2012/01/30 23:53
In an essay by Jurgen Klausenburger called "The morphologization and grammaticalization of French liason", he quotes Pierre Swiggers ("How to Order Eggs in French" in Folia Linguistica 1985) for the following data: On the same topic, this blog posting states the following:I had a professor when I was in college — a linguist from Normandy whose native language was French...
2010/09/26 8:16
Som en del af la Journée européenne des langues, today is the Day of Multilingual Blogging.Para la mayoría de los bloggers no es difícil, потому что они пишут только на одном языке обычно, och alla läsare förstår genast att det inte er vanligt, kiam ili skribas en nekutima lingvo.Men hvis jeg havde blogget på spansk eller tysk, hätten alle wohl...
2012/02/16 20:51
For the past three days I’ve been working at a French company in Champs-sur-Marne, a Parisian suburb. Every day we’ve gone for lunch at a local restaurant, and it’s been a pleasant experience every time.
Today we went to quite a special place, Chez l’ Savoyard in the historical centre of Champs-sur-Marne.
At first I thought it was just a traditional little pub and restaurant.
However, when the owner spotted me, he shouted “Il est nouveau!” and rushed over to shake my hand, saying “Mon fils s’appelle Thomas aussi.” (He quickly forgot, though, and started calling me l’anglais instead!!!)
We then sat down at a table, and one of my temporary colleagues went into the kitchen to find out what was on the menu, while one of the others fetched a bottle of white wine in the bar and grabbed a bottle of crème de cassis from another table.
There were four starters to choose from – eggs mayonnaise, herring salad, charcuterie and salad Parisienne – but there was only one main course on offer: cuisse de canard.
We didn’t have to cook the food ourselves, but the starters were served by another customer who happened to be near the kitchen at that time.
The food was lovely, though – the mayonnaise was homemade, very runny and mustardy, and the duck leg was perfectly cooked.
After each course, we carried the dirty dishes back to the kitchen ourselves.
Because it was my first time there, the owner made us a special dessert – some sort of ice cream with meringue served together with a slice of custard pie. To show that I had sussed the system, I carried our dirty plates back to the kitchen.
We paid €12.50 (£10.37) each. Funnily enough, we didn’t have to work the till ourselves.
Don’t miss Chez l’ Savoyard next time you’re in Champs-sur-Marne!
2011/05/03 23:05
I know almost nothing about Canadian politics, but I had always assumed that it was a bit like Belgium (where the parties are split along linguistic lines). In other words, I had expect the Bloc Québécois to represent the francophones and the other parties to cater for the anglophones.However, I just stumbled upon this recent Canadian leaders' debate in French: Only the Bloc leader is a native French speaker, but impressively all of the others are able to discuss politics...
2011/02/19 8:21
Spoken and written French are so different that they can probably be considered two separate languages.Nevertheless, most language courses and grammars ignore this issue and try to teach some sort of compromise language in which 'money' is argent, ne isn't dropped, and the passé simple isn't used."Street Frenchnɔ̃, ʒe pa d fʁik.If only I was better at French, and if...
2008/10/11 11:22
French orthography annoys me. It manages to be based neither on the phonology nor on etymology.For instance, Latin e has in many circumstances become /wa/ in French, but it's neither written with a grapheme close to 'e' (such as 'ë')...
2008/09/13 10:29
I had a dream last night.I was in France, in a place with mountains close to the sea.I walked up to a big Citroën, where two old guys were standing talking to a young one.The young one asked me in...
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