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

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

#251

Post by jeromegv »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #7
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…

Well, yes, except that this is the language (and its rules) that is taught as school.

Is that really? I know in Quebec it’s the government that decides what is thought in school and the French they use is definitely diverging from outdated académie française. Not sure about France

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

#252

Post by Raidion »

adev_ wrote: post #192
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…

> 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. I think this is currently pretty typical in any language. In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step. I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremel…

I was (at one point) fairly conversational in French by US standards (was taking 300 level French conversation classes).

Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.

It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.

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

#253

Post by kergonath »

junofan wrote: post #234
lukev wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are are literally describing a "lingua franca" here. And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca"). The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...

What evidence are you looking for? No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. It’s got a phonetic alphabet. It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.

> No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages.

Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.

Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.

> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.

And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.

> It’s got a phonetic alphabet

What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.

> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.

It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.

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

#254

Post by marcus_holmes »

adev_ wrote: post #192
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…

> 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. I think this is currently pretty typical in any language. In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step. I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremel…

In Germany they were happy to see me trying, but almost universally couldn't understand any of my garbled sentences. I put it down to German being one of those languages where the order of words matters less and conjugation matters more for inferring context (and context is key to making any sense). Because I mis-conjugated a lot, it came across as garbled nonsense.

I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.

And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.

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

#255

Post by kergonath »

Veuxdo wrote: post #216
Dalewyn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Globish English" Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good. *Ahem* Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal . Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages l…

> This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas. Source? On it's face this doesn't sound plausible...

It sounds like someone who’s never learnt any other language and is high on freedom propaganda. It’s more than not plausible, it’s laughable.

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

#256

Post by thaumasiotes »

qwytw wrote: post #121
Koshkin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly true. To quote Wikipedia, Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.

> to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce. Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects, coincidentally places where most of those merchants who introduced that language came from).

> Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects

So, very closely related to French?

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

#257

Post by kergonath »

Naijoko wrote: post #238
Dalewyn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Globish English" Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good. *Ahem* Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal . Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages l…

many languages have this feature. For example Russian or German. You can put in the words, with most words missing, in any order and somehow someone will get it. France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.

Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.

Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.

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

#258

Post by com »

nicoburns wrote: post #94
Swizec wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas. But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker. That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in US…

> The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave. I think Europe partly just has different preferences around service. We tend to find American servers annoyingly fake, and to be constantly needlessly interrupting us to ask if we need anything. And of course, one should also take into account the experience of being a server.

Having had a date night in Manhattan in a fairly expensive and good restaurant, some time during the first few courses, we had to have a few words with the maître d’ - just to get the wait staff to stop bugging us if we wanted ketchup or whatever - and to observe the language of cutlery as to when we were finished a course. Once explained how we’d like it, we got top-notch European style discreet service and a far less interrupted conversation. A gentle twist of the head got the wine waiter refilling our glasses rather than butting in. It’s possible!

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

#259

Post by chimeracoder »

kergonath wrote: post #253
junofan wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence are you looking for? No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. It’s got a phonetic alphabet. It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.

> No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot? > You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is. > There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese s…

> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

Many languages have been wiped out by genocides, and wiping out a language is a common explicit tactic in ethnic cleansings.

English has never been the source of a serious campaign of this regard, though.

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

#260

Post by DeathArrow »

jimmaswell wrote: post #92
Swizec wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas. But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker. That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in US…

Europe as a whole has always come off as unpleasant to visit as an American, from what I've read online such as this thread. In no American city I've been to do you have to be so vigilant for pickpockets as you apparently do in European cities, and virtually no one in America will complain about your accent or grammar. We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it;…

Nobody forces you to visit Europe. I don't want to visit USA, so I don't go there to complain about what I dislike.
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