responsible for the occurrences of mél in the general sense ‘e-mail’ in French.
7. Conclusion
The outright hostile official attitude towards recent borrowings from British English and American English into French, resulting from their perception as a threat to the French language and culture, does indeed influence the lot of many English borrowings in the domain of informatics. The terms I have examined so far show that a “naturalization” process often follows the following pattern: A new term appears in French in its foreign (English) form, such as computer and driver (1972). If the foreign element is catching on, language users adapt its form to the French language, if possible, cf. computeur, driveur. After a certain time, the official institutions accept or reject the use of a given term. When they discard a term, they need to come up with a corresponding French item. The word ordinateur and pilote represent such official replacements. The official attitude is very strict. The officials try to get rid of anglicisms in all forms; only very few adaptations survive.18
We have seen that the proposed French equivalents are very often direct borrowings from Latin or Greek words or word elements. Numerous examples discussed in this study show that while the guardians of the French language (the members of the commissions ministérielles de terminologie) refuse to nativize new anglicisms, in many such cases the common learned vocabulary would provide an easy link between the vocabularies of the two languages.
18 Among them is, for example, spool, adapted to spoule. The adaptation probably survived because the term is only rarely used. Modem (1958), a blend of modulator and demodulator, was also spared. Though an English coinage, it can be decomposed in English and French due to the common scientific vocabulary: The English lexemes modulator and demodulator correspond to French modulateur and démodulateur.