French baulk @ official e-mail vocab

French e-mail users may not follow official edicts

Controversy has erupted in France after the linguistic authorities gave the @ character a name no French e-mail user has ever heard of.

Translations of @

Czech: zavinac (pickled herring)

Russian: sobachka (little dog)

Italian: Chiocciola (small snail)

Hebrew: strudel (Austrian cake)

Until now, the French have had a choice between "arobase", a popular word derived from the Spanish, and - for the anglophile - "at".

But the General Commission for Terminology and Neologisms - the government body charged with coining new French words - has decided that the proper word should be "arrobe".

However there are no guarantees that the new name will take off.

"No-one uses arrobe," says Christine Ouvrard, a lexicologist with the publishing house Larousse - which produces best-selling dictionaries.

"They have invented a word by turning it into French," she says.

Made-up

"Arobase" entered the Larousse dictionary in 1998, following the advent of email.

It comes from the Spanish arroba, an old measure of weight - although the connection between an ancient Spanish unit and the new world of e-mail is unclear.

Ms Ouvrard says arrobe will not be mentioned in the Larousse dictionary until it is widely used.

"The bureaucracy may issue its decrees," she says, "but in dictionaries we reflect how people use words."

So far France's linguistic guardians have a mixed record in their fight against the spread English in the field of technology.

No-one uses arrobe

Christine Ouvrard
lexicologist

They have successfully imposed "ordinateur" for computer, "logiciel" for software, "internaute" for internet-user, and "informatique" for computer science.

Even when faced with apparently insurmountable obstacles, the French have found a solution.

For example the widely used expression FAQ - as in Frequently Asked Questions - has been cleverly translated as Foire Aux Questions (question market).

But the French authorities have been powerless against the spread of "e-mail". They also failed to substitute "jeunes pousses" (young sprouts) for internet start-ups.

The @ sign has been variously translated around the world. The Spanish say "arroba", the Germans "at".

Among the more colourful translations are the Czech zavinac (pickled herring), Russia's sobachka (little dog), Italy's Chiocciola (small snail) and the Hebrew strudel (an Austrian cake).