Yves Arrouye wrote:
>
>France's Académie française is good at that: they recently invented cédérom
>(CD-ROM; gets used because it's quite okay), and mèl (mail, for e-mail;
>nobody uses it except to make fun of it).
>
Mél (which I oppose) was never proposed as a word but as an
abbreviation for "messagerie électronique" (we are told as tél is one
for téléphone on business cards). "Le symbole : Mél., pour « messagerie
électronique », peut figurer devant l'adresse électronique sur un
document (papier à lettres ou carte de visite, par exemple), tout comme
Tél. devant le numéro de téléphone. « Mél. » NE doit PAS être employé
comme substantif." And strictly speaking the Academy only approved this
abreviation and did not proposed it, the Ministry of Culture did.
http://www.culture.fr/culture/dglf/dispositif-enrichissement.htm
http://www.culture.fr/culture/dglf/dispositif-enrichissement.htm
In Québec, one usually reads, hears and sees "courriel" (courrier+él
ectronique). The steps of the main metro station of Montréal were some
time ago painted in purple and yellow with "Yahoo! Courriel" painted on
them. I won't deny that from time to time, one will not have to suffer
a Hexagonal "mail"...
Patrick Andries
--- http://hapax.iquebec.com
"In the first edition of this dictionary it was said that in many
compounds whose second element begins with h the h is silent unless the
accent falls on the syllable that it begins; thus philhellenic and
philharmonic should not sound the h; in nihilism also it should be
silent. Here too the speak-as-you-spell movement has been at work, and
though the COD [Concise Oxford Dictionary] does not favour the
pronunciation of the h in these words, it is in fact often heard, and
some modern modern dictionaries give it. See "a", "an", "I",
"honorarium", "hotel" [also references to old silent h pronunciations in
herb, hospital, humble, humour] and "wh" [hw sound [re]gaining ground
under the influence of the speak-as-you-spell movement in England]"
(Fowler's Modern English Usage, 2nd ed., 1965)
