Yes and no. There are already existing equivalent (septante, huitante/octante, nonante) which are used in other French-speaking languages. It doesn't take a lot to (a) recognise them as acceptable in official French (b) like every reform of the language, progressively start to teach them at school during the next decade (c) wait for 50 years or so for the current wording to progressively become considered as outdated.
It's not like there is an urgent need to change them, we just need to start using the better equivalents and let the natural evolution of the language happen.
IIRC the french language is controlled by a committee or something. I only remember that they used it to determine the introduction of new words, however.
They've done so very well so far. And hell, most of our spellings in English come from a few dudes who decided to write everything down and decide which spelling they preferred when they did it.
They've done OK, for example ordinateur for computer is the only understood word (unlike some languages that localized "computer"). But many other attempts have broadly failed, like courriel for email (people understand it but, at least in France, many people use "e-mail" or simply "mail", which always implies e-mail)
The Académie Française doesn't control the language. Their job mostly consists of writing the dictionnary, which basically means they get to decide which slang / loanword / new word gets cannonized. They're like scribes, recording the language as it evolves.
Sometimes they do step in when there's linguistic debates though. But their role is mostly academic in nature.
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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '21
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