Diacritiques

In his post De la démocratie au Palais-Bourbon#[1] on his blog at Ceteris Paribus, Emmanuel offers some thoughts on the role of French members of parliament and how the voting public keeps an eye on their work and votes — or rather, doesn’t.

As a political blog, Ceteris Paribus has several things going for it: Emmanuel’s posts are informed by knowledge about the polical process abroad, with frequent references to the UK, the US and the EU level; he has been doing a good job of analysing political processes from other countries for his French readership; and he isn’t gentle with any French political party, an at the same time largely avoids the all-too-common trap doing no more than deploring the weaknesses of the French political system.

But back to the note in question. Emmanuel refers to a previous post by Versac (another French political blogger) wondering why there is no organisation or web site in France that tracks the votes and attendance record of every member of parliament — a practice that is common in the US and the UK alike.

The discussion doesn’t stop here. Emmanuel, in a slightly provocative tone, explains what is, in his view, the reason for this lack of public interest, and goes into some details (my translation, for the original follow the link above):

The reason for this is very simple: there is absolutely nothing to gain from it. Except in a few rare cases, the deputies vote scrupulously along party lines. […]

The crucial point is that the freedom of action of the MPs in the UK or the senators in the US is an order of magnitude greater than what exists, at present, in France, where the majority blindly follows the government and the deputies of the opposition do nothing but abiding by the instruction they receive from the party leadership. This is the fault of the [so-called] rationalised parliamentarism that originated in the 1958 constitution and/or the cowardice of the deputies themselves, who do have significant means at their disposal to use against the government (eg, appointing inquiry committees) but only rarely use them.

[…] What is left is the parliamentary theatre, which is largely on par with the offerings on the grands boulevards, and the work — which recieves only a paltry amount of media attention but is none the less fundamental — that goes into rewriting legislative drafts.

If you read French, be sure to check out the comments on this post, which offer some ideas on how members of parliament in presidential and parliamentary systems might be more or less pushed towards developing a voting profile that might set them apart from the respective party mainstream.

[1]: The Palais Bourbon is the seat of the French National Assembly. You can try the English version of the parliament’s web site, if you are interested in details and history.

Still on multilingual blogging, I have recently met (thanks to IRC) Patrick and Luke, who are both interested in the linguistic and multilingual aspect of blogging and have good ideas to contribute.

Luke, in particular, has an proposal for “distributed translation” of blog content by bloggers who typically blog about related topics in a different language and are sufficiently competent translators. For Creative Commons licensed posts there is actually nothing else to implement or code — people could start right away.

As Suw, who blogs in English and Welsh, explains, even in the absence of blogging platforms that specifically support multilingual blogging, Technorati tags or a similar mechanism could serve to “tie together” the different versions of a post, plus related post in whichever language they are written.

Edit: I added the hreflang attribute to the links, like Kevin suggested. Thanks! The indicators of the link languages that appear in pale violet after each link are visible in all browsers that are CSS2 compliant, ie the vast majority of modern browsers, Internet Explorer (any version) being the exception.

The lack of recent posts on this blog is due me going through a rather deep low at the moment. I’m exhausted (from doing nothing in particular), my concentration is spotty, and so is my short-term memory. So I read half-paragraph by half-paragraph and write one sentence fragment a time.

Even though one characteristic point of these blue phases is that nothing, by itself, will provide a comprehensive cure, this is not a reason to abstain from small attempts to do something pleasant. Which means, in the easiest case, turning to chocolate and associated products.

So this Libération article comes at the right time. We learn from it not only that Ferrero’s annual production is large enough that you could cover the equator with all the Nutella jars lined up, but also that Nutella is … left-wing. In Italy, I mean. But apparently the neo-fascists are trying to even things out a bit, and the Forza Italia guys (Berlusconi’s crowd, in case you didn’t know) are holding “Nutella parties”.

Now, I’m in France, and haven’t noticed a particular political preference neither for the icon, nor in the actual consumption. But we have other problems here, about the gender. The grammatical gender, obviously.

In French, brand names usually get their gender from the underlying product type, even if they are not typically used as modifiers (which would have to agree with the noun they modify). Thus, car brands are all feminine (la voiture)#[1]: une Ford, une Porsche, and even une Mondeo (despite the -o that points to a masculine name) and une Golf (although the noun golf, the sport, is masculine). If this method isn’t applicable, a masculine default applies.

For Nutella, there are two reasons to expect it to be feminine: the suffix -ella, which every speaker of French would expect to create a feminine-gendered diminutive, and the underlying product la pâte (à tartiner), or la crème, maybe.

Yet, Google is very clear on this: 27,000 hits for “[le | du | au] nutella” vs only 865 for the feminine form.

I wasn’t totally convinced and conducted some field research while nipping out for a bottle of milk at the Moroccan grocery store that is open on Sunday evening, with a stop at the café next door#[2]. The result wasn’t quite as clearly in favour of le Nutella, but the preference is there. Strangely enough, if Nutella is used with a partitive determiner/preposition plus definite article to denote an unspecified quantity of a specific instance of Nutella, as in « Tu veux encore du / de la Nutella ? » (”Do you want some more Nutella?”), some speakers who otherwise opted for the masculine gender preferred the feminine form.

Let’s explore this a little further. In German, you have to choose between three genders. Neutral (or masculine) default could be assumed in the absence of other criteria, but German is divided into many dialects that often have their own rules about genders and cases of inanimate nouns.

Ferrero is (sortof) helpful by saying that since “nutella [lowercase in German, it seems, like on the labels] is a fantasy name that is registered as a brand name, it is used without article in general” and that everyone can decide for themselves which article to use in case one is needed.

Personally, I say die Nutella (can’t really bring myself to write it in lowercase letters right now). It is so obviously an Anglo-Italian hybrid, and for me the suffix should determin the gender. Car brands, by the way, are masculine in German (even those that are derived from Spanish female first names).

[1]: Automobile, which was an adjective before becoming a noun, used to be admissible in the masculine (due to un véhicule automobile). Nowadays, the only feminine form is considered correct. [2]: Note to researchers: don’t ask questions in a Parisian café right the moment when Monaco scores against Paris St. Germain.

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