Parisian salon. And in some of these salons, groups of amateur wordsmiths, poets, and social climbers started meeting regularly to discuss their relatively new language, sort of a book club without the book.
One of these soirées caught the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief adviser to King Louis XIII and the first French theologian to have written in French. Richelieu elevated the group to an official French organization (thus bringing it under government control), calling it l’Académie française. Its mission was to define standards of French vocabulary and grammar—to, as the charter states bluntly, “clean the language of all the filth it has caught” and make French “pure [and] eloquent.” And the means by which the Académie would define “pure” French would be to publish an official dictionary. Since written French was still relatively new, and the language sat at the confluence of several linguistic streams, the resulting pool held many of the same fish, but with different names and/or spellings. There was even disagreement on how to pronounce and spell the word for that most French of French foods: cheese.
Printers had already partly taken matters into their own hands by adding diacritics—those little accents of various shapes and sizes, as found in
café
and
Provençal
—to distinguish between similar words and to aid in pronunciation. My favorite diacritic is the
tréma
(as in ö) because it is a diacritic spelled with another diacritic and because the Germans later borrowed it and called it an umlaut, which the
New Yorker
stubbornly continues to use in the word “coöperate,” apparently to ensure that the nation’s most sophisticated readers don’t mistakenly pronounce it “couperate.”
The founding members, or Immortels (so called because they are appointed for life), of l’Académie française got right to work and set out to produce the very first dictionary of the French language. A mere fifty-five years later, the dictionary was officially presented, not to King Louis XIII, who was by then dead and buried, but to his son and successor, King Louis XIV, who received it with the dry understatement, “Gentlemen, this is a long-awaited work.” And because the Immortels are not actually immortal, the project outlived not only Louis XIII and Richelieu but a fair number of the original forty members as well—the first principal author inconveniently died at the letter
l.
And whenever one of them passed away, a new one was inducted, and they had to debate whether to spell “cheese”
fromage
or
formage
all over again.
Design by committee was a problem independent scholars didn’t have, so that by the time the academy’s official dictionary finally appeared in print in 1694, several others were already in widespread use, including one produced on the sly by a member of the academy (and they wondered why he was taking such copious notes during their meetings). The academy’s dictionary was a critical flop, disparaged for its glaring omissions and circular and outdated definitions. Yet it could’ve been worse. As the book was going to press, an alert Académie française member realized just in time that they’d left out the word . . .
académie
. Omissions continued to plague subsequent editions. The most recent edition—that is, the one released in 1935—left out
allemand
(German). Do you believe in karma?
Another of the academy’s responsibilities is to standardize French grammar. The publication of their first grammar book took exactly 296 years. Which, come to think of it, brings us nearly to the present. The academy, whose recent members have included novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is now working hard on the ninth edition (presumably they’ll not leave out the Germans this time). As of this writing, they’re up to the letter
p
.
The academy relies on specialized
One of these soirées caught the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief adviser to King Louis XIII and the first French theologian to have written in French. Richelieu elevated the group to an official French organization (thus bringing it under government control), calling it l’Académie française. Its mission was to define standards of French vocabulary and grammar—to, as the charter states bluntly, “clean the language of all the filth it has caught” and make French “pure [and] eloquent.” And the means by which the Académie would define “pure” French would be to publish an official dictionary. Since written French was still relatively new, and the language sat at the confluence of several linguistic streams, the resulting pool held many of the same fish, but with different names and/or spellings. There was even disagreement on how to pronounce and spell the word for that most French of French foods: cheese.
Printers had already partly taken matters into their own hands by adding diacritics—those little accents of various shapes and sizes, as found in
café
and
Provençal
—to distinguish between similar words and to aid in pronunciation. My favorite diacritic is the
tréma
(as in ö) because it is a diacritic spelled with another diacritic and because the Germans later borrowed it and called it an umlaut, which the
New Yorker
stubbornly continues to use in the word “coöperate,” apparently to ensure that the nation’s most sophisticated readers don’t mistakenly pronounce it “couperate.”
The founding members, or Immortels (so called because they are appointed for life), of l’Académie française got right to work and set out to produce the very first dictionary of the French language. A mere fifty-five years later, the dictionary was officially presented, not to King Louis XIII, who was by then dead and buried, but to his son and successor, King Louis XIV, who received it with the dry understatement, “Gentlemen, this is a long-awaited work.” And because the Immortels are not actually immortal, the project outlived not only Louis XIII and Richelieu but a fair number of the original forty members as well—the first principal author inconveniently died at the letter
l.
And whenever one of them passed away, a new one was inducted, and they had to debate whether to spell “cheese”
fromage
or
formage
all over again.
Design by committee was a problem independent scholars didn’t have, so that by the time the academy’s official dictionary finally appeared in print in 1694, several others were already in widespread use, including one produced on the sly by a member of the academy (and they wondered why he was taking such copious notes during their meetings). The academy’s dictionary was a critical flop, disparaged for its glaring omissions and circular and outdated definitions. Yet it could’ve been worse. As the book was going to press, an alert Académie française member realized just in time that they’d left out the word . . .
académie
. Omissions continued to plague subsequent editions. The most recent edition—that is, the one released in 1935—left out
allemand
(German). Do you believe in karma?
Another of the academy’s responsibilities is to standardize French grammar. The publication of their first grammar book took exactly 296 years. Which, come to think of it, brings us nearly to the present. The academy, whose recent members have included novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is now working hard on the ninth edition (presumably they’ll not leave out the Germans this time). As of this writing, they’re up to the letter
p
.
The academy relies on specialized
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