Jean-Claude Corbeil was, after all, the greatest linguist, who tirelessly, in all his actions, functions and concerns, leaned tenderly and with the greatest solicitude at the bedside of the linguistic drama of his fellow Quebecers. .
He had this intimate, historical knowledge, he, the child of east Montreal, of the idleness of French Canadians, an idleness that had not escaped his sensitivity as an observer and as a young man who had never internalized, for accept him, the inferiorization to which he was destined, he like his contemporaries.
This profound humanist put all the power of his intelligence at the service of a single cause: the defense of the dignity and the vital identity of his mistreated, uncertain people.
Having taken the measure of the announced shipwreck, he, with other giants of his time, courageously invested in a collective mission which seemed at the time unreasonable, insane.
Intellectually, he had grasped like no one before him that the only promise of hope lay in resorting to the forces of numbers, of the exemplary model of the State, to overcome the fatality that awaited each Quebecer who, alone, did not had no chance of escaping the North American context, called upon to inexorably erase the French fact in a minority context under Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
His only pride was in freeing us from our collective shame, our stigma of being defeated.
He brought us patiently and laboriously to internalize the idea that we deserved to be, to survive. Like all other normal people, maybe too peaceful.
So he set to work; if today we have been able to work in French in Quebec for 50 years, it is because at the time he had designed major terminological projects in all sectors of activity with a view to guaranteeing the establishment of French then superbly absent from factories, factories and all workplaces. At the time, only the foreman was talking to boss. He then crystallized these reconquest efforts in the Charter of the French language (1977), or law 101, of which he was one of the main architects.
Thanks to him, an innumerable number of terminologists, lexicographers, language experts and Francophiles have worked and still work proudly to perpetuate our common project of living in French in America.
To this eminent builder, colleague and friend, who once trained me with unspeakable benevolence, I offer my eternal friendship.