I’m planning on writing more about French higher education policy in the next few years, since even after my dissertation there’s a lot to learn. For instance, there’s something curious about the national origins of the French\u00a0system of\u00a0diplomas. Here are the standard types of university\u00a0degrees in France:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thus the most advanced\u00a0degree types are both\u00a0named after German precursors; the\u00a0License<\/em> is strictly a French invention; and\u00a0the\u00a0intermediate degree, the\u00a0Master<\/em>, borrows its name from\u00a0English. If this was a hierarchy and not a historical accident, one would see that the academic system put Germany at the top, Anglo-America in the middle, and France at the bottom. (German and American universities\u00a0have been the dominant foreign references in\u00a0modern French academia, as Christophe Charle has shown<\/a>.)<\/p>\n That’s not the funny part, though.<\/p>\n What’s funny is that when the Master<\/strong> was first introduced in 1999, it was\u00a0spelled in weirdly\u00a0Frenchified form as mastaire.<\/strong>\u00a0I imagine this was partly to make the spelling more pronounceable in French (since “er” in French is\u00a0typically pronounced “ay,” and moreover usually signals a verb, not a noun). But also it indicated a minor attempt to “nationalize” the foreign loan word.<\/p>\n Yet as you see from my table, it’s not called a\u00a0mastaire<\/strong> any more.\u00a0Three years later, presumably to cohere with the international norm (and perhaps with the Bologna Process standards), the degree\u00a0was\u00a0renamed to just use the English spelling,\u00a0Master<\/strong>. Since the names of degrees are spelled out in national statutes, this required statutory action to correct. An amusing official decree of April 2002<\/a> thus reads:<\/p>\n Article 1 – Dans le titre et dans toutes les dispositions du d\u00e9cret du 30 ao\u00fbt 1999 susvis\u00e9, le mot : “mastaire” est remplac\u00e9 par le mot : “master”. (Essentially that says:\u00a0“In official documents from 1999 and 2001, the word ‘mastaire’ is replaced by the word ‘master’.”)<\/p>\n And while the revised spelling was no longer very consistent with standard French orthography\/pronunciation, I found in my field research\u00a0that that made no difference.\u00a0There are lots of borrowed English words in French\u00a0already;\u00a0I never saw anyone have problems pronouncing them. Le master<\/em>\u00a0ended up sort of halfway between French and English, usually getting pronounced\u00a0something like “luh masterre,” with a standard French\u00a0r<\/em> sound.<\/p>\n It’s interesting, though, that the possessive part of the English “Master’s” has vanished in the French borrowing, as has\u00a0the disciplinary marker we append to the formal degree name (“Master of Arts” or “of Sciences”).\u00a0Translations are always messy, never more so than when they involve institutional and juridical categories.\u00a0Le master<\/em> ends up being English and yet not English, French and yet not French.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m planning on writing more about French higher education policy in the next few years, since even after my dissertation there’s a lot to learn. For instance, there’s something curious about the national origins of the French\u00a0system of\u00a0diplomas. Here are the standard types of university\u00a0degrees in France:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[502,488,500],"tags":[510,766,743],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2306"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2510,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306\/revisions\/2510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nArticle 2 – \u00c0 l’article 8 du d\u00e9cret du 4 avril 2001 susvis\u00e9, le mot : “mastaire” est remplac\u00e9 par le mot : “master”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n