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Le Web
On Dave Winer’s blog, I saw a post about Le Web 3. Can you say “le web”? I thought that the language police got mad about non-French words. Is there a French version of “web” (I seriously want to know)? I listened to Jean-Benoit Nadeau on Diane Rhem last week speaking about his book The Story of French. The interview was good and I enjoyed it. Looking on Amazon, I see that Nadeau is also the author, along with Julie Barlow, of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French.
Posted by windley on December 13, 2006 10:28 AM
Comment from Justin at December 13, 2006 12:14 PM
When I worked in France, most of the terms I dealt with in IT were English, but said with a horrible accent. I never heard anyone refer to the web as anything other than "le web" or "le net", never "la toile" (translation). I know that since that time, the gov't has tried to crack down on English/American words in the language. For example, they banned the term e-mail in all gov't agencies. They replaced it with "courriel", which is short for "courrier electronique" (translation of electronic mail).
Comment from BenoitB at December 14, 2006 2:34 AM
As I am french, I can actually say that, yes, we use most commonly "le web". In french, there is a lot of english words that are used as if they are native, often as nouns.
But I assume that english language do the same with a bunch of french words ...
The Académie [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise] regularly create or modify some french substitutes, but they are rarely used.
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