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Re: [OT] Grammatic gender
From: |
Karlin High |
Subject: |
Re: [OT] Grammatic gender |
Date: |
Wed, 15 Nov 2017 08:15:20 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0 |
On 11/15/2017 2:44 AM, Jacques Menu Muzhic wrote:
This tends to denote the speaker as old or from the countryside.
Since we're already OT and having fun...
Here are some articles from my corner of the world about a French
dialect surviving from 18th century fur traders, probably with fewer
than 50 speakers left.
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/paw-paw-french-two-20-somethings-bet-st-louis-can-save-vanishing-dialect#stream/0
This one has recordings of the spoken dialect and a traditional song:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/9/missouri-s-paw-pawfrenchdialectfadingintosilence.html
This one has my favorite stories about the dialect:
https://www.stlmag.com/-ldquoY-rsquoAll-Vous-Autres-rdquo/
"When Dennis Stroughmatt did graduate work at the University of Quebec,
he stayed with a French family. “Mais ça fait fraitte dehors,” he
remarked casually one night, coming in from the chilly evening.
His host looked up. “What did you say?”
He’d said it was cold—literally, “it makes cold outside.” But the modern
French word was froid, not fraitte.
“How do you know that word?” his host persisted.
“From Missouri,” Stroughmatt said, not realizing that fraitte hadn’t
been used in contemporary French for centuries.
“That’s impossible,” the host declared. So Stroughmatt pulled out maps
of Missouri and Illinois, and the two bent over them and read all the
tiny town and river names. The man shook his head in amazement.
***
Once in the early ’90s, when he tried to rent a car at the Paris
airport, intending to drive to the Normandy battlefield, he asked for un
char, and a sitcom of frustrated “Monsieur, you cannot do that” and
“Whaddya mean I can’t rent a car?” ensued. Char, short for chariot, is
Old French for “cart.” What Stroughmatt didn’t know is that its modern
meaning is not “car” but “tank.” The car-rental guy thought the crazy
American wanted to rent a tank and drive it to Normandy.
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA
- Re: double time signature problem, (continued)
- Re: double time signature problem, Wols Lists, 2017/11/14
- Re: double time signature problem, Blöchl Bernhard, 2017/11/14
- Re: double time signature problem, Simon Albrecht, 2017/11/14
- Re: double time signature problem, Noeck, 2017/11/14
- Re: double time signature problem, Werner Arnhold, 2017/11/15
- Re: double time signature problem, Knut Petersen, 2017/11/15
- Re: double time signature problem, Wols Lists, 2017/11/15
- [OT] Grammatic gender, Simon Albrecht, 2017/11/14
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Andrew Bernard, 2017/11/14
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Jacques Menu Muzhic, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender,
Karlin High <=
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Hilary Snaden, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, David Wright, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Wols Lists, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Urs Liska, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, J Martin Rushton, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Blöchl Bernhard, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Helge Kruse, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Kieren MacMillan, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, Karlin High, 2017/11/15
- Re: [OT] Grammatic gender, David Wright, 2017/11/15