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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

#301

Post by quickthrower2 »

watwut wrote: post #294
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…

> 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…

> Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.

I don't think so. Swear word is a swear word. It feels just as taboo to me.

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

#302

Post by BrandoElFollito »

jeromegv wrote: post #251
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Quebec it’s the government that decides what is thought in school and the French they use is definitely diverging from outdated académie française.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

I Quebec maybe, because it is a different language (Canadian French) and they can decide what they want (though since they are fine with the Queen bing their ruler, I do not see reasons fro the French Academy not to be the source of wisdom when it comes to French /s)

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

#303

Post by watwut »

saiya-jin wrote: post #71
dudul wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north yet). First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especia…

> English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison

Absolutely not, really. French was easier to learn.

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

#304

Post by samus »

yawboakye wrote: post #284
samus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

French is indeed a notable exception in that regard. However, the rest of the grammar structure is still overwhelmingly of Romance origin. This and some other odd things can indeed be explained because of the ancient Franks picking up the language of the people they ruled over, but incompletely so.

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

#305

Post by becquerel »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #292
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…

> 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.

I agree, top-down linguistive prescriptivism is good when it means not catering to marginalised people

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

#306

Post by jackjeff »

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…

I agree French could do this as well as English.

In fact, many Creole language derived from French have this kind of simplified French structure as a core feature

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

#307

Post by samus »

yawboakye wrote: post #283
Exoristos wrote: post #198

Earlier 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.

forget about the vocabulary for a second. french, unlike italian, spanish, portuguese, has germanic syntax structure too.

French syntax structure is mostly in line with the other romance languages, with the very notable exception of not being pro-drop.

Edit: Vocabulary matters though because certain words are more likely to be replaced by loan words than others. More importantly, they allow linking with a language's close relatives (most importantly the other languages d'oïl), which might be more conservative, and with its historical forms across time. Said differently: languages without apparent similarity to other languages, no close existing relatives, and no written records to trace their development are isolates by definition.

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

#308

Post by coldtea »

ch4s3 wrote: post #208
coldtea wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

>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.

This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you.

In constrast the German police kills about 10 people a year, which given the population would amount to the US police killing 45 people total (so 5% that of the US). France, the worst example, the analogy would amount to about 250 per year (so 25% that of the US).

For homicides, Germany had 260 in 2026. That would amount to 1135 projected to the US population difference. France (again a worst case) has 734 per year. In US terms that would be equal to the US having 3772 per year. Adjusted for population, the US has around 5x the number of France and 16x the number of homicides Germany has. Other western european countries are much lower.

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

#309

Post by hnbad »

I guess it's time the French gave up on the colonialist idea of the "Francophonie" and accepted that French is evolving independently in other countries just like English, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch.

I wonder how much of this being perceived as "changing French" rather than just other countries having their own variants of similar languages goes back to France holding onto its colonies and trying to keep them close even after some of them formally gained independence.

Nobody would write an article about how Mexicans are "changing Spanish" or Brazilians are "changing Portuguese" let alone about how South Africans are "changing Dutch" (it's called Afrikaans and considered a distinct language just like Belgian Flemish). Some "spillback" via migration from the former colonies is hardly worth writing about.

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

#310

Post by gobip »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #292
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…

> 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.

"Mesdames et Messieurs" is inclusive. You've heard that for as long as you can remember.

"Statut : marié(e)" is also inclusive. Check your tax return.

The median "." for example "marié.e" is also inclusive and is probably what you're against. Please hate it right, we all use inclusive, even in English (ladies and gentlemen for example). Being inclusive is good, you're doing it too.

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