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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

#291

Post by yawboakye »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #215
gerdesj wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what 400 years of Norman political control really means. There was an invasion of England in 1066 by William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, which ended up with King William I of England. Subsequent monarchs of England/bits of France were no longer Normans per se. At least one variety of a French language at the time was introduced, wholesale, and became the court language of England. Latin of course rema…

> Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca. You have the causality backwards here. > Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine. This is just incorrect.

the rare forms/orders are allowed for the purposes of literature and other forms of art. the grammar of the modern english language and its gradual adoption through intellectual training was intentionally done. it was necessary in order to (1) elevate english to the level of latin and french, and hence (2) be a suitable tool for both art and intellectual writings. that was the only way it could unseat french and become the dominant language fit for all purposes.

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

#292

Post by throw_m239339 »

edwcross wrote: post #4
throwup238 wrote: post #3

https://archive.ph/nItnV I wonder what the Académie Française has to say about that...

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…

> The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge.

Yet thanks to them we escaped that hellhole nonsense that is the so called "écriture inclusive". All evolutions aren't good. French grammar needs to be simplified though, but not made a trophe on the altar of intersectionality.

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

#293

Post by carstenhag »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #254
adev_ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Haha, it's funny we have had similar experiences. But I have been the German in this situation. We had some designers from the UK and often out team members were struggling to understand them, and I had to reiterate their sentences in other terms, sometimes in bad English but that everyone understood. (A large part is also the British accent)

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

#294

Post by watwut »

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…

> Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step

You just don't feel foreign language the way you feel own. Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.

Not being bothered by bad grammar and what not is the same - butchered foreign language is not annoying nor more effort to understand. Butchered own language hurts ears the way foreign one does not.

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

#295

Post by BrandoElFollito »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #290
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #6

> 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…

Aaand... you are right. I stand corrected. I follow some of the new words added but they were all either in Larousse or Robert - not the dictionary of the Académie Française. Sorry for that.

In my defense, the "nonsense" feeling was mostly after reading the whole article on how local variants of a language heavily impact the source one.

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

#296

Post by apigalore »

com wrote: post #258
nicoburns wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 le…

omg yes is "language of cutlery" not a thing in US?

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

#297

Post by watwut »

kergonath wrote: post #257
Naijoko wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Declention makes it harder to learn the language tho. Keeping fixed words order is waaaay easier then keeping all those suffixes correct.

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

#298

Post by watwut »

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…

Honestly, I had good experiences with talking French in France. And it was by no means perfect.

My working assumption is that beyond meme, people have much worst pronunciation and grammer then they think.

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

#299

Post by jjav »

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…

> 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.

Here's an anecdote that suggests it is nothing but malice in Paris.

My partner's mother is from France (not Paris) and extremely French. Has worked decades as a professor of French language. You'll have a hard time finding someone more proper in strict French language than her.

And yet, in Paris she is mocked for "not speaking French" and they pretend to not understand her even though her French is as perfect as it gets. It's just malice, if you're not a local.

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

#300

Post by BrandoElFollito »

glandium wrote: post #212
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #6

> 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…

French here, living abroad for more than 10 years. > sa va koi Phonetically, it's easy. "ça va quoi" > vzy cr vas-y... you lost me here. crève? That kind of reminds me of a joke some rapper (I think) made about, I wanna say 20 years ago, when young people from the banlieue were starting to cut words. I don't remember it exactly, but it went from "arrête ça" (stop it) being verlan'ized to "teuarass" and when they'd go…

> Phonetically, it's easy. "ça va quoi"

ies, but stil anoing

This said, I am all for a simplification of French, esperanto-style, to make it easier for everyone (native and non-native users of French)

> > vzy cr

> vas-y... you lost me here. crève?

It was "vas-y carré", which in English means "go ahead, all good". I do not blame you for not knowing, I had to check twice.

> I guess you're thinking about things like "qu'est-ce que"?

qu'est-ce que c'est ça, eaux to say "o", the -amment and -emment you never know when to use, the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif that is the national joke, Louis that nobody outside of France can pronounce correctly, sometimes one r, sometimes two, sometimes one l, sometimes two.

All of this is well documented of course: the core of our grammar/vocabulary/conjugaison rules is maybe 50 pages, and then you have two or three tomes of exceptions.

Then we have writers such as Proust who are hated by children at school because they have to dissect his 15-line sentences to say which part does what.

Most of this information is completely useless - when my children started school, I had to dig back into books to recall what was what.

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