Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bread Loaf literature and writing program began in 1920 as a summer retreat where English teachers studied for advanced degrees. Until the late 1970s most were teachers from elite Eastern prep schools. Bread Loaf "was failing in its social responsibility," says Paul Cubeta, a Middlebury humanities professor who has directed the program since 1965. "So we went looking in rural America for potential educational leaders." Foundation funds were raised to help defray the $2,500 cost for tuition and board. Over the past ten years nearly 500 rural instructors have studied in the shadow of the distinctly flattened mountain that...
...Wednesday afternoons when school is not in session, French children can tune in a popular TV game show that has no American parallel. The program confronts young contestants with invidious English expressions that have infiltrated common parlance and invites them to concoct substitutes in their own language. Some of the prizewinning neologisms: for milkshake, mouslait (literally, milk foam); for hot dog, saucipain (sausage bread); for fast- food outlet, restapouce (quick-bite restaurant). Outsiders often dismiss such exercises as evidence of France's obsession with maintaining the purity of its beloved tongue, especially against the encroachments of Franglais. But lately...
Worldwide, French is the first language of some 109 million people, fewer than those who primarily speak English (403 million), Spanish (266 million) or even Portuguese (154 million). Fifty years ago, British Writer W. Somerset Maugham correctly called French "the common language of educated men." Today that distinction incontestably goes to English in the fields of science, technology, economics and finance, not to mention movies, rock music and air travel. As French President Francois Mitterrand said last year, "France is engaged in a 'war' with Anglo-Saxon...
...State for Francophone Affairs. The country also has what amounts to a language patrol. Since 1977 the General Association for the Users of the French Language has won modest civil-court damages from some 40 companies and other groups for violating a 1911 law that forbids the use of English words in the conduct of business when French equivalents exist. Among the offenders: Trans World Airlines, which had issued boarding passes only in English...
Nowhere is the battle to uphold French more heated than in the fields of science, commerce and high technology, which are dominated the world over by English. "Our technical contribution," the newsmagazine Le Point recently lamented, "stopped with the word chauffeur." To strike back, committees have been formed by industrial and educational groups to create new French words for every modern occasion. Thus, a Frenchman now listens to his baladeur, rather than a Walkman, and plans vacations according to his partage de temps, and not his time-share. While some of the expressions are felicitous -- the computer term random-access...