The story is quite a mysterious one, in fact. The word silhouette, in French and English, originally referred to cut-out profile portraits in black paper, resembling a shadow of the sitter. Like this one, for instance:
If you go to the Place du Tertre in the Montmartre district of Paris, you’ll probably still get someone try to persuade you to get one of yourself.
The portraits, and the word ‘silhouette’, originated in the eighteenth century. It’s known that the word is derived from the name of Louis XV’s finance minister, Etienne de Silhouette, but it’s not exactly clear why.
Etienne de Silhouette was born in Limoges in 1709. He was to rise to the rank of contrôleur général des finances at the court of King Louis by the age of fifty, thanks to the patronage of the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. He was appointed to the post in March 1759, but didn’t even make it to the end of the year. Attempting to get state finances into better shape, he advocated cutting spending, getting rid of loopholes that allowed rich state officials to avoid paying tax, and imposing a touch of austerity on the lavish spending of the royal court. This last proposal in particular didn’t go down too well, and he was booted out of office in November of that year, retiring from public life to live on his country estate for the rest of his days.
Silhouette’s attempted reforms led his enemies to call him a skinflint, and his name was soon associated with meanness and frugality. Apparently, breeches without money-pockets were known as ‘culottes à la Silhouette’ at the time. It’s been claimed that this is the reason Silhouette gave his name to the shadow-portraits, either because they were a ‘portrait-on-the-cheap’, or because they thinned people down to a shadow of themselves. That may just be part of the general slander Silhouette suffered after his short-lived stint in control of the nation’s purse strings. Other accounts suggest he was a genuine enthusiast for shadow-portraits, and would sit guests to his home in front of a blank canvas, before using a special lamp to project their shadow onto it for him to draw around.
Either way, whether he was an enthusiast for the craft or a victim of some very roundabout insult, it’s unlikely that Silhouette was the inventor of the technique. For starters, shadow puppets have been in use in south-east Asia for at least a thousand years, and it’s known that these ‘ombres chinoises’ reached Europe at around the time we’re talking about, where they became generally popular. As with Guillotin, it seems, the famous name gets the credit, and the real inventor, whoever they may have been, is lost in the shadows.
It’s always interesting to see how news in your country gets reported abroad, and it’s particularly interesting when France and Britain are both reporting on a story that concerns both of us. The refugee and migrant crisis at the Eurotunnel in Calais is one such story. It’s had a lot of coverage over here and a fair amount in France too, although the French reports have a rather different tone to them. Slate.fr recently published an article on the whole affair. You can find it here. (Watch out, though! They’ve given it a rather, erm, eye-catching headline in English…) After some remarks on British attitudes to the tunnel, and to foreigners in general, the author gets on to the current situation. Here’s an extract, with some of the trickier vocabulary picked out in bold and listed under each paragraph:
(UPDATE: The article pre-dates the death of Aylan Kurdi, the photos of whom on a Turkish beach have so dramatically changed the debate in recent days. Here is another French article on Calais published since.)
Chaque semaine, des milliers de migrants tentent de traverser la Manche par le tunnel qui a fini par être ouvert en 1994. Ces aspirants voyageurs sautent par-dessus les tourniquets—ou, plus précisément, franchissent les immenses grillages proches de l’entrée du tunnel aux environs de Calais, en France. Dans des scènes dignes du pire cauchemar de John Bull, réfugiés, demandeurs d’asile et migrants économiques essaient désespérément de sauter à bord de camions à destination de la Grande-Bretagne et, espèrent-ils, d’une vie meilleure (en clients avertis, les migrants savent que la vie, en tout cas lorsqu’elle est évaluée en termes d’emploi et de statistiques économiques, est plus douce dans le pays de Shakespeare que dans celui de Racine).
sauter par-dessus les tourniquets: jump the barriers
digne de: worthy of
le pire cauchemar: worst nightmare
le demandeur d’asile: asylum seeker
le client averti: smart customer
Comme il était à prévoir, les événements de Calais ont déclenché les mêmes peurs incontrôlées et le même langage désinhibé qui bardait les premiers débats britanniques autour du tunnel. Fin juillet, dans un article orné de photos de gendarmes français échouant à regrouper des migrants ou se contentant de les regarder courir sous leur nez, le Sun a braillé «Les Frenchies sont atroces!»Pour ne pas être en reste, le Daily Mail a claironné que le cri de ralliement des migrants était: «C’est l’Angleterre ou la mort», et le journal en a profité pour exiger de savoir quand le Premier ministre David Cameron entendait«agir». Les tabloïds, jouant sur les souvenirs de 1940, ont raillé la lâcheté de la réaction française devant la vague de migrants tentant d’entrer dans le tunnel et appelé le gouvernement britannique à faire intervenir l’armée.
Comme il était à prévoir: As might have been expected
déclencher: trigger, set off
désinhibé: uninhibited
échouer à faire qq ch: fail to do something
Pour ne pas être en reste: So as not to be left out
entendre faire: intend to do
railler: mock
Cameron n’a pas encore mobilisé l’armée mais en revanche il n’a pas manqué de faire appel à ses réserves rhétoriques. Lors d’une visite officielle au Vietnam, il a utilisé le mot«nuées» pour décrire les milliers de migrants désespérés qui tentent de forcer le passage dans le tunnel. Plus souvent utilisé pour qualifier des insectes que des êtres humains, ce mot a probablement eu plus de succès auprès des lecteurs du Mail que d’organismes comme la filiale britannique de Médecins du Monde, dont le directeur a observé que ce que Cameron appelait des «nuées» était en réalité «des gens ordinaires—des mères, des pères, des filles et des fils—qui vivaient dans les conditions les plus atroces qui soient et que personne ne devrait avoir à supporter.»
en revanche: on the other hand
faire appel à: call up, call upon (i.e. Cameron isn’t mobilizing the army, but he’s calling up his reserves of rhetoric)
les plus atroces qui soient: the worst possible (literally, ‘the most atrocious that might be)
Se déclarant «très préoccupé» par la situation à Calais et plus particulièrement par les kilomètres de camions attendant sur les autoroutes anglaises de pouvoir entrer dans le tunnel, poussé à la fois par les problèmes de sécurité qui se posent dans le tunnel et par les équipes en grèves dans les ferries français, Cameron semblait également soucieux de la réaction de la France. Il a tapé sur les doigts des Français, évoqué les sommes—plus de 4,7 millions d’euros— déjà dépensées par son gouvernement pour renforcer le réseau de sécurité autour de l’entrée du tunnel côté français, et promis d’affecter 10 millions d’euros supplémentaires à la sécurité du tunnel.
en grève: on strike
soucieux de: concerned about
taper sur les doigts de qqn: rap someone on the knuckles
The Limousin is a region of France to the south-west of Paris around the city of Limoges. Bayonne is a town on the Atlantic coast near the Spanish border, in the heart of the Basque country.
The Limousin is a mostly rural area, famed in France for its distinctive red-brown limousin beef cattle. It doesn’t have a lot of limousines, and yet the region is without doubt the origin of the word.
Similarly, the place-name of Bayonne is the origin of the word bayonet (la baïonnette in French).
So how did limousines and bayonets come to get their names?
The link between Bayonne and bayonets is the more straightforward one. Rural France in the seventeenth century was prone to sporadic conflicts between different groups. During one such, the peasants of Bayonne found themselves short of gunpowder and bullets. As an alternative, they lashed their hunting knives to the end of their muskets to make improvised spears, and the bayonet was born. (They may not actually have been the first people ever to do so, but the association with Bayonne has stuck.)
Limousin and the limo is a more mysterious connection. No one actually knows for sure how the region came to give its name to the stretched cars beloved of film stars and hen nights. The first vehicles to be known by the name were luxury cars in the 1900s which had an enclosed compartment for the passengers behind a driver’s seat with roof and windscreen, but otherwise open.
One suggestion is that shepherds of the limousin region wore a distinctive hooded cloak. Carriages with separate cover for driver and passengers became known as ‘limousin’ carriages by association, and when the similarly structured motor vehicle appeared, the name was carried across. Do make up your own etymology for the term, though, if you can think of something more plausible.
Other French words derived from place names include le corbillard (hearse), which originally referred to a water-bus shuttling between Paris and the suburb of Corbeil, and la dinde (turkey), which is a contraction of lapouledes Indes (chicken from the West Indies), showing that the French had a better grasp of where turkeys come from than the English did.
Lastly, the flower meadow saffron is le colchique in French, which is derived from Colchis, the home of the tragic heroine Medea in Greek myth. Medea’s story involves multiple poisonings, and in French the poisonous flowers of the meadow saffron are associated with her crimes. Les colchiques, and their poison, feature in the most famous poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, which gives me all the reason I need to reprint it here by way of conclusion:
Les Colchiques
Le pré est vénéneux mais joli en automne
Les vaches y paissant
Lentement s’empoisonnent
Le colchique couleur de cerne et de lilas
Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-la
Violatres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne
Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s’empoisonne
Les enfants de l’école viennent avec fracas
Vêtus de hoquetons et jouant de l’harmonica
Ils cueillent les colchiques qui sont comme des mères
Filles de leurs filles et sont couleur de tes paupières
Qui battent comme les fleurs battent au vent dément
Le gardien du troupeau chante tout doucement
Tandis que lentes et meuglant les vaches abandonnent
Pour toujours ce grand pré mal fleuri par l’automne
Meadow Saffron
The meadow is poisonous but pretty in the autumn / The cows that graze there / Are slowly poisoned / Meadow-saffron the colour of lilac and of dark shadows around the eyes / Grows there your eyes are like those flowers / Mauve as their shadows and mauve as this autumn / And for your eyes’ sake my life is slowly poisoned
Children from school come with their commotion / Dressed in smocks and playing the mouth-organ / Picking autumn crocuses which are like their mothers / Daughters of their daughters and the colour of your eyelids / Which flutter like flowers in the mad breeze blown
The cowherd sings softly to himself all alone / While slow moving lowing the cows leave behind them / Forever this great meadow ill flowered by autumn
The Guardian had a helpful guide recently on what to do if you find yourself falling in love with someone who speaks a different language. The original article is here, but I thought I would share some of it with you, in case you should ever find yourself in that situation:
Dating can be confusing enough in your mother tongue, let alone when your date speaks a foreign language. From dealing with embarrassing mistakes to surviving arguments, Erica Buist shares some tips on how to get by.
Are you dating someone in a foreign language? It can be an amazing language and cultural exchange, but it can also be tricky. Whether you’re celebrating Día de San Valentín, Saint Valentin or Den’ sviatogo Valentina, here are a few tips on how to maintain a relationship without the comfort of your mother tongue.
The first date: don’t try to escape the language barrier
Writer Gary Brooks arrived in Siberia as a linguistic “full-grade ignoramus” and met Masha in a cafe. “She overheard me receiving a Russian lesson over some awful Baltika beer. We did the whole ‘You are Britain?’ horror, with my teacher interpreting for me. Lord of the Rings had just been released, and after we established I had never seen the film we arranged to meet and watch it together (in Russian), and so a first date was born.”
A film seems like a great idea for a date when you can’t say much to each other, but Gary points out you have to talk about the film afterwards, and suggests you instead use the language gap as material for a date. “Meet up for a coffee date and give a mutual language lesson,” he says. “Go for a long romantic walk, pointing out trees, ducks and strange men in anoraks and tell each other the name in your own languages. It’s relaxing and fun.”
When words fail, body language and charades will be your friends
Will Henderson dated Marianne from Montpellier for three years. When he arrived in France on his Erasmus year, he had only a GSCE in French and a few catch-up lessons: “My level of French was not great. I had some formulaic phrases, such as ‘My name is William’ and ‘Where is the cathedral?’”
Will and Marianne met at the student bar. “It was a good way to get together – because the music is too loud to hear anyway, so you use other ways to flirt, like body language, buying her a drink, or making sure you’re going out for a cigarette at the same time.”
They were together for four months before Will had to resort to charades. All he wanted to do was put up some shelves, but he didn’t know the French words for drill, tools or hole. “I was completely without context. I was pointing at the wall saying, ‘I need a … it’s the thing you use to make a … a bit of not-wall.’ She looked confused; I’d resorted to charades for random nouns before, but this was an entire performance. I pointed my finger like a gun and made drill sounds, at which point she understood and taught me all the words I hadn’t known.”
Treasure the inevitable cultural clashes
Gary says that rather than language barriers which could be “easily overcome with gestures, dictionaries and hurried phone calls to friends”, he and Masha found out more about each other and their backgrounds, by often embarrassing and always revealing cultural differences. “Our third date was at a restaurant and I was puzzled by her insisting on eating every course with a spoon – apparently a knife and fork was ‘posh’ and unnecessary. That memory sticks with me a lot, if only because eating game with a spoon is very difficult.”
Etiquette in other situations were even more baffling. “Manners and interaction, both socially and especially in the bedroom, were – amazingly – determined by the content of classic Russian novels,” says Gary. “If it wasn’t in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, one simply didn’t do it. If it was rude in Chekhov it was rude in life and if Gogol said something was a good idea then you ought to do it.”
Cultural clashes can be awkward and even embarrassing – but treasure them. They’re not just great for getting to know each other: with every faux pas you get to know your partner’s culture a little better.
Arguments: prepare yourself for an uneven playing field
It can take ages to shake your susceptibility to misunderstandings when you communicate in a second language. “Marianne and I would have blazing rows,” Will recalls, “before realising I’d misheard or misunderstood something.” There are words and phrases that appear to have a simple, direct translation, but the meanings can change in ways dictionaries don’t flag up. You can’t be too precious about your point, advises Will, because you will have complete breakdowns in communication.
Your brain may never work as fast in your second language – but that shouldn’t doom you to lose every argument. Lilia Esperón Delaney from Mexico speaks only English with her Canadian husband, Dan, and finds making arguments the most frustrating part of being in a relationship in a foreign language, even after 14 years together. “You always end up sounding like the more stupid person in the fight – because you have an accent, because you can’t make a point as well, because the perfect word in Spanish has no English equivalent, so you’re definitely at a disadvantage. It can be quite frustrating.”
Embrace embarrassment, it’s good for your vocabulary
Embarrassing stories are useful for remembering words. The first time Gary made Masha laugh was a slapstick moment of slipping on ice and falling over, Norman-Wisdom style. “Instead of warm sympathy I got giggles and a breathy ‘Eto skol’zko, eto skol’zko!’ (It’s slippy, it’s slippy!). In the intervening years I’ve worked all over the place and my Russian has decayed, but I never ever forgot skol’zko.”
“Prepare to be embarrassed on a very regular basis,” says Kate McDermott, reflecting on her time dating a Frenchman. It’s true for all language-learning that you’re likely at some point to mispronounce words and be occasionally unintelligible, but you’re at your most vulnerable in terms of your self-confidence when you’re in the company someone you fancy. The solution? “Get over yourself, basically!” says Kate. And as someone who was once almost tricked by a friend into mixing up the terms for “back of the neck” and “a***hole” during a romantic moment, she should know.
Some verbs are special. Learning French, you soon get to know about the small list of verbs that don’t behave like the others when you put them in the passé composé. They conjugate with être instead of avoir, and their past participle agrees with the subject of the verb. So rather than ‘ils ont donné’ or ‘elle a fait’, you get ‘ils sont partis’or ‘elle est tombée’. They are the Mrs Vandertrampverbs, and they are these:
Monter (elle est montée)
Retourner (elle est retournée)
Sortir (elle est sortie)
Venir (elle est venue)
Aller (elle est allée)
Naître (elle est née)
Descendre (elle est descendue)
Entrer (elle est entrée)
Rester (elle est restée)
Tomber (elle est tombée)
Rentrer (elle est rentrée)
Arriver (elle est arrivée)
Mourir (elle est morte)
Partir (elle est partie)
Good old Mrs Vandertramp, the helpful mnemonic-lady made up of the initial letters of all the special verbs. Except… something about her has always bothered me. Why is there only one ‘D’ in the name, when both descendre and devenir are on the special-verb list? Presumably it’s becausedevenir is just venir (which is in the name), plus a prefix. But in that case, why does the mnemonic include both entrer and rentrer? And if it includes rentrer, why not revenir, remonter, redescendre, redevenir, retomber, repartir, ressortir(note the extra ‘s’ in that one), and renaître? Adding in Mrs Vandertramp’s husband to make ‘Dr & Mrs’ (as in the image at the top of the post) is hardly going to solve that problem.
No, if you want a mnemonic that covers all the subject-agreeing être-conjugating verbs, you’re going to have to memorize this one:
Arrrrrrrrrrr, Stamp DVD Men !
…which, funnily enough, is also the official motto of the International Association for Video Piracy.
A video pirate yesterday
There is another version of the Mrs Vandertramp mnemonic which I learned at school: the less memorably named Mrs Daventramp, who just includes a letter for each of the thirteen basic verbs, missing out any which are the same with an added prefix. It means you don’t have to include any of the endless ‘re-‘ prefixes, but also means you still have to be careful not to forget about devenirandredevenir (to become again or turn back into), which are included in the V for venir. Alternatively, if you want to strip out all the ‘re-‘ prefixes and leave in all the rest, you could acquaint yourself with Mr D. M. Vaderpants, who has descendre and devenir in his name, but none of the superfluous ‘re-‘ derivatives.
Mr D. M. Vaderpants yesterday.
The problem with all of these mnemonics is that in some ways they actually make things more difficult than they really are. The special verbs naturally form into groups, either by being opposites in meaning or by adding prefixes, and the mnemonics split up these groups and shuffle everything around randomly. In fact, with a bit of fiddling about, we can reduce the Mrs Vandertramp verbs to a simple list of five, plus the related verbs to each of them. The verbs are Naître, Sortir, Partir, Aller and Monter. Behold, the N-Spam verbs!
Naître, plus its opposite, mourir, and with a prefix, renaître.
Sortir, plus its opposite, entrer, and their prefixed versions, ressortir and rentrer.
Partir. What’s the opposite of depart/leave/go? Obviously, it’s arrive/return/stay. The three verbs arriver, retournerand rester are all opposites of partir. Plus, there’s the prefix version, repartir (to set out again, not to be confused with répartir, to share out).
Aller, plus its opposite, venir, and the two prefixes, devenir and revenir.
Montermeans to rise or ascend, and also has two opposites: fall (tomber)or descend (descendre), plus a prefixed version of all three: remonter, redescendre, retomber.
N-Spam. Like N-Dubz, but with spam.
Really though, unless you’re going to carry a piece of paper around with you and refer to it whenever you need to say something in the passé composé, these lists are only useful to get you started. What you need to do is keep speaking, listening, and reading in French until ‘elle est tombée’ sounds right and natural to you, and ‘elle a tombé’ sounds weird and wrong. Once you get to that point, you’re thinking like a French person. Mrs Vandertramp has become a part of you, and will live somewhere inside your head for evermore.
ADVANCED VANDERTRAMPING
To finish with, a few extra notes and complications, as Mrs Vandertramp is never quite as straightforward as people might like her to be.
1.All the Vandertramp verbs are intransitive, meaning they don’t have an object: you can go, but you can’t go something, in the way that you can do something, eat something, see something. Some of the verbs on the list in fact have a transitive version. ‘Monter’ can be used intransitively as a Vandertramp verb, ‘elle est montée’ (she went up), but also transitively, meaning either to go up something, or to take something up. In that usage, it’s no longer a Vandertramp verb, but conjugates with avoir: elle a monté l’escalier; elle a monté les valises dans la chambre. You can also use five other verbs from the list in the same way: (re)descendre quelque chose (go/bring down something), remonter quelque chose (go back up something/wind something up), rentrer quelque chose (bring something in), retourner quelque chose (turn something over), and (res)sortir quelque chose (take something out).
2.Retourner gets a proper place on the Vandertramp list, unlike rentrer, revenir, remonter, redescendre, redevenir, retomber, repartir, ressortir and renaître, which are optional extras. That’s because the others are all Vandertramp verbs even without the re- prefix, but not retourner. The verb tournerdoes exist in French, but it’s conjugated with avoir: elle a tourné la clef/la clef a tourné.
3.There’s one more Vandertramp verb we haven’t mentioned. Décéder, a more formal synonym for mourir, is not as commonly used as the other ones, so often gets overlooked, but it works in just the same way as the rest of them.
4. There are four other verbs in French, which, while not actually being part of the Vandertramp list, might perhaps be described as Vandertramp-ish. Accourir (to rush up) and apparaître (to appear) can take être or avoir, as you prefer, with no change in meaning. The same goes for passer (to pass), which is more often treated as a Vandertramp verb than not. (The exception is the phrase ‘passer pour’, to pass as or be taken for, which always takes avoir: ‘il a passé pour intelligent’ – ‘people believed he was clever’.) Lastly, demeurer is a Vandertramp verb when used in the sense of ‘remain’ (elle est demeurée fidèle), but not in the sense of ‘live (somewhere)’ (elle a demeuré à Marseille).
5. Oh, and one other thing about monter: as well as taking avoir when used transitively, it can also take avoir when it means that the level of something has risen: le fleuve a monté; les prix ont monté. In this sense, it’s being the opposite of the non-Vandertramp verb, baisser, rather than of descendre.
6. Lastly, there are no other Vandertramp verbs. Reflexive verbs take être in the passécomposé too, but they don’t agree with the subject, as we talked about here.Also, you may occasionally think you’ve come across an extra Vandertramp verb in a sentence like ‘la ville est tout à fait changée’, but that’s because past participles can sometimes be used as adjectives, just as you’d say ‘la ville est tout à fait différente’. In the passé composé, changer takes avoir and doesn’t agree with the subject: elle a beaucoup changé récemment.
After the Gauls – whose contribution to the French language we looked at here – come the Romans. Julius Caesar launched an invasion of what would be modern-day France in 58 BCE, and by the end of the decade, Gaul was part of the Roman Empire, in which it would remain for the next five hundred years. With them came the Latin language, and the history of the centuries that followed is one of a gradual displacement of the Gaulish language, from the administrators and traders down to the ordinary people, by the language of the conquerors. In grammar and vocabulary, Latin forms the basis of modern French, as it does for modern Spanish and, more closely still, modern Italian.
The crossed swords mark the sites of battles in Caesar’s conquest of Gaul from 58 to 51 BCE.
The Gallo-Romans spoke a language that was coloured by the older languages of their region, and continued to evolve across the centuries into the various French dialects that made up the language by the medieval period. (The spread of a single, dominant variety of French, based largely on the dialect spoken in Paris, is a much more recent story.) The point in this evolution at which people are no longer speaking Latin, but are now speaking French, is a bit of an arbitrary one. Historians of the French language often point to a document written in the year 842, the Oaths ofStrasbourgas the earliest example of written French. It’s an pact between two of Charlemagne’s grandsons, Louis the German and the unfortunately nicknamed Charles the Bald, who are ganging up against their brother, Lothair. Would you like a quick look? Here’s the first sentence:
Pro deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro cummun saluament d’ist di en auant, in quant Deus sauir et podir me dunat, si saluarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra saluar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui mon uol cist mein fradre Karl in damno sit.
And here’s the same thing in modern French:
Pour l’amour de Dieu et pour le salut commun du peuple chrétien et le nôtre, à partir de ce jour, autant que Dieu m’en donne le savoir et le pouvoir, je soutiendrai mon frère Charles de mon aide et en toute chose, comme on doit justement soutenir un frère, à condition qu’il me fasse autant, et je ne prendrai jamais aucun arrangement avec Lothaire, qui, à ma volonté, soit au détriment de mondit frère Charles.
You might not totally agree that it’s right to call the top one French, but it’s definitely not Latin: the oaths actually include a Latin translation of the Old French text (as well as a German one), showing that people at the time thought of them as quite distinct languages.
What’s interesting here, though, is that precisely at this moment that French was breaking free of Latin to become a separate language in its own right, Latin was making a whole new invasion of France. This time it wasn’t being brought by Roman soldiers, but by French scholars.
In late 700s and 800s, when Charlemagne and his successors ruled much of Western Europe, there were rapid developments in literature, law, the arts, architecture and religion. (The period is sometimes called the Carolingian Renaissance.) All this new scholarship needed new, more rigorous terms, and the scholars turned to Latin to coin new words. Over the preceding centuries, the latin words fragilem (fragile), frater (brother) and proxima (near) had drifted into the French words that would become today’s frêle, frère, and proche. In the Carolingian Renaissance, though, French scholars reached back to Latin to coin more formal words like fragile, or to fill in other parts of speech like fraternel (the adjective ‘brotherly’) or proximité (the noun ‘proximity’ or ‘nearness’). French today is full of pairs like these: a noun likepèrewhich has evolved from the Latin pater over the long centuries since Caesar’s invasion is accompanied by the adjective paternel, coined from a return to the Latin from hundreds of years later . Some other double borrowings from Latin you’ll come across are vide and vacuité (empty and emptiness, both from Latin vacuus), entier and intégrité(whole and wholeness, from Latin integer), aigu and acuité (sharp and sharpness, from Latin acutus), even hôtel and hôpital (both from Latin hospitalis), along with many others. Of course, a similar process happened in English, where we often have words of Anglo-Saxon origin (king), Norman French origin (royal), and Latin origin (regal) rubbing up alongside one another, and becoming more formal the closer we get to Latin.
So that’s Gaulish and Latin as the roots of French. There’s one further important influence to come, though, which slots in between the two Latin waves of Caesar and Charlemagne. The last one, which I’ll tell you about in a future post, is a people who not only left their mark on the French language, but also gave their name to it, as well as to the people who speak it and the country they live in. Our last French root will be the Franks.
Today, we have a short piece of bilingual theatre for you:
LA LICORNE ET L’ÉCREVISSE
AN ETYMOLOGICAL DRAMA IN THREE ACTS
ACT ONE
A long time ago, in a castle in England. GUINEVERE, a damsel, is embroidering a needlepoint picture of a horse with a horn sticking out of its forehead.
Enter BISCLAVRET, a French knight on holiday, and ISEUT, his lady-friend.
BISCLAVRET (to Guinevere, trying out his best English): Is very nice! What is called?
GUINEVERE (without looking up): ‘Unicorn’.
BISCLAVRET: Excusing me, once again, how you say name?
GUINEVERE (with limited patience): Unicorn.
ISEUT (to Bisclavret): Qu’est-ce qu’elle a dit, l’anglaise?
BISCLAVRET : Elle dit que c’est uneicorne.
ISEUT : Ah, bon ?
ACT TWO
A château, somewhere in France. ISEUT is busy weaving a tapestry based on a new design she saw on a recent trip to England.
Enter BRENGAINE, her maid.
BRENGAINE: Que c’est beau, madame! En fait, c’est quoi le cheval avec la corne au front?
ISEUT : L’icorne.
BRENGAINE : Ah, ça s’appelle donc une licorne ! Je vais apprendre ce mot à tous mes amis !
OK, so it may not have happened precisely in that way. In fact, the route taken from the Latin unicornis to the French licorne more likely travels via the Italian alicorno. Either way, though, the evolution of the French word really does come through this kind of successive mishearings, adding and subtracting letters at the beginning of the word and then crystalizing the mistake into the accepted form of the word.
Words invented by mistake like this are surprisingly common, especially when two languages are in contact and the speakers of one language are not always entirely clear what the speakers of the other one are on about. Famously, there are place names, such as Yucatán in Mexico, which were diligently recorded by European explorers as the local name for the area, but which apparently mean ‘What?’ or ‘What are you saying?’ in the local language. With English and French, misunderstandings have happened in both directions between the two languages…
ACT THREE
GUINEVERE and her friend MORGAN LE FAY are visiting ISEUT in her château. The three chums are eating crisps*and paddling in the moat.
MORGAN LE FAY (suddenly): Ugh! There are horrible things scuttling about under the water! Ow! One of them has pinched my toe! Iseut, ma chérie, comment s’appelle cette bête?
ISEUT (indistinctly, through a mouthful of crisps): L’écrevisse.
MORGAN LE FAY: Elles s’appellent les créviches?
ISEUT (already bored and not really listening): Oui, c’est ça.
GUINEVERE: What did she say it was? A cray-fish?
MORGAN LE FAY: Yeah, something like that.
GUINEVERE: Funny, looks more like a lobster to me.
*In pre-Columbian Europe, crisps were made out of thinly sliced fried turnips.
Again, a certain amount of dramatic licence is involved in this reconstruction. Strictly speaking, both the modern French écrevisse and the English crayfish are descended from the Old French word, crevice. But the fish of crayfish most definitely arises from a corruption of the sound of that last syllable,‘veece’ in the French word, which someone at some point misheard as ‘fish’. And that, dear reader, is how this little fellow…
…who is clearly not a fish at all, came to be known in English as a crayfish.
As you probably know, Sir Terry Pratchett, beloved author of the Discworld novels, died on Thursday. In France — yes, he was beloved by the French as well — his death was reported by Libération as follows:
Peut-être la mort s’est-elle approchée et lui a dit «ENFIN, MONSIEUR TERRY, NOUS DEVONS CHEMINER ENSEMBLE». Car c’est ainsi, en lettres capitales, que parle la Mort, personnage récurrent de l’œuvre immense de Terry Pratchett, décédé aujourd’hui à l’âge de 66 ans.
Perhaps death approached and said to him, AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER. That’s how Death speaks, in capital letters. Death is a recurring character in the immense series of novels written by Terry Pratchett, who died today at the age of sixty-six.
In the comments below the online version of the article are the same expressions of sadness that have accompanied every mention of Pratchett’s death on this side of the Channel. But not all of them. The first comment is cross, as are one or two of the others. And they are cross about grammar.
Sérieusement Libé : peut-être également la mort s’est-IL approché de lui. Car pour Sir Pratchett la Mort est un mâle, un mal nécessaire.
And again:
Il fallait écrire : Peut-être la mort s’est-il approché et lui a dit «ENFIN, MONSIEUR TERRY, NOUS DEVONS CHEMINER ENSEMBLE»
What they are annoyed about is the use of the feminine pronoun, elle in the original article to refer to Death.
What’s going on? Well, la mort in French is a feminine noun, so the correct pronoun to refer to it should be elle, as in this line by the Romantic writer, Chateaubriand:
La mort est belle; elle est notre amie.
In Discworld, however, Death is most definitely male. He’s a guy with a skull face and a big scythe who rides around on a pale horse called Binky, ushering souls into the next life. Pratchett’s creation unintentionally trespasses on one of the most fraught areas of the French language: the question of what to do when the grammatical system of masculine and feminine nouns comes into conflict with the real-world existence of male and female people (as well as male and female animals, supernatural entities or symbolic personifications).
In all such cases, as Libé failed to realize, the pronoun is determined by the actual gender of the person, not by the grammatical gender of the noun.
So, for example, une star/une vedette (a movie star) and une sentinelle(a sentinel) are feminine nouns that can refer to men:
La sentinelle s’est assoupie. Il n’avait pas bien dormila nuit précédente.
Gaspard Ulliel est une star francaise. Les anglais le connaissent surtout pour des publicités d’une marque d’après-rasage, dans lesquelles il dit: “I am nert going to be ze person I am expected to be any more.”
Feminine nouns that can apply to men are rare. (Apart from la personne, those are the only two I can think of right now.) Masculine nouns that can apply to women are far more common, and include many job titles and other roles in life, for instance:
un architecte – architect
un juge – judge
un médecin – doctor
un professeur – teacher
un témoin – witness
The same rule applies as above, so:
Mon professeur de français s’appelle Mme Vergnaud. Elle est très intelligente.
This rule, however, has turned into a feminist issue, with many women objecting to being referred to in the masculine, and with new feminine alternatives being coined, such as une avocate for a female lawyer, or une écrivaine for a woman writer. Sometimes it’s simply the article that’s at issue, as with the ongoing debate as to whether it’s acceptable to continue to refer to women government ministers as madame le ministre, or if madame la ministre is more appropriate. Here is a nice video of a male politician calling his female colleagues ‘madame le ministre’, and ‘madame le président‘ to their evident displeasure, and getting very much owned in response when they refer to him as ‘monsieur la députée’:
Libération, at least, managed to sort itself out, when, a little later the same day, they published a proper article on Pratchett. Not only do they get Death’s gender right, they also add a little explanation as to who he is and what he does:
A la toute fin, la Mort, avec sa faux et son long manteau noir, vient tous nous chercher. Il (car, il a beau s’appeler «La Mort», c’est un homme, si vous ne le saviez pas) ne voulait pas forcément que tout cela soit terminé. Il n’y a pas d’intérêt particulier, c’est simplement son travail. Jeudi, Il est venu chercher, peut-être à regret, l’un de ses plus grands amis : Terry Pratchett.
At the very end, Death, with his scythe and his long black cloak, comes for us all. He (for, even if he’s called ‘La Mort’, he’s a man, in case you didn’t know), didn’t necessarily want it all to end. He doesn’t have any particular axe to grind, it’s just his job. On Thursday, he came, perhaps unwillingly, for one of his greatest friends: Terry Pratchett.
P.S. Before I saw the Pratchett grammar nerds, I was planning to use this post to urge you to go and see Suite française, a rare chance to see some French literature on the big screen (albeit an English-language Hollywood adaptation of some French literature, but we take what we can get). I was also going to tell you the story of how Suite française came to be published, which is if anything a more extraordinary story than Suite française itself. I’ll save it for the DVD, but in the meantime, here’s the trailer:
P.P.S. That first comment from the grammar nerd I quoted, the one that began, Sérieusement Libé, also contained an untranslatable pun, which the commenter no doubt thought was very clever. Did you spot it?
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s legacy to the French language may not be as useful an addition to your everyday vocabulary as that provided by Eugène Poubelle, but it’s perhaps more distinctively French. As well as the name for the execution device itself (la guillotine), Guillotin has also supplied us with a verb, (guillotiner, to guillotine), two further nouns (le guillotineur/la guillotineuse, who does the guillotining, and the rather less fortunate le guillotiné/la guillotinée at the business end of the device), plus, the excellent term, lafenêtre à guillotine, which sounds very much more architecturally exciting than the English sash window. Note that, like la Bastille (and unlike, say, la ville), the double-l of Guillotin and guillotine has a y-sound rather than an l-sound in French (and apparently also commonly in American English – it’s only the British that always get it wrong).
Here are three things that many people can tell you about Joseph-Ignace Guillotin:
1. He was keen on executing people.
2. He invented the guillotine.
3. He ended up getting executed himself by the device he invented.
Here, on the other hand, are three facts about Joseph-Ignace Guillotin that are actually true:
1. He was strongly opposed to the death penalty.
2. He didn’t invent the guillotine.
3. He died of natural causes in 1814.
Guillotin considered the death penalty barbarous, and was particularly sickened by the suffering inflicted by botched executions, and by the double standards that afforded more humane forms of execution to the aristocracy than to the common people.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, abolition of the death penalty was most definitely not on the cards, but as an alternative measure, and a step in the right direction, he proposed to the National Assembly the following legal reform:
“Les délits du même genre seront punis du même genre de supplice, quels que soient le rang et l’état du coupable; dans tous les cas où la loi prononcera la peine de mort, le supplice sera le même (décapitation), et l’exécution se fera par un simple mécanisme.”
Crimes if the same type will be punished with the same type of penalty, regardless of the rank and estate of the guilty party: in every case where the death penalty is given out, the method will be the same (decapitation), and the execution will be carried out by simple mechanical means.
The motion was accepted, and the Assembly set about finding itself an inventor to come up a device that would fit the bill. The credit for the design and construction of the prototype guillotine goes to the trio of Jean Laquiante, Tobias Schmidt and Antoine Louis (for a short while, it seemed possible that the machine might become known as a ‘Louison’). Guillotin’s name attached to the machine as the legislator who proposed that something should be done, not as the man who created the actual solution to the problem. In fact, the naming of the device after him proved an enduring embarrassment to Guillotin and his family, so much so that the family later petitioned the government to rename the machine, and, when this was rejected, changed their own surname to avoid the association.
The story that Guillotin ended up guillotined himself is entirely mythical. There was in fact a certain Dr J. M. V. Guillotin from Lyon (no relation) who met that fate, and it’s also true that Joseph-Ignace fell foul of the Revolutionary authorities and was imprisoned for a short time during the Terror. From these two facts the myth seems to have arisen, and as usual, the truth has trouble getting in the way of a good story.
Lastly, guillotine is not the French word for that machine your school has for cutting multiple sheets of paper with very straight lines. The French call that un massicot. And yes, it’s because it was invented by a certain M. Massiquot.
There are seven billion people on the planet. Fewer than four hundred million of them speak English as their first language. Five billion of them don’t speak English at all. If you want to talk to them, you’re going to have to learn a foreign language. Even with the ones that do speak English, you’re not going to get very far if you know nothing of their culture, and can’t understand anything they say to each other.
How does French measure up against these other choices? Well, according to the French government, there are more than 220 million French speakers in the world, spread across five continents and 77 countries with French as an official language. It is the second most widely learned foreign language after English, and the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. French is also the only language, alongside English, that is taught in every country in the world. France operates the biggest international network of cultural institutes, which run French-language courses for close on a million learners.
The majority of French-speakers live outside Europe (which has approximately 87.5 million French speakers).
There are:
16.8 million French speakers in the Americas and the Caribbean (notably in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Quebec and French Guyana),
2.6 million speakers in Asia and Oceania (particularly in the former colonies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia),
33.6 million in North Africa and the Middle East (especially the ‘Maghreb’ countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and Lebanon and Syria in the Middle East),
and 79.1 million speakers in sub-Saharan Africa (including Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mozambique, Niger, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Togo, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, and several others.)
French is very much a global language of the twenty-first century, and studying it at university opens doors that lead far beyond our nearest European neighbour.
A blog for students and teachers of Years 11 to 13, and anyone else with an interest in Modern Foreign Languages and Cultures, written by the staff and students of Oxford University. Updated every Wednesday!
Data Protection: Like most websites, this site collects some user data in order to function properly.
In order to use this site we need you to consent to this by clicking I agree. I AcceptTell Me More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
