French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini would like to send a copy of his new book, The English Language Doesn’t Exist: It’s Badly Pronounced French, to King Charles III.
Rather than aiming to make the monarch sputter into his morning tea, “it’s a book written from a humorous perspective. It’s deliberately in bad faith, arrogant, chauvinistic and so on,” Cerquiglini said.
Beneath the provocative title and humor, the prominent academic hopes to convey the cross-Channel linguistic tangle since the Norman conquest of 1066 — and how ridiculous French resistance to “anglicisms” can be.
Photo: AFP
“You can also see my book as an homage to the English language, which has been able to adopt so many words ... Viking, Danish, French, it’s astonishing,” Cerquiglini said.
Norman French’s use by the new colonial aristocracy endowed English with words that at first glance might look homegrown, such as “cabbage,” “lure” or “wage,” in the 150 years after William the Conqueror took the throne.
However, Cerquiglini is most interested in the 13th and 14th centuries, when French — by then a second language used in trade, administration and law — bled freely into English because “a job, fortunes in land or cash, upholding a contract, liberty or even one’s life, could depend on mastering” the tongue.
Half of English’s borrowings from French took place from 1260 to 1400, producing words such as “bachelor,” from the old French word “bachelier,” meaning a young noble not yet a knight.
“Travel” is related to the modern French word for labor, “travail,” while “clock” stems from the French “cloche,” a bell struck to sound the hours before mechanical timepieces were invented.
By the time William Shakespeare came to write his plays in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, about “40 percent of the 15,000 words in his works are of French origin,” Cerquiglini said.
Sometimes French alternatives can go too far, such as in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, where some food stands offer a “chien chaud” — a very literal translation of “hot dog,” he said.
“That doesn’t whet my appetite. I have no desire to buy a ‘chien chaud,’ that’s for sure,” he said.
These days the place of Anglo-Saxon words in modern French can stir defensiveness in Paris, often from the Academie Francaise, charged since 1635 with preserving the language in its “pure” form.
“Language in France is official, of the state, national, and so of course we have an academy” whose members enjoy “a ridiculous outfit, a sword, a palace by the Seine” river in Paris, Cerquiglini said.
In the past few years, the academy has railed against imports related to COVID-19, such as “cluster” or “testing,” as well as technology terms like “big data.”
The academy has scored some worthwhile wins, such as convincing the French-speaking world to use the native-sounding “logiciel” instead of the once-omnipresent “software,” Cerquiglini said.
However, “this isn’t an invasion. These are French words that have gone for training in England and that are coming back to us,” he said.
The rich cross-pollination between English and French is an example for the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the loose modern association of French-speaking nations, he said.
For example, Madagascar uses French as a second language in much the same way as England did 800 years ago, he said.
The situation there or in places like the US state of Louisiana, where French is still spoken by many as a second language, could prove as fertile as the language’s sojourn in Britain, Cerquiglini said.
He also hopes that English survives the trend in the past few decades toward a simplified form spoken around the world — sniffily described as “Globish” by French detractors.
Cerquiglini places high hopes in automatic translation, which could allow local languages to be preserved, while enabling free communication.
“I spent 30 years of my career mocking automatic translation ... because it was terrible,” he said. “Now it’s stupefying.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate