Punctuation

If that is the case then there is no term in French for weekend. Or perhaps it has been under research for decades and a new one will be out any day now.

There is a well-established French term, 'la fin de la semaine'. For years conservative journals like Le Figaro tried to retain it. Now even they have given up.

But it is still taught in schools. Any teacher not teaching it would be fired.

That's a sign of the language rebelling when told it needs 5 words to express something when (in most other languages) one will do. Weekend hasn't been with us in English for all that long - farmers never needed the term because their crops and livestock don't take Saturday and Sunday off. But when we needed a term for that someone coined it, unlike in French where they often need to have extra words...

For example:
une jeune fille - which is literally "a young girl" is most often translated as "girl", sometimes as "a girl", with the word "young" implied because you are using the word girl and the "a" dropped because it is usually a redundant word when translated into an English sentence.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates its first use to 1879 in the UK. In 1926, Henry Ford started shutting his factories for Saturday and Sunday, other employers following suit under pressure from trade unions (effectively, the people who brought us the weekend, though I know it's long been unfashionable to acknowledge anything good about trade unions).


French isn't alone in this. I know it's not a term as commonly used, or as useful on a daily basis, as 'weekend', but the german word schadenfreude needs at least four words in English (delight in another's misfortune). Perhaps the French have never coined 'finsemaine' as a single word for the same reason as we've never coined 'harmjoy'?

Language is tricky business. The English import "weekend" was quite popular in Norway for a while although we have a perfectly adequate and short word for it: "helg". The reason may have been that "helg" has quite strong religious connotations ("helgr" means holy in Old Norse, and "helgen" is still the Norwegian word for saint). These days "weekend" feels quite dated, as if you're still living in the fifties.

For what it's worth, using Google's Ngram tool we can see that not once in the English corpus was the form: `." He said` ever used. Citation

I'd be fascinated to see your evidence for this, GG

My evidence? Every few years the teachers in France start talking about teaching a more modern version of the language. Dropping t he archaic bits. Every time that happens there is an outcry against those "lazy" teachers who do not want to teach "the beautiful language" as it is while the boards that control the French language say they will take those suggestions under advisement. The teachers talk about colleagues being fired for daring to teach French as it is spoken and not how the academics say it should be spoken. There is a huge debate, which changes nothing, and a few years later it happens again.

To the point that it only makes the international news as a human interest story, not as something that is actually news. Actually, the only point that has made the news is gender base. Remember back when "he" was often used when the person could be either male or female? How now the accepted practice is to say "they" even when talking about a single person because that term is gender neutral? That happened slowly, over the course of a couple of decades, in the English language. Now the same thing is happening in France, where almost every word is either mail or female.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/08/french-schoolteachers-push-gender-neutral- grammar-row-language/

Notice of the teachers say that they want to teach that way - not that they do. The most they can do is refrain from marking something wrong on a test - they must still teach the "official" way.

Sure, there's an argument going on about what should be taught. Nothing unique to France there. But I see nothing in that report to back up your contention that teachers are being threatened with the sack. Where does it say that the AF has any power over who's employed in schools?

I have read article like that in the past, but my google skills are failing me. I keep finding articles about a french teacher who drank wine with his 14 year old students, another fired for racist, the first lady of France, and other reason for firing teachers.

The closest I can find at the moment is
https://www.thelocal.fr/20160830/ten-ways-to-fix-the-french-school-system

The national education system is huge and highly centralized. With more than 1 million personnel, it's now bigger than the Russian Armed Forces—and it's run a bit like an army, in a rigid hierarchical manner that relies on command and control. Teachers are the grunts in the trenches who carry out orders, rather than respected professionals who are able to use their discretion and judgment. The curriculum, the timetable, the school hours, the allocation of finance and other resources and the decisions about which teachers should work in which schools are all decided by bureaucrats from the central authority, with the Minister of Education at its head.

Already from the age of eight, children spend hours of class time struggling to identify grammatical and linguistic structures, which they then must learn to call by the correct technical name. (In the classroom, this is known as learning the "nature and function of words"). That's all well and good for those who want to go on to study linguistics in later life, but it's horribly tedious and repetitive for most, and, at worst, can put them off reading for life.
________

All hiring and firing decisions made from a central authority, teachers having no say in what or how they teach - that's France for you.