L’Académie Française was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu with the goal of preserving and protecting the purity of the French language. And, the French take their Academy and their language very seriously. Of course as we know the biggest “threat” to the purity of the French language these days is our own native tongue of English. However, look what happens when the shoe is on the other pied. These restaurant menus show the English words: “fine”, hot” and “ice” with an “s" added to grammatically agree in number with the noun they modify, as is the case in French. Now, I don’t think this is a deliberate attempt to “Frenchify” English in the menu translations, but les Immortels (the head honchos of L’Académie) still carry a lot of weight with many French folk, in particular every school teacher of French language, and I would bet they would tip their berets to this!I haven't seen this kind of calque transferance before and I find it fascinating. I am going to use this as an example in class to my beginning students who don’t believe me that it is automatic for a French speaker to make adjectives agree with the nouns they are describing. Apparently, they can’t even help themselves when they use another language which doesn’t even have this grammar trait.
Wow! Most cool. French and English have had such a strange relationship for so long. It is so interesting to hear about the continuing histoire.
ReplyDeleteDo a posting on accent please! (if your readers might request posts)
:-)
Here in the Arabian Gulf, English and Arabic seem to be fairly separated grammatically, but the vocabulary mixes freely. The signs on the stores are usually in Arabic and English but it trades off which language is transliterated into which. "Okay" seems to be an international word. And commands, like "jalla" (let's go) is used a lot in English sentences, and "challas" (enough) likewise. Invocations such such as "insha'alla" (if it is the will of Allah) and "Alhamdilila" (thanks to the grace of Allah) occur often in English conversation.
When we visited the Catholic Church here is Kuwait, we asked the Bishop of Kuwait if he thought the Catholic church would grow in Kuwait. He responded, "Insha'alla".
Yes, certainly I will take requests. I already have some "potty" shots responding to Debbie's desire to have a "three-way" photo essay of this most important of places in any country.
ReplyDeleteAs for accents, I have just posted something about the "pure" French in this region which is reputed to have the best French (between here and Clermont Ferrand to the East). I must say that I almost feel lulled to listen to both the professor at the university and the doctoral student guide at the Balzac museum as they spoke a most wonderful, unaccented and well articulated language.