Coronavirus: the Immortals have spoken

Académie Française
Preserving a legacy. If necessary, in aspic

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Don’t chew with your mouth open.”

“Use the right spoon.”

Ah, the making of the middle class. All those rules. All those do’s and don’ts.

With rather more don’ts than do’s, of course.

And in language too. Never start a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction. Never split an infinitive, a stricture I’m trying hard to learn to finally stop being ruled by. Oh, and never end sentences with prepositions, of course.

I’ve recently been listening to an American linguist, John McWhorter. He points out how little sense many of these rules make and how they vanish in time anyway.

For instance, in German today, ‘there’ isn’t the same in ‘stay there’ (‘bleib dort’) and ‘go there’ (‘geh dorthin’). That distinction, between ‘dort’ and ‘dorthin’, used to exist in English too, between ‘there’ and ‘thither’.

“I want to go there,” infant tells mother.

“Now, my dear,” replies mother, “you know that should be ‘go thither’.”

Yes, well, it wouldn’t happen now, would it? But I bet late Renaissance parents would have said something like that, as they tried to make their kids speak English proper, like.

Why do these things vanish? Chiefly, McWhorter claims, when many people start learning the language as adults. Up to the age of twelve or fourteen, children have a capacity to master a language with all its weird peculiarities; beyond that age, they lose it. Imagine foreigners arriving in England and having to learn the language. Viking invaders, say, who settled, ‘married’ local women (the quotation marks are because such arrangements weren’t always consensual) and realised they had to speak English if they wanted to communicate with their kids or most of the people around them.

“Runnest? Runneth? You expect me to learn to say that? Screw that for a game of soldiers. If you insist I’ll add an ‘s’ in the third person singular, though beats me why I bother, but all the rest will just be ‘run’. OK, pal? Happy with that? If not, just remember which one of us came in awe-inspiring boats sweeping across the North Sea, with a bunch of the most fearsome warriors of the Middle Ages. With fire and sword to make it clear to you that we were staying. Come to think of it, I’ve still got the old battle axe somewhere. Should I fetch it? Ah, now you see the sense in the way I conjugate verbs. Good man. Sensible fellow.”

A good basis for protecting middle-class values: use the right spoon

And in German, the basis for a little gender conflict too

One of the niceties of language that vanished from English over those centuries was grammatical gender. As McWhorter points out, it’s somewhat laughable that German treats spoons as masculine, knives as neutral and forks as feminine. I challenge any German to provide a logical reason for the distinction. What, items of cutlery might have gender clashes?

English has done away with all but biological gender. Houses, truth, postboxes, knives, forks and spoons are all genderless. One less useless thing to learn…

But Old English, as a good Germanic language, did have grammatical gender. I’m sure rigid grammarians tried to get speakers of the language to remember the gender of lots of nouns for genderless things. The Vikings, speakers of Old Norse which had its own somewhat different genders, basically couldn’t be bothered to learn a new system and discarded it.

All this to show that languages change. The rigid rules are senseless. Eventually, they go.

But in French, they don’t go easily. A valiant rearguard action will always be put up to prevent their loss. And there’s a prestigious national institution to lead the fight.

It’s called the Académie Française. It was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu who gave the Three Musketeers such a bad time. Its forty members are so important they’re referred to as the ‘Immortals’. My father liked to quote a film I’ve never been able to track down, in which a character is elected to the Academy and, gazing at his reflection in his new uniform, declares “me voilà donc immortel jusqu’à la fin de mes jours” – “so here I am, immortal until the end of my days”.

The Academy issues regular decrees on the French language to ensure that it isn’t allowed to decline into ignominious pauperisation or, as the rest of like to say, change. If it means mummifying the language or preserving it in aspic, then they’re the ones to do it.

Years ago, they announced the verb for to land, ‘atterrir’, literally to come to earth, could be used for the moon too, so you didn’t have to say ‘alunir’, to come to the moon.

Though you could.

Similarly, an ‘Alpiniste’ could go climbing in mountain ranges other than the Alps. You weren’t an ‘Himalayiste’ or ‘Caucasiniste’ depending on which mountains you tackled.

The Immortals have issued a decree on the Coronavirus related disease. It is permissible to refer to it as ‘Covid’, even in French. But it’s important to understand the word’s feminine. Apparently, too many French people have been treating it as masculine, as with most loan words from English. Think of those quintessentially French terms such as ‘le parking’, ‘le brownie’ or ‘le weekend’, where the form ‘le’ for ‘the’ is masculine.

So why is Covid feminine? Because the gender of a compound term, and Covid is a compound of ‘Corona’, ‘Virus’ and ‘Disease’, takes its gender from the principal component. And that principal term, according to the 7 May issue of the Academy’s ‘Dire, ne pas dire’ (‘Say, don’t say’) collection, is the word ‘disease’. Disease in French is ‘la maladie’, where ‘la’ is feminine. 

So the whole term must also be feminine.

La Covid, then, not le. The Immortals have pronounced.

Vive la France, I say. Vive le français too, come to that. But I’m so relieved those Vikings decided they couldn’t be bothered to learn Old English grammatical gender.