I thought France has a law against using foreign words.
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How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
281–290 of 502 posts
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. And among those where data is available the number where the unarmed person wasn’t attacking the officer with their bare hands boils down to basically the cases you’ve seen in the news. I can think of exactly 2 foreign nationals who have been shot while unar…
The point being made was that worrying about going to jail for a tweet in Europe, or being pocketed, is dumb.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
French has a few Germanic loan words, but is most certainly not a Germanic language.
The Germanic vocabulary in French is surprisingly as high as 40–45%, as Fernand Braudel pointed out. French is kind of a hybrid.
forget about the vocabulary for a second. french, unlike italian, spanish, portuguese, has germanic syntax structure too.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Germanic vocabulary in French is surprisingly as high as 40–45%, as Fernand Braudel pointed out. French is kind of a hybrid.
That seems like a rather high amount. According to the statistics from Wikipedia it's more like 40-45% of all loanwords , of which French admittedly has quite a few. Crucially, the vocabulary that makes up its grammatical core is overwhelmingly of Romance origin.
what makes a language isn’t the core vocabulary but, crucially, the syntax structure. when you say ‘je suis malade’ instead of ‘suis malade’ that’s the germanic roots of french mandating the structure. latin loan words don’t make a language romantic.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#285It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
That's a bummer for me. I spent +2 years learning French and now you're telling me this is useless. I'd assume I can talk with older folks and try to practice at restaurants, museums, etc. Prob I won't be able to communicate with GenZ but probably that's not the case for millennials.
It isn't useless. The parent is 100% hyperbolic, at best. The fact is just that some people living in France can't speak french properly for various reasons, but it's not a generality. The french you've learn is the official one, and if you go into a restaurant, speak "academic french" and the waiter doesn't understand you, then that person isn't a french native.
The parent is basically saying "English is useless in USA, because people in some places speak broken English". Of course it's completely absurd in both cases.
The french you've learn, everybody who went to school in France learns that exact same language.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can say « les vécés » (or « le vatér » if you're an old Belgian man maybe), but more common are « les toilettes », « les chiottes » (vulgar but very common)
Mmm, same word as "shitters" in British English, with what I have to imagine is an identical etymology
It's not a daring conjecture that the slang word for toilet has an etymology related to shit.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look up verlan. It’s a type of French slang where you reverse syllables or sounds of words. “Verlan” itself comes from the reverse of “l’envers” which means “reverse”.
Who has time for that?
What do you mean "who has time"? It doesn't take more time to e.g. say "meuf" than to say "femme".
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's speaking the word backwards, syllable-wise. L'envers becomes verlan, femme becomes meuf, fête teuf, louche is chelou and merci is cimer, for the most common, everyday words. It can even go further, with Arabe becoming Beur which itself gets verlanised into Rebeu. Or meuf, femeu.
I thought Beur was from Beurre and its yellow color
The (racist) stereotype is that Asians have yellow skin, not Arabs...?!
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
while 1/2 of french is imported and mangled latin. so where did english borrow from really? given that it’s easier to figure out the latin roots of the anglicized?
The normand invasion of England and political control for 400 years changed the English language for sure. The medieval English and the modern English are completely different. Medieval French and modern French, not so much.
how did the normand invasion change the language? is there a study you could reference? did they influence the structure of the language itself or their language became a source of loan words? or what really happened?
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#290> Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years. This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year. The whole article is weak to say the least. Of course, the French spoken abroad is changed by the local influences. This is the sam case as with any…
> This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year.
It's not nonsense. They are still working on the same edition, just progressively adding words. There is some debate today, though, because they're mostly working A to Z, so words close to the start of the alphabet have definitions that were written down long ago. The definition for "femme", for example, is controversial. You can read up on this here: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-dictionnaire/la-9e-edit...
It's okay not to know something, but maybe inform yourself before calling what other people write "nonsense".