We have remarked on the eclipse of French as an international language and the impenetrability of French as bureacratese. The latest slam comes from Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo.

ISHIHARA'S FAUX PAS OVER FRENCH LANGUAGE SPURS SUIT

A French-language teacher and 20 other plaintiffs sued Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara on Wednesday over his remarks about the French language last year.
Malik Berkane, 46, principal of a French-language school in Tokyo, filed the suit at the Tokyo District Court along with 20 other French and Japanese, demanding an apology over the remarks and 500,000 yen in compensation for each plaintiff.

According to their suit, Ishihara said Oct. 19, "I have to say that it should be no surprise that French is disqualified as an international language because French is a language which cannot count numbers."

The suit accuses the governor of:

...defaming the French language by failing, for example, to recognise its historical role as the language of diplomacy. His comments "stain the reputation of people who are researching French and speaking it as their native language".

Dear God, how crippling! It's taken M. Berkane and his crew of plaintiffs almost nine full months to pick themselves up off the floor to sue. This is easily worth ¥10.5M (USD$93,566.21/€77,745.10), which, we imagine, is representative of the going French rate for holding a less-than-spectacular opinion of France, the French language, a French person, or a baguette. As understandably as this cry for redress commands French attention and the stray Francophile's enthusiasm, it does suffer from the appearance of triviality when only 21 plaintiffs can be scrapped up out of a population of some 33+ millions in the greater Tokyo area.

Ishihara san's superficial complaint is with the arithmetic operations intrinsic to the names of certain French numbers. This post's title for example, 96 Tears, in French is extravagantly rendered ([4x20] + 16) Tears. But Ishihara's san's real complaint with things French lies elsewhere.

He made the remarks at a meeting of a support organization for Tokyo Metropolitan University, which opened in April after integrating five metro government-run universities and colleges. He was criticizing university employees who opposed the integration, including those teaching French and other languages.

"After all, those guys desperately clinging to such kind of (language) are lodging opposition for the sake of opposition," he said.

Ishihara-san apparently has the Frenchies' number.

PFFT (What's this?): Thin skin 5 | Drama queenism 4 | Rayonnement français 0