No, French has private dictionaries that aren’t normative. This isn’t that.
The Académie is a quasi-governemental institution built by Louis XIV to impose a normative version of French. They initially reformed the language but quickly ended up enforcing the linguistic status quo. French hasn’t had a (much needed) structural reform in about two centuries.
What the academy defines to be “proper French” is essentially the only French that is used by the government, media, and school system, and they refuse to acknowledge changes in usage at every turn.
This means that French is set in stone and mid-19th century books have essentially the same grammar as 21st century French apart from some very minor differences.
(I won’t get into the systemic and very successful repression of minority languages which is closely related).
German did. And it worked. One of the reasons is probably that written German is uniform everywhere. I imagine language reformes are harder and less effective when dialects are still big.
Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban]) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous.
Or quantum grammar, which would solve the problems of normal languages where people have misunderstandings by making it so that nobody can communicate anything enough to have a misunderstanding again because it’s all gibberish.
It’s shit like that why I wonder people just don’t update their languages, remove useless letters, nonsensical loan words exonyms, etc.
LOL, this kind of shit is what happens when people do try to police their language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_québécois_de_la_langue_française
… A dictionary? We already have those in English lol.
Oxford University Press doesn’t have governmental enforcement powers the way the OQLF does.
Users dictate a language more than anything else
No, French has private dictionaries that aren’t normative. This isn’t that.
The Académie is a quasi-governemental institution built by Louis XIV to impose a normative version of French. They initially reformed the language but quickly ended up enforcing the linguistic status quo. French hasn’t had a (much needed) structural reform in about two centuries.
What the academy defines to be “proper French” is essentially the only French that is used by the government, media, and school system, and they refuse to acknowledge changes in usage at every turn.
This means that French is set in stone and mid-19th century books have essentially the same grammar as 21st century French apart from some very minor differences.
(I won’t get into the systemic and very successful repression of minority languages which is closely related).
German did. And it worked. One of the reasons is probably that written German is uniform everywhere. I imagine language reformes are harder and less effective when dialects are still big.
We all do constantly with each word spoken. Language is updated without rest forever.
Like many things in life, languages aren’t necessary logical but I’m looking forward to your efforts to finally get everyone into Esperanto!
Megwetch
Or Lojban.
Edit:
Or quantum grammar, which would solve the problems of normal languages where people have misunderstandings by making it so that nobody can communicate anything enough to have a misunderstanding again because it’s all gibberish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wynn_Miller
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