Sunday, July 20, 2003

France bans the word 'e-mail' from French. Instead, the oh so intuitive courrier electronique shall be used. IIRC, 'courrier' is a noun and means 'mail', and so I've been racking my brain on how to verb-a-size this one. As a noun, it's perfectly easy to use: "J'ai obtenu votre courrier electronique." However, en anglais, e-mail is one of those great, all-purpose words that seems to function just as easily as a verb. "Courrier eletronique moi" just doesn't sound right; it lacks the panache of "Email me!" (though, I don't think emailez-moi is correct either and I'm not sure about the phrase 'mail me' either en francais, linguistically speaking, that is). What I need is a real French person to show/tell me how this all works in the proper context. Hmmm?

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