53. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE (Part-3)

This inclination to hack away at English words until they become something like native products is not restricted to the Japanese. In Singapore transvestites are known as shims, a contraction of she-hims. Italians don't go to a nightclub, but just to a night (often spelled nihgt), while in France a self-service restaurant is simply le self. European languages also show a curious tendency to take English participles and give them entirely new meanings, so that the French don't go running or jogging, they go footing. They don't engage in a spot of sunbathing,

but rather go in for le bronzing. A tuxedo or dinner jacket in French becomes un

smoking, while in Italy cosmetic surgery becomes il lifting. The Germans are

particularly inventive at taking things a step further than it ever occurred to

anyone in English. A young person in Germany goes from being in his teens to

being in his twens, a book that doesn't quite become a best-seller is instead ein

steadyseller, and a person who is more relaxed than another is relaxter.

Sometimes new words are made up, as with the Japanese salry-man for an

employee of a corporation. In Germany a snappy dresser is a dressman. In

France a recordman is not a disc jockey, but an athlete who sets a record, while

an alloman is a switchboard operator (because he says, "alto? alto?"). And, just

to confuse things, sometimes English words are given largely contrary meanings,

so that in France an egghead is an idiot while a jerk is an accomplished dancer.

The most relentless borrowers of English words have been the Japanese. The

number of English words current in Japanese has been estimated to be as high as

zo,000. It has been said, not altogether wryly, that if the Japanese were required

to pay a license fee for every word they used, the American trade deficit would

vanish. A count of Western words, mostly English, used in Japanese newspapers

in 1964 put the proportion at just under lo percent. It would almost certainly be

much higher now. "France is engaged in a war with Anglo-Saxon." The French have had a law

against the encroachment of foreign words since as early as 1911, but this was

considerably bolstered by the setting up in 1970 of a Commission on

Terminology, which was followed in 1975 by another law, called the

Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language, which introduced fines for

using illegal anglicisimes, which in turn was followed in 1984 by the

establishment of another panel, the grandly named Commissariat General de la

Langue Francaise. You may safely conclude from all this that the French take

their language very seriously indeed. As a result of these various efforts, the

French are forbidden from saying pipeline (even though they pronounce it

"peepleun"), but must instead say oleo-duc. They cannot take a jet airplane, but

instead must board an avion a reaction. A hamburger is a steak hache. Chewing

gum has become pate a ma cher. The newspaper Le Monde sarcastically

suggested that sandwich should be rendered as "deux morceaux de pain avec

quelque chose au milieu"—"two pieces of bread with something in the middle."

Estimates of the number of anglicisimes in French have been put as high as 5

percent, though Le Monde thinks the true total is nearer a percent or less.

(Someone else once calculated that an anglicisime appeared in Le Monde once

every 166 words—or well under i percent of the time.) So it is altogether

possible that the French are making a great deal out of very little. Certainly the

incursion of English words is not a new phenomenon. Le snob, le biftek, and

even le self-made man go back a hundred years or more, while ouest ( west) hasbeen in French for loo years and rosbif (roast beef) for 350. More than one

observer has suggested that what really rankles the French is not they are

borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the

world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine Le Point put

it: "Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur."

The French, it must be said, have not been so rabidly anglo-phobic as has

sometimes been made out. From the outset the government conceded defeat on a

number of words that were too well established to drive out: gadget, holdup,

weekend, blue jeans, self-service, manager, marketing, and many others.

Between 1977 and 1987, there were just forty prosecutions for violations of the

language laws, almost always involving fairly flagrant abuses. TWA, for

instance, was fined for issuing its boarding passes in English only. You can

hardly blame the French for taking exception to that.

The French also recognize the global importance of English. In 1988, the elite

Ecole Centrale de Paris, one of the country's top engineering academies, made it

a requirement of graduation that students be able to speak and write fluent

English, even if they have no intention of ever leaving France.

It would be a mistake to presume that English is widely spoken in the world

because it has some overwhelming intrinsic appeal to foreigners. Most people

speak it not because it gives them pleasure to help out American and British

monoglots who cannot be troubled to learn a few words of their language,

believe it or not, but because they need it to function in the world at large. They

may like a few English words splashed across their Tshirts and shopping bags,

but that isn't to say that that is what they want to relax with in the evening.