Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

[Oexmelin]

It's not cited, but if true would indicate that the French Academy did, in fact, do some significant regulating.

Lol. No it doesn't.

[Capetan Mihali]

Well I imagine the French had a word for a computer before the 1980's.  The Americans did: computer.  The US were using Hollerith machines to do the census by the 1890's.

Well I too imagine the French had a word for a computer before the 1980s; in fact, I imagine they had their current word for it by April 1955.

[Razgovory]

It's not cited, but if true would indicate that the French Academy did, in fact, do some significant regulating.

Lol. No it doesn't.

What is the proper percentage of words with altered spelling required to account for significant regulating?

[Razgovory]

Well I imagine the French had a word for a computer before the 1980's.  The Americans did: computer.  The US were using Hollerith machines to do the census by the 1890's.

Well I too imagine the French had a word for a computer before the 1980s; in fact, I imagine they had their current word for it by April 1955.

Huh.  They apparently did not have that word by April of 1955, since that is the letter the coins the word.  That's the first time it's used.

[PDH]

Remember that "computer" was (before the mid 1940s) a word for someone who did equations.

[Capetan Mihali]

Huh.  They apparently did not have that word by April of 1955, since that is the letter the coins the word.  That's the first time it's used.

  The term was coined and they "had" that word, both in April 1955.  Unless you use "by" to refer to temporal events in some non-standard way....

[Razgovory]

Huh.  They apparently did not have that word by April of 1955, since that is the letter the coins the word.  That's the first time it's used.

  The term was coined and they "had" that word, both in April 1955.  Unless you use "by" to refer to temporal events in some non-standard way....

Well, By April tends to mean by the beginning of the month ( like get here by 8:00), but "they" as the French people did not unless it got around really, really fast.  I don't  consider the the American people having had the word Computoquerribuck, a word made up by me, by June of 2016.

[Valmy]

Courriel vs. e-mail is the French tech terminology controversy I'm more familiar with.

Yeah I am thinking this was what Yi was talking about. French is not the only romance language to use a version of 'ordinateur'.

[Valmy]

French speakers seem to have a helluva lot of chips on their shoulders.

Well at least the ones who post on Languish.

Anybody who challenges mis-information and stereotypes has a chip on their shoulders? Did you not get huffy with Viper when he made a gag about gays having commitment issues?

We have an obnoxious bigot like Raz going around spewing his bullshit it does piss me off a bit.

[Valmy]

Because you use it in a ahistorical manner, to convey meanings more properly attached to later, 19th or 20th century government practices, to the sort of royal government that oversaw the foundation of the Académie. By the same token, one could say that the British government sponsored Shakespeare.

I suppose I could.  In fact, I have no problem with saying that governments sponsers artists, inventors, scientists and builders.  You have a point but a very narrow one, that government was different in the 17th century.  This is true, but it still means that that the Acadamy had both a mission to regulate the French language and state funding in the person of the monarch and was continued long after the death of King Louis XIII by successive French states.  As far as I know, Noah Webster had no similar advantage.  I know of no similar institution in the United States.

There are institutions like this in other European countries. The British have a big fancy building to regulate coats of arms and shit. Besides not every country is exactly identical to the US or should be.

[Duque de Bragança]

Remember that "computer" was (before the mid 1940s) a word for someone who did equations.

Verb computer or word still exist in French for calculus or date calculations. Not common but it is found on all decent dictionaries. Heard it in Latin class in high school.

I have seen "computeur" with the same meaning you described

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/computeur Wiktionary, so not a great source I reckon.

http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?29;s=3509478045;

COMPUTER, verbe.
Rare
A. Emploi intrans. Déterminer une date; calculer, supputer un temps :
Quant aux ères, ici on compte par l'année de la création, là par olympiade (...). On compute encore par les ères julienne, grégorienne, ibérienne et actienne.
CHATEAUBRIAND, Génie du christianisme, t. 1, 1803, p. 127.
B. Emploi trans., littér. [L'obj. désigne un objet quantifiable] Calculer, évaluer. Si l'on computait tout ce qui est gagné par tous les avocats d'une grande ville (SAY, Traité d'écon. pol., 1832, p. 366). Une mécanique de bois et de métal qui (...) peut computer les tables astronomiques et nautiques jusqu'à n'importe quel point donné (BAUDELAIRE, Nouv. Histoires extraordinaires, trad. d'E. Poë, 1857, p. 383). L'épouvantable catastrophe pécuniaire qu'il computait (J. DE LA VARENDE, Indulgence plénière, 1951, p. 228).
Prononc. et Orth. : [], (je) compute []. Étymol. et Hist. 1595 (MONTAIGNE, Essais, III, 9, éd. A. Thibaudet, p. 1113). Empr. au lat. class. computare « calculer ». Fréq. abs. littér. : 7.

As for the word before ordinateur, it was probably "calculateur". For mainframes à la ENIAC AFAIK
Earlier on, machine arithmétique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_calculator from Blaise Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

[Razgovory]

There are institutions like this in other European countries. The British have a big fancy building to regulate coats of arms and shit. Besides not every country is exactly identical to the US or should be.

Okay.

[Valmy]

Okay.

Some institutions have only tradition and old age to recommend them. Every country has stuff like that.

[Oexmelin]

What is the proper percentage of words with altered spelling required to account for significant regulating?

I am just going to give you one example to show you how your premises about regulating, and the impact of the Académie, are misguided.

In the 16th, and the early 17th century, the preferred spelling, as in, the most used by writers in print, was throsne. Even at that time, it was in competition with other spellings, notably, throne (this one mostly linked to the printer's uses or not of accents), thrône, and trône.

The first dictionary of the Académie, in 1694, retained throne. No s, no accent.
In 1740, it changed for trône, with the accent.

This is a google ngram viewer. It digs within google's digitized books to track the occurrences of words. You can see that the publishing of the Académie's dictionary has little to do with the frequencies of spelling. Even as the Académie retained throne, most writers were using the version without the "h". The decline of "throne" had begun much earlier in print.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=throsne%2Ctr%C3%B4ne%2Ctrone%2Cthr%C3%B4ne%2C+trosne&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1600&year_end=1790&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cthrosne%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthrosne%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThrosne%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Ctr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Btr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Ctrone%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Btrone%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTrone%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTRONE%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cthr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BThr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthr%C3%B4ne%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Ctrosne%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Btrosne%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTrosne%3B%2Cc0

There is a reason for that: the Académie's main tool for suggestion, the Dictionary, was published slowly, and in very small numbers. No one could find it. No one bought it. Its impact was marginal. Much more influential was Antoine Furetière's own competing dictionary, which the Jesuits adopted for their teachings, and modernized later as the Dictionnaire de Trévoux. But even Furetière's popular dictionary, who retained "Trosne", did not curb the more widespread use.   

Did the French language standardize over time? Absolutely. Like all other languages in print. Was it the work of the Académie? Not really.

[Razgovory]

Okay Oex, if you want me to believe that the institutions of your country don't actually do what they are designed to do, then who am I to argue with you?