French purists go to court in fight against Franglais
Bit weird even for the French to be suing someone 15 years after their death……
French purists go to court in fight against Franglais
Bit weird even for the French to be suing someone 15 years after their death……
They’re just pissed-off because English is the modern-day lingua franca.. 🙂
Haven’t the French got enough other things to worry about?
Baron J:
And one problem with the French is that they’ve got no word for rapprochement.
Haven’t the French got enough other things to worry about?
If the French worried about what mattered, they wouldn’t be French, now would they?
Il est le end de civilisation.
There was a spell in French at school when a favourite reply was “Je ne dinna ken pas”.
Shows a lack of savoir faire
The French need to learn that the reason that English is such a brilliant language is that we have appropriated words from all over the world that express meanings and ideas better than we could by using our own words.
The French aren’t all so hung up on this issue. I recall that one guy, on hearing that his countrymen wanted to purge foreign words from their language, pointed out that a sandwich would now have to be called two slices of bread with something in between them.
dearieme: i chuckled. Thanks
Dearieme.. what the hell was that?
Skench? Frottish? 😛
Stonyground, the french are not the only ones..
In Belgium the Language War still rages on, and both french and flemish ( not dutch!! gods forbid..) speaking cohorts are adept at inventing new words/transliterations for Furrin’..
One of the very best Flemish examples is the word for “Battery”.
“Batterij” in dutch, simply “bad pronunciation” with the spelling to match. Meaning is exactly the same, including the use for gun emplacements. It’s that old…
Enter the Flemish and their purist flame wars.. They came up with “pieleke”.
Which is also vernacular for a child’s penis… Because it’s a small stiff rod you have to work in a hole, and…
Ok.. I’ll get me coat.. 😉
Interesting. In the Belgian company I’m currently working with, they all refer to their language as Dutch.
Dutch is just a dialect of Deutsch – Low German, rather than High German. But the Cloggies hate it when you point this out.
BiW.. we’re talking Purists here… They most certainly don’t.. 😉
Chris.. Dutch is the evolution of any German as God intended.
I believe a lot of Brits have the same attitude towards english, even though most of it is just mispronounced French.. 😛
English is far more Germanic than it is Froggy. We’re supposed to be able to converse with Frisian Islanders, though I haven’t tried this myself.