The Story of French

I've just started reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, and it is a fantastic book. Although I'm constantly reminded of reading Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue in St. Andrews, Scotland, in the winter of 2006 and having my mind blown repeatedly.

I'm a sucker for interesting facts about language and how it changes over time, which leads me to include the following excerpt from The Story of French regarding the evolution of Anglo-Norman and subsequent formation of French, and its effect on the English language.

. . . The English language is an excellent laboratory for examining the different trends that were at work in the formation of French. For the word château, the Norman variant castel produced castle, whereas the Paris variant chastel produced chastelain and châtelaine. There are many other examples; for example, chasser (to hunt), which was pronounced chacier around Paris, but cachier in Normandy, produced chase and catch. Real, royal and regal meant the same thing in Norman, Françoys and Latin respectively, but English took them on and gave them each different meanings. The term real estate comes from two Anglo-Norman terms. Leal, loyal and legal followed the same pattern, although leal (meaning both "loyal" and "legal") has fallen out of use. Warranty and guarantee are the same word, pronounced with a Norman and a Françoys accent respectively; this difference in pronunciation also explains how Guillaume became William, guerre became war and Gaul became Walloon (p. 33).

What struck me most at first was the weight of the last sentence. I always knew that Guillaume was the French version of William, but I had never realized that in Anglo-Norman and the subsequent early incarnations of the modern French language, the pronunciation of g and w was the same, thereby drawing a relationship between guarantee and warranty that I never knew existed. It's also notable that guarantee and warranty are essentially the same word, though spelled differently. English is marvelous and fascinating to me because it can get away with making so many of the same sounds look different when written, such as the uar and arr, -ty and -tee of guarantee and warranty, respectively.

I'm only on page 33 of the book; I expect a lot of the cool stuff I find to overflow into this space. It's too good not to.

Typiquement

Sometimes I think about slang expressions and neologisms. Take, for example, the question "are you going to nuke it?" Out of context one might think it to have a different meaning but somehow it has become generally acceptable to say that you are going to "nuke" a food item when you are simply going to reheat it in the microwave. Yet, I hear it all the time and only recently have I thought about how silly it sounds. I won't argue the convenience of saying "nuke" instead of "microwave" or "reheat" but I guess personally for me it seems odd.

When I first read the chapter entitled Wordplay in Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, I thought it was interesting to read of the different instances of wordplay in English. He explains that someone in the UK might come across a crossword clue of "a city in Czechoslovakia" and have to figure out that the city is Oslo (Czech-oslo-vakia). Also, the playfulness of palindromes means the phrase "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas" is read identically whether spelled backwards or forwards. By and large, I suppose the origin of wordplay isn't as important as the ability for language to grow and be semantically pliable.

While living in Spain with a couple of french guys I learned a lot about French and slang expressions. Of course, I learned all the vulgarities (even though to my ears they sound too nice to be vulgar) but also some other interesting things about wordplay in French. One day I discovered my favourite phrase in French, ce type (meaning, roughly, this guy; pronounced sə ti:p), and asked what the equivalent phrase would be for this girl; they told me that it would be cette meuf (pronounced set: møf). The usage of meuf is highly colloquial and I found out that the word meuf was actually created by inverting the consonant sounds of the French word for woman: femme (pronounced fɑ:m). [Please do tell me if I've made mistakes with the phonetic spelling]

After talking with a friend (americaine) who has spent a considerable amount of time living in France, I found out that a lot of slang words in French are hard to figure out because the words are inverted versions of the originals. For her, the trickiness of inverted sounds and duality of meaning made learning slang slightly less intuitive. There is an article on Wikipedia that explains that this type of wordplay in French is known as verlan. In fact, the word verlan is, in itself, a play on words because if you invert verlan you get lanver (l'envers), which means the inverse in French.

The Wikipedia article explains how verlan is employed as well as some idea of what it would be like if we tried to do the same sort of thing in English. Take a look for yourself, it's rather amusing.

It is also worth mentioning that Lunfardo, an argot originating in and around the Rioplatense regions of Argentina and Uruguay during the 19th century, is similar to verlan in the sense that it reverses the syllables of words to form new words and expressions. Thus, tango is also known as gotán. There are others found in its Wikipedia article. I personally enjoy feca con chele for café con leche.

Also, for anyone who has taken a look at the url of this blog and wondered what keyornew is supposed to mean, I'll only say that it is the name of a song on Mathieu Boogaerts' album Michel. I bought the record, liked the song, and then realised that it is, in fact, the name of an american city, put in verlan. Can you figure it out?

Comme ça

So, today I decided to be pro-active. I picked up the two french language books I borrowed from the library, found a blank notebook and a pencil, and began to study French. I often daydream about second language acquisition and exactly how effective certain studying methods can be. There are the computer software packages and grammar books for autodidacts and then there is simply pure immersion by way of moving to a different country. I'm a big fan of the immersion method. From the point of view of an armchair linguist (really, is there any other kind?), it's amazing to think about the many pieces to the puzzle of learning another language. For me, recognising the parts of language acquisition is hard enough because it's so easy to digress onto other topics. I find it hard to get past Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar - especially after having so many friends say that they simply have no aptitude for learning language - though I'm not sure if I wholly agree with it. So, I start to wonder about the debate of nature vs. nurture, and from there my thoughts are free to drift into any one of various fields that is somehow related to linguistics. After a few minutes I've got everything jumbled, so I let it go and feel content with liking that I like the topic.

My point is that I feel most comfortable getting to know a language (the basics; introductory stuff) in a classroom environment. I suppose this is so because it was in a classroom that I began to learn Spanish. I remember a weekend in 2005 when I decided to make flash cards to jump-start myself to study Hungarian. Sadly, it didn't work out. Though it was a half-hearted attempt, I do admit.

Being able to speak Spanish has given me this incredible ability to understand things in a bunch of other languages like French, Italian, Catalán, Portuguese. It's so involuntary at this point that to me it feels kind of like a super power. So, after taking an intro to French course at University, living with two french guys (and hanging out with all of their friends) in Spain, and already speaking another romance language, I figure that with a little extra effort learning French on my own shouldn't be completely impossible.

I started by working on the important stuff pertaining to french verbs - conjugations. I feel like the indicatif présent, passé composé, and conditionnel should nourish me for a bit, especially because French verbs don't have a ton of inflections. I've studied French before and understand certain things that I read and can get the gist of a conversation (I owe a lot to context), but I've never taken the time to learn about verb conjugations and grammar from a book. My favourite moment of studying today was learning about the passé composé and how the phrases I have bought and I bought in English can be expressed together with one phrase in French, j'ai acheté. The passé composé relies on an auxiliary verb (j'ai; avoir; to have) + a participle (acheté; acheter; to buy) in order to express the past tense. I think that's really cool because in Spanish we don't have auxiliary verbs and in English we do. I also find it fascinating that the passé composé is technically the present perfect tense (I have bought) but somewhere along the line it merged with the preterite, or passé simple, (I bought) to form the passé composé. Thus, the phrase "j'ai acheté" can now be translated into English as I have bought and I bought. The preterite (passé simple) still exists in the French language but is primarily used in literature, as stated in the book I'm reading.

I have another book I'm reading, 1001 Pitfalls in French, that explains some interesting things about vocabulary, namely the history of certain words that have a circumflex (^) or an acute accent (´).

1. A circumflex indicates where an S once existed in old French. (ex. forêt)
Note: as stated, this would imply that the modern word forêt, which means forest in
English, was once actually spelled forest in old French. Yet, this would not change the
pronounciation because words ending with -est and -êt are pronounced the
same way.

2. A word that begins with É or E indicates that at one time the word in Latin began with S.
ex. établissement [Latin stabilis]
école [Latin schola]
esprit [Latin spiritus]

3. The final E is always a Y in English. (ex. faculté [English faculty])

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Simple pleasures.