Messieurs les Anglais, pillez les premiers! par by Jean Maillet (review)

les trois contributions de cette partie proposent des réflexions sur l’expression, la perception et la représentation des identités francophones au sens linguistique, culturel et littéraire (entre autres) des locuteurs à travers le monde. La troisième partie, “Contact des langues dans l’espace francophone”, se compose essentiellement d’études sur l’analyse d’interactions verbales, avec la longue étude de Galatanu, Bellachaab et Cozma (les trois coéditeurs de ce volume) sur le cas de “remercier”, ainsi que deux articles théoriques sur l’enseignement du français langue étrangère (Pescheux, El Masrar). Dans l’ensemble, toutes les études regroupées dans ce livre sont accessibles à un lectorat non spécialisé, mais les linguistes et les théoriciens de la langue y trouveront des informations et des analyses d’une grande qualité scientifique et de solides cadres théoriques sur les significations et les constructions des discours identitaires francophones. University of Massachusetts, Lowell Carole Salmon Maillet, Jean. Messieurs les Anglais, pillez les premiers! Paris: L’Opportun, 2016. ISBN 978-2-36075-415-1. Pp. 476. 18 a. Maillet’s volume laments the massacre of the French language, a phenomenon he attributes to an invasion of Anglo-American loanwords. In this respect, his work has numerous precedents. Yet Maillet introduces a subtlety that has escaped previous discussions: if French draws on English for novel lexical items, the“borrowing vector” has not always been one way. Indeed, English has drawn significantly upon French, albeit during a much earlier epoch. Having acknowledged this debt, Maillet’s discussion interrogates contemporary usage. Why has borrowing become essentially unidirectional? Why must worthy French vocabulary be replaced by anglicismes? Is it due to snobbism? Linguistic laziness? On a more sinister note, might this embrace of Anglo-American lexical items signify a surrender of cultural identity, an (unconscious ?) affirmation of the economic/social ideals that animate the Anglo-American lexicon? These introductory arguments frame the remainder of Maillet’s volume, divided into three robust chapters supplemented by an epilogue. The first addresses English neologisms whose origins may be traced to French. The second explores the phenomenon of faux amis and the third, words whose forms may suggest a false relationship. In his initial chapter, Maillet addresses the term “battle” as a representative example. Its origins derive from the New York hip-hop culture, signifying an improvised confrontation between two rappers. This nod to cultural innovation along with an appeal to l’exotisme facilitated its entry into French. Yet its usage has become more banal: the concept of battle has been extended to other contexts, delegitimizing its initial semantic exceptionalism. An odd trajectory, as Maillet notes: bataille was borrowed from French around the fourteenth century. The form battell occurs in Shakespeare, only to be reimported into French during the 1970s.Among the examples 204 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 205 of faux amis that Maillet explores in his second chapter, the pair library ≠ librairie is instructive. At an earlier stage, the words were nearly synonymous. However, French abandoned the meaning of bibliothèque in the seventeenth century, whereas English retained it, resulting in a disconcerting difference for the learner. As an exemplar of “deceptive” pairs inventoried in his final chapter, Maillet turns to aunt/tante. Both derive from Latin amita, but the French acquired the initial consonant from children’s usage of the possessive (t’ante), whereas the English is a more faithful rendering. Although superficially similar, they may not be considered cognates. Maillet succeeds in sustaining a nuanced analysis of the crosslinguistic components that have determined the modern French lexicon. But he seems unable to expand his prescriptive argumentation beyond the tiresome battle metaphor. His epilogue disappoints by its weakly formulated cohortative: “Sus aux anglicismes! Chassons-les, corrigeons-les” (418). For better or for worse, the dynamic nature of language change can hardly be constrained by such an idealized manifesto. Although not a pedagogical handbook, it has important implications for the classroom. If students encounter an Anglicism in an authentic text, can—or should—they adopt its usage? Which have achieved droit de cité? What pragmatic factors might determine their word choice? Unfortunately, absolute prescriptions ignore these complex considerations. Cabrillo College and Graduate...