Slaphead, that’s true. But I believe I never said that there’s anything odd or wrong with having “Fernseher” instead of “television”. Quite the contrary, it’s refreshing to see a fitting domestic word instead of a loan word like everywhere else. I was just using Fernseher as an example of domestically constructed German word being used in the place of a pseudo-Latin or pseudo-Greek word, which is a quite common phenomenon, and as one could argue also a way to protect the language from outside influences even without any official actions by the state.
Of course, and I guess that government policies to specifically designate what words people should use isn’t probably the best way to go. Obviously if folks think “e-mail” is handier and more natural word to use than “courriel”, then they will use it no matter what, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. But I was referring to something that tends to come up in these discussions regarding language regulations and Académie française; namely the notion that since the word “e-mail” already exists, then even the idea that someone or some other language might use a non-identical word for the same concept is just unthinkable. What I was trying to say is that if enough people call “e-mail” “courriel” then that will be just as natural word as the original.