Joueur Professionnel

Learned Vol. 5, Issue 11

This week: Joueur professionnel is the officially sanctioned translation of pro-gamer. The English media is contemptuous, the French youth are indifferent. Let’s talk about it.

Joueur Professionnel

“You are not a streamer, little man, you are a joueur-animateur en direct.”

This week, I'm going to do something I never thought I would ever do, not in a million years.  I'm going to stick up for l’Académie Française.

Let me back up: The Academy is a centuries old institution whose remit is to explain and codify the French language. It is their job to decide what is and what is not proper French. They’re comprised of a mysterious council known as The Immortals and they take the stance that French needs to be kept pure, e.g. free of the influence of other languages. And so, in recent years, they have made attempts to get French people to use phrases like l'access sans fil à internet instead of wifi and jackpot as toucher le gros lot.

Normally, when the Academy gets up to its usual antics, they are ignored by both the French and the world at large. This week, however, they managed to stir up the hornet’s nest that is the internet-at-large and e-gaming in particular by releasing a list¹ of official translations for a number of tech-related words that have managed to worm their way into the French language. The English gaming and tech-adjacent media reported it and that was that.

Except.

In all four² of the sources that first brought me the news the writing was dismissive and condescending.  The general tone was less one of reporting the news and more one of cultural mockery. Which bothered me quite a bit because it made me realize how little I actually know about the French language, the Academy, and why it felt the need to address these tech terms in the first place.

What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

French is a bit like Spanish for English-speakers in that we all think we know it better than we do (unless we've actually put in some serious study).  What I mean by that is, as an English speaker, you know dozens, if not hundreds of cognates³ and terms.  Add to this that the basics of French grammar are not too dissimilar to English and that we can all read French without having to learn a new script and we have a language we think we recognize better than we actually do.

And so, in one of the articles I read, the author took pains to point out that the new French terms were more cumbersome than the English originals. But, are they really? There are two questions that I feel are important before making a claim like that: one, does French, like English, tend to abbreviate to the shortest coherent form and, two, how fast, as in syllables per minute, is French spoken?

I haven’t found a definitive answer to the first question, however, French grammar possesses the same systems of abbreviation and contraction⁴ that English does so I would suspect that it, too, shortens everything as much as possible.

But the second question has a much more definitive answer: French is spoken a full syllable per second⁵ faster than English. Meaning, that over the course of a sentence, French speakers can cram an extra three to four words into the same amount of time we English speakers can.

Taken together, I’m going to call the idea that the Academie provided translations are more cumbersome than the English originals a faulty one and move on.

Carl is the Rodney Dangerfield of the animal world. No respect.

Suivre les Jones

Now, as to why the Academy has made these recommendations - its stated purpose is to make translations available for people who don't speak English.  And this, I think, is a laudable goal.  As long-time readers will know, I'm not a prescriptivist.  I don't really believe in telling people what words they must use.  I think it's far better to give people options and explain how different words might be perceived in different contexts.  And I think that's what the Academy is trying to do.

They are not requiring people to use the new terms.  They are suggesting that people familiarize themselves with the new terms because they might need to explain the English terms to someone.  And, by having official translations, they've paved the way for dictionaries and thesauruses to provide more context and better definitions than they might otherwise be able to.

As a counterpoint, I asked my friend Mathias, the writer behind The Average Polyglot and a native French speaker to weigh in on this idea⁶. His take was that while there was nothing wrong with the official translations, he was very unlikely to use them. What’s more, should he need to explain any of the English terms to someone, he would probably do so by just explaining what it meant rather than turn to the dictionary to look up the official translation. Which makes perfect sense.

Because languages, by their very nature, do not stay unchanged.  To learn a language is to understand and follow its evolution through your own lifetime, maintaining a constant balance between what has been established and what is new so that you can communicate both in general and in the immediate present. And sometimes, that means explaining something in terms people can understand without having to resort to a dictionary.

Announcement:

I’m going to be doing a new project this summer, and I wanted to mention it here, first. The project is called 91 Days and it’s a photo project. I’m not going to get into the details just yet, suffice to say that it will be presented as a weekly newsletter (in addition to Learned; Learned is not going anywhere) from July to October 2022. You can sign up or find more information (soon) at 91 Days. Hope to see you there.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I came across this post on Colossal about London-based artist Rosalind Hobley and her current exhibition of cyanotypes, which are lovely and which sent me way down the rabbit hole this week.

• Start by visiting Hobley’s website, where you can see her work. It really is lovely; she mainly works with flowers, but she has also extended her cyanotype process to prints of people, mainly swimmers and dancers.

• Then, in case you’re wondering what a cyanotype is, if you ever took a piece of photo-sensitive blue paper and pressed a leaf between the paper and a piece of glass, you’ve made a cyanotype. They’re delicate and difficult to make well, but they have a kind of unearthly beauty to them when done right.

• The Instagram hashtags #cyanotype and #cyanotypes are worth looking through. And once you’ve done that, scroll through tags for #daguerreotype and other alternative processes.

From the Archives:

This week, I’m going to take you back to the last time I talked in-depth about language change, which is just about a year ago, in Learned Volume 3, Issue 44: Zoom Zoom.

Of all the pandemic changes, I think I’m least concerned about how prevalent Zoom has become in our lives. Earlier, when I said I talked to my friend Mathias, I mean we had a Zoom call. The issue talks about how the company chose the name and where the word comes from. Take a look!

1. Here’s the full list.

2. I’m not going to link them; instead, for a discussion with people who actually seem to know what they’re talking about, I recommend this Reddit thread.

3. Words that are similar or derived from one-another across languages.

4. E.g. initialisms, acronyms, ellipses, shortenings, and so on.

5. French is spoken at 7.18 syllables per second while English is spoken at 6.19 syllables per second.

6. Which I’m pretty sure is three times as much research as any of the tech-news writers did.