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How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

nytimes.com

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Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#171

Post by fknorangesite »

pelorat wrote: post #42
edwcross wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge. They stopped reforming the language almost two hundred years ago and now they can only hope that people will keep paying them attention. But the language will keep evolving and drifting, and they will keep resisting, until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness…

> They stopped reforming the language That's the whole point of their existence...

Exactly. Hence

> people with zero or little linguistic knowledge.

They are tilting at windmills.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#172

Post by maest »

jimmaswell wrote: post #141
manmal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Europe and have never been stolen from, and I‘ve been on plenty vacations abroad. And in many places you do get free tap water (eg London or Vienna) with food. IDK why you would care about the price of tap water though since that’s probably 0,1% of your traveling budget for a city trip. Taxes are country specific, you‘ll find some EU countries with lower taxation than your average US state, eg Bulgaria. Bei…

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-... Jail time was on the table in this instance I had in mind.

The conviction rates for illegal tweets in Europe are much lower than, say, gun murder rates in the US.

That is, what you're saying is even more ridiculous than an European refusing to go to the US for fear of getting shot in the streets.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#173

Post by [deleted] »

dudul wrote: post #17
grecy wrote: post #11

Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…

French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…

[deleted]

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#174

Post by WalterBright »

dudul wrote: post #17
grecy wrote: post #11

Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…

French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…

> it's probably kind of the same in English

"Come out with your hands up, or I'll sh*t!"

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#176

Post by fknorangesite »

bsaul wrote: post #128
cassepipe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that's one of the worst thing in French : The gap between written and spoken is so much bigger than say spanish which I think makes it hard for foreigners.

i'd say the problem is mainly the inability of young generation to be able to write and speak proper french. Speaking slang is fun and everybody's been doing it forever. However being only able to speak slang is a problem.

Gosh I know, right? Kids these days!

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#178

Post by csdvrx »

thriftwy wrote: post #133
sesm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gems in Russian rap? As a native speaker I’m genuinely surprised

For all the critique that can be, Oxxxymiron is, like, the last big name in Russian music.

Лига Опасного Интернета was nice but Morgenshtern caught my eye again with ЧЕРНЫЙ РУССКИЙ (ПОЙДЕТ was boring)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK7CIj-_uBk

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#179

Post by TacticalCoder »

thriftwy wrote: post #164
TacticalCoder wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then we have at least half a century of Russia being abused that way... Ah yup... Because Stalin who wanted to execute 30 000 Nazis officer to "give an example" was a saint? (for the record it's Churchill who opposed to that) And the attitude of the USSR during the cold war was a respectable one? As in: people in eastern germany were happy to live on that side of the Berlin wall and not in western germany instead?…

[flagged]

> Meanwhile, France did...

Where did I talk about France? I was commenting on your comment about movies portaying Russia has being "propaganda".

> The rest of stuff is the same level of pathetic. Eastern Germans complaining they didn't get access to white privilege, that they deserve by birthright, for almost forty years is sure tragic.

What does "white privilege" have to do with anything in post-WWII Europe?

Are you really going down that route? Germany (both western and eastern) had been levelled to ground during WWII, with many german civilians killed. Wanna talk about their "white privileges"? You wanna talk about the "white privilege" of my grandfather who spent five years in a prison in germany during WWII or the "white privilege" of all the countries in Europe who were living under the dictature of nazi germany?

Wanna talk about the "white privilege" of the tens of thousands of US soldiers who died to free Europe?

Maybe you wanna talk too about the "jewish privilege" during WWII too?

EDIT: oh... apparently you're russian or you live in Russia. So you're defending the USSR and you're not commenting on the invasion of Ukraine. Makes sense now.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#180

Post by yamrzou »

pooper wrote: post #163
greatgib wrote: post #103

[flagged]

This video from real life lore just came out yesterday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpWb3MTV9bg This is not about Africa but rather Haiti but I think the point stands. Why can't France give Haiti USD 21B? Or even USD 100B. It doesn't have to be in one lump sum. Would that bankrupt France? When I look up France GDP, I see 2.958 trillion USD (2021). Actually do some good in the world for once. (And make some money f…

Wikipedia article for those who want to read about it: Haiti Independence Debt — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt
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