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Nowhere is the battle to uphold French more heated than in the fields of science, commerce and high technology, which are dominated the world over by English. "Our technical contribution," the newsmagazine Le Point recently lamented, "stopped with the word chauffeur." To strike back, committees have been formed by industrial and educational groups to create new French words for every modern occasion. Thus, a Frenchman now listens to his baladeur, rather than a Walkman, and plans vacations according to his partage de temps, and not his time-share. While some of the expressions are felicitous -- the computer term random-access memory becomes simply memoire vive (live memory) -- some are decidedly clumsy. Computer hardware is vaguely called materiel, and the futures market has become le marche de contrats a terme (limited-term contract market). But, insists Mitterrand, "either our language is in the computer data base or it ceases to be one of the great methods of communication in the world."
Not all the French are enthusiastic about such campaigns to maintain linguistic purity. Languages must evolve to survive, argues Author Jean- Francois Revel, and much of the resistance to the influx of foreign words is thinly disguised "French xenophobia." Indeed, French has long been enriched by English expressions (not to mention such charming Anglo-French jumbles as le smoking for a tuxedo), just as English has absorbed such words as bouquet and carrousel. Others believe that the invasion of English is inevitable, especially in technical and business fields, and urge that more Frenchmen give in and learn to speak it. Says French Foreign Trade Minister Michel Noir: "We would certainly be taken more seriously if we became Angliciste."