French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a monument to the French language deep in far-right heartland.
Macron used the occasion to wade into a culture war debate, backing a right-wing bill to ban the use of “inclusive language” – a popular trend for using both masculine and feminine versions of words when writing.
France must “not give in to fashionable trends,” he said as he inaugurated the Cite Internationale de la Langue Francaise just hours before the Senate was due to debate the proposed law.
Modern French presidents love a cultural “grand projet” – an imposing monument to “scratch” their name on history, as ex-leader Francois Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Georges Pompidou built a famous modern art museum in Paris, and Jacques Chirac created the Quai Branly global culture museum on the banks of the Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterets while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into an international centre for the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits and cultural events.
Perhaps fittingly, the website seems determinedly uninterested in the quality of its English translations, describing the castle as a “high place of the French history and architecture”.
That’s a terrible solution, there’s no pronouns and articles that could refer back to that kind of construct (“The teachers who went to the bridge met their students there”), and don’t get me started on cases or adjective agreement.
If you don’t want to use generic feminine/masculine forms (Like “Die Person löste ein Bahnticket”, “Der Bäcker buk ein Brot”) there’s the Inklusivum, which is nothing but a whole new fourth grammatical gender: Animated but sex-neutral.
Wow this is bullshit. Who’s gonna learn a whole new grammar for their mother tongue? And “de gute Arzte” still sounds masculine to me. There’s nothing wrong with generic masculine in my opinion, it’s efficient and everyone speaks it. But I’m a man, so my opinion is invalid anyway.
It’s not a new grammar it’s a new gender and the difference to what we have isn’t larger than German inter-dialectal difference. It’s a linguistically sane alternative to Binnen-I and Sternchen and everything.
As in: If there was a dialect around without male/female distinction that used the Inklusivum instead you’d hardly blink. You’d be able to make sense of it (at least more than I can make sense of Bavarian) and with some exposure, you would be able to speak it without studying.
You could also learn Platt which pretty much has lost the female/male distinction everywhere but in pronouns just like English (but retains the neuter), but I guarantee you that’d be harder.