SMBC Comics Forum

smiley_cow wrote:LR what's your opinion of l'Académie francaise? I'm just curious.

Well, as I said before, there's no real method of preventing language change, so that's completely out of the question. Personally I don't mind if that's the way they do things in France. Really it's just another method to force assimilation or to disenfranchise linguistic minorities. The real question is if you have a problem with that, and apparently the French don't, so it's fine.

EDIT: The best term to describe it would be "shibboleth," because it originally referred to the biblical practice of killing anyone who could not say "shibboleth".

LordRetard wrote:

smiley_cow wrote:LR what's your opinion of l'Académie francaise? I'm just curious.

Well, as I said before, there's no real method of preventing language change, so that's completely out of the question. Personally I don't mind if that's the way they do things in France. Really it's just another method to force assimilation or to disenfranchise linguistic minorities. The real question is if you have a problem with that, and apparently the French don't, so it's fine.

EDIT: The best term to describe it would be "shibboleth," because it originally referred to the biblical practice of killing anyone who could not say "shibboleth".

That's pretty fair. I was just wondering because every time you talk about how language evolves my mind immediately jumps to L'Académie, so I was just wondering your opinion. Personally since I'm not really French I don't have a strong opinion. If I was a native speaker it might be different. Though I do enjoy that I have such an easy time understanding stuff written three or four hundred years ago, and I suppose I have l'Académie to thank for that.

Not really, actually, language change isn't really held back that well by institutions. Chances are that French just hasn't undergone that much change lately. I know, for instance, the Real Academia Española was formed in 1713 in Spain, modeled after L'Académie. But the thing is, Spanish texts older than that are still easy to read. Cervantes' well known text, Don Quixote, was published in 1605, and is completely legible, barring a couple of spelling changes (the main character's name is now "Don Quijote", but in an example of how well it has aged, the change from 'x' to 'j' actually reflects a change in pronunciation yet anyone who reads the original Old Spanish text wouldn't even know the original pronunciation; today they are pronounced the same way). This is because Spanish already had a well-established literary tradition. The difficulty in reading Old English is due to a number of other historical events; mostly the Norman Invasion, as well as the Great Vowel Shift. In addition, many older texts are written in a runic script, not the Latin alphabet. If anything, the only observations possible are that Spanish orthography is almost entirely phonemic, and French is also phonemic to some degree (as I understand). English, on the other hand, maintains more morphemic spellings; ex. "signature" clearly originates from "sign", even if they sound very different.

Skipping 4 pages of your inane drivel...Syfy? NOOOO! I will officially go on a murderous rampage! I'll see everyone in HELL!

No matter how horribly they bastardize their name and their logo I will always love them for the shitty movies they premiere. Where else will I get my fixin's of FIRE ANTS 3?

yeah, well I will always hate them for canceling Mystery Science Theater 3000. I used to wake up early every Saturday morning to watch it.

hawhaw1267 wrote:yeah, well I will always hate them for canceling Mystery Science Theater 3000. I used to wake up early every Saturday morning to watch it.

Well MST3K always has an irregular time slot and is really long. It's a hard show to air.

Yet it's an easy show to download. Assuming you have a lot of memory on your computer.

Make that NOT easy. I've been downloading three of them this past week. And it's still not half way done. But I am dead set in having them. So I continue the downloading.

Goddammit, MM, seed!

Heh. I'm not downloading MST3k. I've never seen any episodes. I've heard it's great but I don't have any interest in downloading it.

It's still your god-given duty to seed, man.

I don't believe in that guy, remember? Anyways, I do seed. But you can't seed what you haven't downloaded.

No. I don't... remember... ANYTHING.

In that case, you've been my slave for the past 10 years. Send any valuables and cash you have to me.