Francomot

Tom Otterness sculpture, image from Flickr

Buzz, tuning, newsletter, chat and talk are all words, Anglicisms, much scorned by the purists of the French language.  In an effort to combat the gradual invasion of their language, they held a competition to Frenchify these five words.  The competition was open to all students who had until February to submit new words as replacements.  I imagine someone has realised that enlisting the help of young people might just be more successful than laying down the law.  The suppression of "le weekend" wasn't a noticeable triumph.

Last week the jury met to decide which words would stand a chance of being used.  For "buzz" they chose "ramdam", a word already in the French language.  Oddly it's also an import, from Arabic, but that presumably is all right because it's not Anglo Saxon.  It means noise, representing the noisiness of Ramadan evenings, bush telegraph, and information flow, and it was unanimously accepted.

Next it was decided that "bolidage" would replace the word "tuning" (of a car).  "Un bolide" is a racing car so there is some logic there.  But at that point they came to a halt.

The suggestions for "newsletter" were narrowed down to "cybernote", "périodiciel" ou "netzine", though again I don't think the last one sounds too French.  Périodiciel is just far too long and hardly trips off the tongue.


Boringly, "talk" could be replaced by "débat", with "parlage", "parlotte", "discut'", "échapar", "débadidé", "débatel" and "débafusion" all up for discussion.  Discussion but no decision.

As for "chat", the possibilities are apparently endless.  Eventually it was narrowed down to either "tchatche" which is little more than a Frenchified spelling, and the very best of all of them: "éblabla"!

Eblabla, how superb! It has a certain ring to it, don't you think?  I'll very happily adopt it.

PS.  I have to add that the article where I read about this had comments following.  The first started off "O M G".  I think there is a long way to go before the battle is won.

Congé <> vacances

Photo from Flickr/l r

In the part of France where I live, if you try to visit a restaurant or some museums or châteaux, you are likely to find a notice like the one above saying that the place is shut for "congés annuels".  If you are in Paris, you may very well see the same thing during August.  Sometimes they do say "vacances annuelles" and so I've always believed that the two words, congé and vacances, both meant holidays.

Well I was wrong, they aren't interchangeable.  There is quite an amount of overlap but  "vacances" means pleasurable holidays where "congé" is more of an official period of leave.

All that preamble is to say I am taking a congé, a week or so off blogging.  The house move has been less than smooth, there is so much to do that it's hard to concentrate on anything else, and now the heating has stopped - this is the coldest winter in the UK since the 1960s.  I think I am justified in not using "vacances" in this instance.

Learning French

There has been something of an excited debate following a post on the Language Log, with comments on Heideas and Language Hat, plus further post on Dadge.

Briefly, a study was being conducted to compare how learners of French as a second language were learning the gender of words. In order to compare their progress against native speakers of French, they tested 17 adults and 42 teenagers with a list of 93 masculine and 50 feminine nouns.

To the researcher's amazement, the native speakers were not only far from 100% correct, there was considerable disagreement between adults and teenagers.

Most commenters have expressed surprise at the low agreement between adults and teenagers, but most also point out that among these particular words some are especially difficult or formal words that adults might be more likely to use.

A further point is that oasis and primeur, although originally feminine, do now have common masculine forms. Oasis is a drink and primeur is used as "en primeur", first of the crop more often than the feminine form, a news scoop.

The two words that the teenagers knew best were "cible", target, and "victime" which one commenter thought could be significant. Another though pointed out that "La Cible" is a television programme.

I have been finding the discussions fascinating, especially because I seriously thought French children were so well drilled in their language that it would be inconceivable that there should be errors of this sort. Additionally I had no idea that the gender of a word could change over time as is apparently the case.

I have always thought that people who learn a language by assimilation, and are prepared to have a go, end up much more fluent even if not always grammatically correct, whereas people like me hesitate while making sure verb endings and noun genders are correct. Clearly it has largely been a waste of my time learning grammar because even French people get it wrong! See, Miss Howcroft!

French kisses

I don't have a particular problem normally with Papillon's posts. They are extremely well written and she uses fairly standard (lovely to my ear) language, though she quite often plays on words. But today she had me floored. For the operation they put a charlotte on her head? I knew what she meant but I couldn't decide whether she was making a joke or whether it was a technical term :) I got there in the end though, but it took some considerable googling. All my usual sources let me down.

It's usually the comments which give me the most difficulty, partly because of the casual language often used and partly because commenters don't normally "compose" their comments and they can be full of typos which can send me off on a wild goose chase.

But what gives me the most difficulty of all are the numerous ways the French kiss you! So far twenty different ways:

• allez bizzzzz
• bises
• bisous
• biz
• biz amilcales
• bizou
• de grosses bises
• des bises
• des bises plein
• gros bisous
• gros, énormes bisous
• je me permets une bise
• je te fais de gros bises
• je te fais un gros bizou
• je t'embrasse
• je t'embrasse très fort
• mille baisers à toi
• tout plein de bisous
• un énorme bisou
• une bise sur chaque joue

- all used as signing off a comment, and I can't think of one way of saying it in English without sounding, well, really odd, not to mention repeating myself.

Reading French

For the first time I have finished a book written in French, voluntarily at least. I have attempted several over the past few years but I haven’t got very far I’m afraid. This time, instead of trying to get to grips with “improving” literature, I took the advice of a French friend and chose a mystery/thriller so that the story would pull me along, and it did. I feel remarkably smug!

The book itself was Sans Feu ni Lieu by Fred Vargas who has written several books, some of them, though not this one, translated into English. I followed up immediately by reading another of her books in English, “The Three Evangelists”.

I’m not usually very keen on translations because I never feel they read well. A couple of years ago I was at a talk given by Ruth Rendell who recommended Henning Mankell as a good crime novelist. His books have been translated into English from Swedish. I don’t desperately like them because I am constantly aware of a Swedish lilt to the language, I find the names of people and places extraordinarily difficult to pronounce (I know it’s not reading aloud but I have to pronounce them in my mind) and the stories themselves I find bleak. My husband on the other hand, thoroughly enjoys them. He says Sweden *is* bleak and he doesn’t find the lilt or the names difficult, possibly because he used to travel there frequently.

Coming back to the Fred Vargas translation, I found it excellent. I was very much aware that the English didn’t read in the way it would if it were originally English but since it was set in Paris I found it lent to the atmosphere – pretty much why my husband likes the Mankell translations. Just today though, I had a notification from Amazon, recommending The Three Evangelists. That led me to read the reviews, and one of them really was very scathing about the translation – said it was no better than school level.

I know very little about the mechanics of translation. While I have been translating Papillon’s blog, I found myself wondering whether it is better to translate some phrases literally which may be understandable but sound odd in English, or to substitute another phrase altogether, one that is more normally used but conveys a similar meaning. In the end I did a mixture of both because I felt it lost too much of the French flavour if I used entirely English phrases, so perhaps that is what the translator was aiming for in The Three Evangelists. I’m even more smug now – I’ve finished one French book and now I like to think I’m a professional translator!