A feast of narrative imagination and directorial invention!The University of Oxford’s fourth French film essay competitionwas once more opened up to younger students (from year 7 onwards) and offered entrants the chance to write, direct and submit their own mini-film. An amazing total of 178 entries were received, from almost 50 schools.
The judges were deeply impressed by the range and richness of responses to the four set films: Le Petit Nicolas and Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (years 7-11) and Dans la maison and De Rouille et d’os (years 12-13). Entrants re-wrote the closing chapter, picking up narrative threads left hanging by each film’s ambiguous ending. So rich were the responses that, in addition to the winner and runner-up in each category, a selection of further entries were offered special and higher commendations. The winners in each age group wereJoe Beadle (Years 7-11)and Jessica Binks (Years 12-13). The winners in the new ‘Film’ category were Class 7H of Bartholomew School. Further details are available at:
Below are brief reports from the judges about the entries for each film.
Le Petit Nicolas
Rewritings (and filmed versions) of the end of Petit Nicolas offered a rich tonal and emotional range, from the gentle and tender – where the united family lives happily ever after – to the sudden and shocking – where the jealous Nicolas takes sibling rivalry to its murderous limit. The strongest entries gave emotional depth and richness to each of the wide cast of characters, including Nicolas’s friends and family, while retaining the rapid, quick-witted patter of the original. The judges were impressed throughout by the close attention entrants gave to all these aspects of the film, and by the sheer energy and enthusiasm invested in all the entries.
Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis
There was a pleasingly large number of responses to this very successful French movie. The vanished wife gave entrants scope to take the film in all kinds of unexpected directions; an opportunity they eagerly seized. Some movingly melancholic, even tragic, entries impressed the judges enormously in their emotional maturity. Others retained the sweetly joyous tone of the original. Scottish entries often made wittily knowing allusions to the “North” of the Ch’tis as wet, cold but ultimately welcoming. While entrants’ level of French was not taken into account when deciding the winners, the judges often noted in passing an encouragingly good grasp of the language.
Dans la maison
Our older entrants responded very well to this film, which deals expressly with the problem of writing the ending of a story. There were twists and turns as inventive as those of the film itself, and some sensitive responses to the original film’s cold, tense tone and analysis of status anxiety, snobbism and sexual jealousy. There were some gripping retellings in English and in French, strengthened by subtle, incisive description, good narrative pacing and intelligent plotting, where just enough information was released at just the right time to keep the reader guessing. De rouille et d’os
While relatively few entrants wrote on this film, the entries we did receive were extremely accomplished. Entries here were characterized by their tendency to formal experimentation: there were more rewritings in verse for this film than the others, in English and in French. The judges were impressed especially by entrants’ ability to express themselves well given the constraints of versification, often awarding Special Commendations in recognition of this.
Another competition is planned for next year. We hope you’ll consider entering.
Montmartre is a legendary part of Paris – a maze of twisting cobbled streets, trees, squares, that leaves you breathless, and not just from the steep climb.
Tucked away discreetly in a side street behind the Sacré-Coeur, the Musée de Montmartre keeps the memory of the area’s heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alive. Set in beautiful gardens overlooking the Montmartre vineyards, the museum’s collections are displayed in the house of artist Suzanne Valadon and her son Maurice Utrillo, a building which played host to the most dynamic and innovative artists, painters, and composers of the day. A zinc-topped bar counter, a battered piano with yellowed keys, photographs, paintings, and sketches all conjure up a time when Montmartre was the centre of an extraordinary creative ferment, and a lodestone for artists from across Europe, who would arrive with no money and no French, confident of a generous Montmartrean welcome, with kindness and credit freely given.
Alongside the Moulin Rouge, two iconic cabarets loom large in the museum’s collections: the Lapin Agile and the Chat Noir. Lithe, mischievous, and living by their wits, the nimble rabbit and black cat which form the Montmartre menagerie perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the area. Opened in 1855, the Lapin Agile still offers a nightly dinner and cabaret show 160 years later, although the atmosphere is somewhat different. In the late 19th century, you would step into a spicy fug of tobacco smoke and sweat, the aniseed burn of absinthe hitting the back of your throat. Ears ringing with the plaintive wheeze and rasp of an accordion, and the sound of bawdy, full-throated laughter, you would take a seat at one of the sticky tables, scored with the initials of your predecessors. You never knew who you’d be rubbing shoulders with: wealthy Parisians slumming it for a night, artists’ models, dancers, political radicals, ladies of the night, local eccentrics of every stripe, penniless poets with inkstained fingers or hungry artists still spattered with paint, come from unheated attics and studios to warm themselves with drink and friendship, and to listen to the chansons réalistes of poets such as Aristide Bruant. As their name suggests, these were songs which told the truth about Paris and the seamy underbelly of its nightlife, in a distinctive slang. They were tales of poverty, prostitution, violence, heartbreak, hopeless love, but also bawdy, innuendo-laden or just downright filthy sing-a-longs. They’re emblematic of gouaille – a uniquely Parisian trait, a blend of bolshy straight-talking, cheek, and bravado, with an underlying hint of vulnerability. It’s tempting to sanitize or romanticize the sordid reality of life in Montmartre, but these songs express the extremes of existence there – all human emotions and situations, from joy to misery, expressed with equal intensity.
Montmartre has retained its strong sense of identity: its inhabitants are still defiant outsiders and unrepentant eccentrics, helping each other out and fighting to preserve their traditions. Looking down from the gardens of the museum and imagining summer evenings heavy with the smell of ripening grapes and raucous with the din of the Lapin Agile, it’s easy to fool yourself into hearing the clack and swoosh of the windmills which used to dot the Montmartre hillside – and feeling the breeze of anarchy.
And if you’re interested…
… here’s a flavour of Montmartre’s cultural output during its heyday.
Art
With their exuberant colours, effervescent energy, and startling shapes, these are definitely worth a look:
A larger than life figure, Guillaume Apollinaire was an experimental poet and the father of Surrealism. In his collections Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), he uses words which are simple individually, but puts them together in surprising combinations. He plays with the layout of his poems on the page to form verbal flowers or fireworks.
A particular favourite of mine is Le Pont Mirabeau (here in the original French, with English translations, and musical French versions).
Music
‘Milord’ – In this rambunctious number, Edith Piaf, the ‘Sparrow of Montmartre’, encourages a broken-hearted lover to drink and dance away his sorrows:
‘Rose Blanche (Rue St Vincent)’ – an iconic poet from the Lapin Agile, Aristide Bruant here sets his pen to tell of a woman’s tragic end at the hands of her gangster lover, on the Rue St Vincent in Montmartre (here in a rendition by variety star Yves Montand)
A modern take on the area, but which has an unmistakeably quirky Montmartrean charm. The director Jean-Pierre Jeunet lives in Montmartre and is a familiar face in its various restaurants and bars.
The Musée de Montmartre can be found at: 12 rue Cortot, 75018 Paris
Madeleine Chalmers
I’m a 3rd year French student at St John’s, currently on an Erasmus study exchange at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. I have been known to give the odd rendition of a chanson réaliste on my accordion.
I’ve often been asked why I chose to do a degree in French. My answer is, because it constantly surprises me. The novels, poems, and plays I read for my course at Oxford make me laugh, cry, and think. They might puzzle me occasionally, and always challenge me, but they never leave me indifferent.
Literature, which we read in the original French, forms the backbone of the French course at Oxford. This might sound absolutely terrifying, and not very appealing. Reading in French is a long hard slog, but if you stick with it, it will reward you in ways you couldn’t imagine. I read my first French novels at school with a dictionary balanced on my knees, impatiently deciphering every other word. It was tiring, frustrating, and extremely slow, but absolutely addictive. Reading in English, my eye would skip easily across the page. In French, it felt like I was having to fight for every word, and so, strangely, each word really seemed to matter.
I’ll always remember the rush of joy and pride I felt when I finished my first French book without a dictionary. All of a sudden, I felt as though I had gained access to a whole passionate countryful of new stories, feelings, and ideas – a country I no longer wanted to leave. Reading is an intensely personal experience. Your mind and your feelings come into contact with the mind and feelings of an author who may have lived and died centuries before you were born. He or she offers you his or her vulnerabilities, sense of humour, and ideas about the world – and they collide with yours. The more you read in French, the more fluent you become and the easier it gets, but I promise that you’ll never lose that original thrill of recognition, when, across time and language, an author’s message comes through loud and clear, and it feels as though they were speaking only for you.
A French degree is the experience of other voices and other perspectives. As such, it’s incredibly varied. ‘French literature’ at Oxford encompasses everything written in French – from the earliest Medieval writings to books published last year, from mainland France to French-speaking countries across the world. Options in film, philosophy, and art allow you to get to grips with French culture through approaches which you may not have studied before, while translation and linguistics will make you see language in a whole new light.
One of the distinctive features of a language degree is the year abroad (the 3rd year of the 4 year course). For me, it’s felt like a chance to bring everything together: the French language and culture I’ve studied at Oxford, and French language and culture as they are spoken and lived in France today. It’s the year when a country that has seemed foreign really becomes home.
I’ve always been fascinated by France at the turn of the twentieth century – a period when certain districts of Paris became hubs for innovation by bold new artists, writers, and all-round eccentrics. My year abroad has given me the chance to see exhibitions and museums which celebrate these revolutionaries, and I’ve been able to visit their old haunts and homes. These are moments when the literature, music, art, and atmosphere of a whole time and place slide into focus – and they make all those hours flicking through dictionaries worth the effort. Over the next few months of my year abroad, I’ll try to pinpoint some of those moments – the reasons why I love my degree. First stop (in next week’s post): Montmartre!
Madeleine Chalmers – I’m a 3rd year French student at St John’s, currently on an Erasmus study exchange at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
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.
When looking for an internship for your Year Abroad, definitely think outside the box and never be afraid to approach a company or organisation you might like to work for on the off chance they might be able to take you. As my time at Montaigne’s Château drew to a close last summer, my thoughts turned to the two month long Easter Vacation I would have from my German university. I knew I wanted to spend this in France but at that point, I was starting to doubt whether anywhere would take me for that amount of time.
However my fears were left unfounded and I quickly managed to secure the internship of my dreams. I mentioned to my boss at the château that I needed to find another placement and she knew that I’d spend much of my free time whilst I was there enjoying the books about Montaigne. One of my favourites focuses on the famous beams in Montaigne’s library, known for their Latin and Greek inscriptions. My boss then suggested that I contact Alain Legros, a frequent visitor to the château and the author of the book. So I quickly translated my CV into French and wrote a letter outlining my interests in 16th Century French literature, my future career plans, and my need for an internship. Within two days I had a reply. He couldn’t offer me anything himself, but he is an associate researcher at the CESR (Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance – the Centre for Renaissance Studies) attached to the University of Tours, so he passed my CV onto someone who could: Marie-Luce Demonet, a Professor of Renaissance French Literature and director of the BVH, the project on which I worked. Within three days, I had a positive response and everything was confirmed after a brief meeting in Oxford in September to discuss practicalities: I had a seven week internship in Digital Humanities in Tours!
But before I could get too excited, I had to find somewhere to stay. Finding accommodation in France can be tricky at the best of times due to the huge amount of bureaucracy, and for a two month stay, I didn’t fancy that. Admittedly I started panicking when the university accommodation website was incredibly unhelpful and looked at Tripadvisor on a whim. I managed to find a studio in the centre of Tours, a ten minute walk from where I would be working and which cost only a fraction more than the university accommodation. I could hardly believe my luck and spent eight wonderful weeks living an almost surreal grown-up existence in the city centre.
My daily life in Tours was similarly exciting. As an undergraduate who hopes to have a career in academia, I got the chance to experience life at a research centre. I worked on the Digital Humanities project MONLOE < http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Montaigne.asp> (MONtaigne à L’Œuvre), which aims to publish digital versions of the sixteenth century philosopher’s essays as well as the books which were once in his library or the sources of his essays. I spent most of my time learning how to edit transcripts and use TEI-XML coding, two transferable skills which were completely new for me, so it was a very intense and beneficial experience. I was trusted to work on a real project, the digitisation of this book, http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Consult/index.asp?numfiche=1136&url=/resrecherche.asp?ordre=titre-motclef=theologie%20naturelle-bvh=BVH-epistemon=Epistemon, which, after further editing and several control checks by other members of the team, will eventually appear online as part of the virtual library. It was very rewarding knowing that what I was doing was actually useful and part of a real project, something which can be rare in the world of internships. I also had the opportunity to go to conferences held at the CESR, looks at rare books in the reserve, use the extensive library, and meet professors working on the things which interest me. The other members of the team were friendly, welcoming, and easy to talk to – it’s always good to work in an environment where there are others who share your interests.
I worked five days a week from nine until six with an hour for lunch. On Fridays, we would go out for lunch as a team, but on the other days I would go and read by the Loire, try out the cafés around the centre, or browse the nearby shops: you can achieve a surprising amount in an hour. Staring at a computer screen all day and doing everything in French was quite tiring, so after work I often just spent the evening relaxing. When I had more energy, Tours was a great city to be in. The cinema, theatre, ice rink, swimming pool, and other attractions, were all within walking distance and every week the university holds events for people interested in languages, so it was easy to meet new people.
Located in the Centre region and in the Loire Valley, Tours was an ideal place for weekend excursions. With a Carte Jeune (the equivalent of a Young Person’s Railcard), I went to Paris three times, Versailles, Orléans, Angers, and also numerous chateaux all over the region, without ever paying more than fifteen euros for a train ticket. At times it felt like I really was in the Renaissance.
Overall, this internship was thoroughly enjoyable, opened my mind to the possibilities offered by an academic career, and had relatively few disadvantages. Obviously an interest in the literature of the French Renaissance was essential and, having spent so many of my waking hours editing 16th Century French, I now often find myself spelling like a Renaissance person, although this is easily rectified. This kind of internship might not be suitable for someone who would prefer to be with lots of people their own age. I enjoy spending time with people older than me, so being the youngest in the office and the centre itself didn’t phase me, but it might not be for you if this would bother you. If there is somewhere you would really like to work but they don’t seem to offer internships, I would always suggest sending that speculative letter…you never know where that might take you!
So, the thing is, the British Foreign Office has forgotten how to speak foreign languages. According to an alarming article in the Independent, which you can find here, our diplomats are now so desperately short of language skills that our government can’t even work out what’s going on in the rest of the world.
The UK Government was left in the dark while Russia annexed large parts of Ukraine because British diplomats can’t understand Russian, according to a scathing new report by MPs.
Language skills at the Foreign Office are said to have become so poor that officials were unable to adequately advise the Government on the unfolding annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
“British diplomacy towards Russia and elsewhere has suffered because of a loss of language skills, particularly in the Foreign Office,” Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow, told the House of Lords External Affairs Sub-Committee.
“There was quite a lot of complaint in Whitehall after the annexation of Crimea that the Foreign Office had not been able to give the sort of advice that was needed at the time. I think that is regrettable and it marks a change from when I was there.” The revelations came to light in a report by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, which has been scrutinising the Foreign Office’s performance.
The committee’s MPs found that only 27 per cent of Russian “speaker slots” at Britain’s foreign ministry were filled by someone who could speak the language to the specified level.
The figure across all languages was only 38 per cent, a fact the committee described as “alarming”.
The cross-party group of MPs found that cuts to the FCO’s budget meant the department was finding it difficult to retain the right level of expertise.
Further government cuts would “probably” mean a significant reduction in Britain’s world influence and a scaling back of its foreign policy ambitions, they concluded. “The cuts imposed on the FCO since 2010 have been severe and have gone beyond just trimming fat: capacity now appears to be being damaged,” the committee’s MPs wrote.
“If further cuts are imposed, the UK’s diplomatic imprint and influence would probably reduce, and the Government would need to roll back some of its foreign policy objectives.”
The committee’s report also said there were serious shortages of capable Arabic speakers at the Foreign Office – despite a long history of instability in the region.
“It is alarming that the strongest criticisms that we hear about FCO capability relate to regions where there is particular instability and where there is the greatest need for FCO expertise in order to inform policy-making,” they said.
If you fancy helping this country play a role on the world stage, rather than just sitting in the world audience eating popcorn as we are apparently doing at present, then you might like to consider a modern languages degree at Oxford. A degree in Russian, perhaps, available with an A-level, or starting entirely from scratch… Or one in Arabic, maybe. Or why not both? Future ambassadors, conflict negotiators, and James Bonds apply here.
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.
I’ve written a couple of posts in the past on the particular challenges faced by the poor French translator of the Harry Potter saga, dealing with J. K. Rowling’s wordplay, funny names and made-up magical terms. So I was interested to come across this article by the British translator, Sue Rose, who’s had almost precisely the opposite challenge: translating the French fantasy novels in the Oksa Pollock series into English.
Here’s an extract from the article, in which she talks about finding equivalents in English for the made-up French words in Oksa’s world:
It was a hugely enjoyable challenge to introduce English teenagers to Oksa Pollock, the loveable French heroine with incredible magic powers. Being a translator is like putting on Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility or wearing a layer of Oksa Pollock’s Invisibuls — you don’t want anyone to see you’re there. You need to stay out of sight so that the reader has no idea how much blood, sweat and tears have gone into the mix.
While trying to stay invisible, you also have to navigate what feels like a lengthy obstacle course! The first set of walls I had to clamber over was the names of the many adorable, quirky creatures that inhabit Oksa’s world. These were plays on words in French, which meant they couldn’t be left as they were because an English speaker wouldn’t get the joke. I’d take a long run up and launch myself at one of these walls, get half way up, then fall flat on my back. It was totally exhausting! Some of the names were really tough to beat! Here are a few examples to show how I finally overcame the obstacles they presented:
Lunatrix and Lunatrixa: the French—Foldingot and Foldingote—is a combination of “foldingue” (crazy) and “dingo” (nutcase). There are girl and boy Lunatrixes, which in the French is shown by the “e” ending for the girl, so whatever I came up with had to be able to be varied for male and female. We often add “ess” in English to a name to show they are female, as in Prince and Princess, but that didn’t work here. What I came up with was Lunatrix, which is a combination of loony (since they’re crazy little characters) and tricks (for their weird abilities and the tricks they always have up their sleeves). They also have very large, moon-like, eyes so the first part of the name sounds like “lunar”, which relates to the moon. It was then easy to add an “a” on the end to make the female form.
Croakette: the French—Grenette—combines “grenouille” (frog) and the suffix “ette” which refers to a small version of something in both French and English. I was very happy with “Croakette”, which combines “croak” (the sound a frog makes) with “ette”. I also liked the way it sounded like “croquette”, as in potato croquette.
Gargantuhen: the French—Gelinotte—refers to a type of hen of normal size, although the Gelinottes in the book are massive — six feet tall. I was delighted when I came up with Gargantuhen, which plays on the word Gargantuan (which means immense or gigantic and refers to the French author, Rabelais) and is combined here with hen.
That was only the first obstacle though. There were also the names of the amazing magical powers that Oksa and the other Runaways (who had been exiled from an incredible, invisible world somewhere within this world) could use as weapons or useful tools:
Volumiplus: the French—Chuchalotte—is based on the verb “chuchoter” which means to whisper. This power allows someone to hear the tiniest sounds clearly. What I came up with was a name that combined “volume” (which is the amount of sound) and “plus” (the idea of getting louder). Volumiplus also sounded like some of the other powers like Magnetus (which I left the same in French, as it was clear what it meant) and Alpinismus (“Varapus” in the French came from “la varappe”, which means rock-climbing. I used a combination of Alpinism, which means mountaineering in many European languages and refers to the mountain range of the Alps, with the same “us” ending).
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.
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!
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