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How good is your French accent?

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Re: How good is your French accent?

#151

Post by reirob »

melvinmt wrote: post #74
brian_cloutier wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkish also did, the word was originally brought into Turkish as "Kompüter". But that didn't sound nearly turkish enough, so it was replaced with Bilgisayar, or "knowledge counter". Turkey has an official government body which regulates the Turkish language and naturalizes foreign loan words. It used to be much more active but people generally still listen to it, why copy the sounds of a foreign word when you can co…

And, don't forget "Yüz Kitap".

What does Yüz Kitap mean?

Re: How good is your French accent?

#152

Post by programLyrique »

jpgauthier wrote: post #135
Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there's tons of little anglicisms in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisme#Liste_d.27anglicism...

Anglicisms in French is actually a funny subject. According to different sources, roughly 45% of all English words have a French origin. Thus, there's a lot of overlap between English and French. Some words, such as camping, parking and flirting are considered anglicisms in French, but they are actually words from the Old French that did a full round-trip from French to English to French.

Although the stems are ok and related to other French words (camping -> camp, campement, camper ; parking -> parc, parquer ; flirting conter fleurette), I think what can shock the purists is this ending is -ing which does not sound French at all and is not grammatically French.

Re: How good is your French accent?

#153

Post by apricot »

teekert wrote: post #31
joeblau wrote: post #27

Funny Story: I was traveling from Portugal back to the U.S. through Charles de Gaulle Airport and my Dad gave me 4 Euros. I went to this little bakery and the man behind the counter asked me what I wanted in French. I mustered up as much throat as I possibly could and said croissant which was apparently good enough for him to go off on this long answer to what I ordered. I looked at him blankly and said "Sorry man, t…

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

The French verb "épisser" is an old verb that means "to splice", and actually comes from middle Dutch "splissen". Épissage is just the noun form of it. It's as natural for French speakers to use "épissage" in the context of RNA splicing as it is for English speakers to use "splicing". Why would they borrow a word from English when they already have a perfectly good one?

Re: How good is your French accent?

#154

Post by gheeohm »

teekert wrote: post #31
joeblau wrote: post #27

Funny Story: I was traveling from Portugal back to the U.S. through Charles de Gaulle Airport and my Dad gave me 4 Euros. I went to this little bakery and the man behind the counter asked me what I wanted in French. I mustered up as much throat as I possibly could and said croissant which was apparently good enough for him to go off on this long answer to what I ordered. I looked at him blankly and said "Sorry man, t…

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

As someone who has spent half of their life in France and the other half in North America, I would disagree. I return every 2 years or so to visit family, and am always appalled by the amount of English words that weasel their way into the language.

Marketers (in France and many other countries) have realized that the American legacy of progress and technology is still cool and edgy, and helps sell pretty much anything.

It honestly irritates me, as 95% of those intruder words are not only often misused in their context, but have perfect etymologically correct translations in French.

Un steak is spelled the same but pronounced "steck". The Hangover movie was literally called "Bad Trip" in France, instead of "La gueule de bois". "Shopping" is the go-to word to describe purchasing goods, even though "achat" is a perfectly valid word.

I could go on and on: un smartphone, la freebox (router), un smoking (a tuxedo), un string (a thong), wi-fi (this one is worldwide), chewing gum, businessman, boycott, startup, warning...

Re: How good is your French accent?

#155

Post by reirob »

I was disappointed!

Reading through the comments, before loading the page itself, I got really interested. Finally I clicked on the page just to find out that it is for Apple devices only. Quelle discrimination in the age of HTML5! If I only had a button to down-vote!

Re: How good is your French accent?

#156

Post by ern »

webreac wrote: post #125
notalaser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordinateur was not invented when computers came to the market. It was coined in its modern sense of computing machine , not by Proud French People Who Liked Their Language but by IBM France, because they felt that "calculateur" (French for -- whaddya know! -- "something that computes", a literal equivalent for "computer") was too restrictive. In the 1950s, when that happened, "ordinateur" had been in use for a very l…

We have also the word "informatique" which is not exactly computer science nor software engineering.

There is also Informatics in English (what BAs, System Analysts and Software Project Managers study in some parts of the world), but I'm not sure how it maps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics

Re: How good is your French accent?

#157

Post by Shebanator »

jmnicolas wrote: post #141
yodsanklai wrote: post #126

Lot of stereotypes in the comments. I'm little disappointed to read that on HN. Some commenters tell they had bad experiences in France. In my opinion, it's a case of confirmation bias and lack of understanding of cultural differences. For many reasons, you can't expect the same types of interactions with a waiter in Paris and one in NYC or Tokyo. I think people traveling to foreign countries should be open-minded an…

I'm French too and if you read more of the comments you will find more positive things about us. By the way, if they form an opinion on France by how they are treated by parisiens I can understand they don't appreciate the experience. We're much friendlier in province ;-)

I don't speak French, but I've never had a problem with people being rude to me, in Paris or elsewhere in France. I have witnessed rude responses to other tourists, though, and it was always because the tourists themselves were rude and/or excessively informal first. Politeness will take you very far.

Re: How good is your French accent?

#159

Post by apricot »

melvinmt wrote: post #70
teekert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

Every time I meet a French person my go-to sentence to show off my French is: "à quelle heure le garage est fermé?", only to be met with the same blank stare. I then ask if I pronounced it wrong and they say (in English): "no I understand, but which garage do you mean?".

Your sentence is a bit ungrammatical. It would be more natural to say "À quelle heure le garage ferme-t-il?" if you mean "when does the garage close?" (expecting a precise time: it closes at 9PM), or "Quand le garage est-il fermé?", if you mean "when is the garage closed"? (expecting an interval: it's closed from 9PM until 10AM the next day).
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