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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

#491

Post by aaptel »

aldousd666 wrote: post #432

I'm surprised that we got the whole way through all these comments and nobody mentioned "L'Acadamie Francais" and the French laws enforcing proper use of the language, requiring a certain percentage of broadcast media to be in acadamie-sanctioned French. In my opinion, this is the cause of the international friction with other speakers. On the other hand, I've been to Paris and as long as I open with French and ask q…

So much misinformation on the article and in the comments...

1) The academy doesn't make laws, they just make recommendations that anyone is free to follow or ignore.

2) there are laws regarding the amount of french-spoken media being broadcasted but nothing is said about which word is accepted or not you can use as much foreign slang as you want.

3) the academy does not make an official dictionary. There is no official dictionary. There are multiple private entities editing dictionaries. These companies have their own authority on what makes it in the dictionary.

3) the academy suggest new words when none exist in French to avoid using too many English ones. Again it's perfectly fine to ignore them if you don't like them. Some works (eg logiciel for software) some don't (eg courriel for email).

Other french speaking nations have their own academy and that's also fine. There are no academy wars lol.

I'm also surprised at the reactions regarding Quebecers. Most french people are delighted to hear that accent. It's very rare to hear it in France. We are mostly used to accents from north and sub-saharian African regions, or bordering neighbors. When I fist heard it I couldn't help but say I loved their accent. In a genuine, wholesome way... It is sad that it's often taken the wrong way.

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

#492

Post by samus »

yawboakye wrote: post #488
samus wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened in quite similar ways to most other Romance languages as well though. Almost all of them (with Romanian being a notable exception) have gotten rid of their case system and only the pronouns contain traces of it. Nowadays, they express the "cases" with prepositions too.

agreed. so given that french grammar bears striking resemblance to german/english, and given that they’re all info-european languages, why are we quick to reject the germanic roots of the french language and classify it as romance? here i don’t know much history but i won’t be surprised if we learn that the association was deliberate, in order to elevate french to the status of latin? i.e. language fit for intellectu…

Good that you brought up English, which is also frequently argued to actually be a Romance language and where it is much more ambiguous. Since it actually acquired a massive amount of latin loan words directly and via medieval or modern French. Sometimes the same word twice or thrice.

The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations:

I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French and its close relatives are still more similar to each other and to the other Romance languages. If I see a page of French text, my knowledge of German is almost useless, but my Italian gets me very far. This classification can be made objectively by using Swadesh lists[0] or related tools.

II. We can trace its historical development very well and it seems to organically emerge from the vulgar Latin of late antiquity.

Of course the association with Latin was deliberate, but this happened much earlier when the Romans conquered, colonized, and eventually romanized Gaul. Because of this, there was simply never a need for loaning words from Latin on a large scale. Later, the Franks were just a new management that placed itself on top of the existing culture.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list

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

#493

Post by yawboakye »

samus wrote: post #492
yawboakye wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. so given that french grammar bears striking resemblance to german/english, and given that they’re all info-european languages, why are we quick to reject the germanic roots of the french language and classify it as romance? here i don’t know much history but i won’t be surprised if we learn that the association was deliberate, in order to elevate french to the status of latin? i.e. language fit for intellectu…

Good that you brought up English, which is also frequently argued to actually be a Romance language and where it is much more ambiguous. Since it actually acquired a massive amount of latin loan words directly and via medieval or modern French. Sometimes the same word twice or thrice. The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations: I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French…

incidentally my latin helps me very little in french but a lot in italian and spanish, for example. in fact, i studied latin to make my task of learning french easier—but that never happened. i picked up habits and rules that produce outrightly wrong and nonsensical french.

on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin dialects) of modern mainstream languages: they’re amalgamations of many languages, the mainstream languages furnishing words and phrases where necessary. barely do they supply grammar. that said french, unlike other romance languages, demonstrates a strong germanic syntax structure, which has persisted over centuries of iterations of the language. the overwhelming evidence suggests that french is germanic (both in syntax structure and vocabulary). it’s incorrect to assume that spanish and italian, for example, are pro-drop when in latin the so-called pro-drop is the default. intelligisne? is what you ask your interlocutor, not tu intelligsne? in french an explicit subject is required, without which the sentence is nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.

french is arguably romance but it is germanic too, and in no small way.

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

#494

Post by arcticbull »

galvin wrote: post #162
arcticbull wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French colonialism ended a long time ago, like in the 60s. It’s been over 60 years. [edit] The French even regularly hold referendums in COMs like New Caledonia offering to cut them loose. But the last one they had 97% voted to remain part of France. Sometimes it’s good to be a dependency of a world power. I should correct myself, New Caledonia isn’t a COM (collectivité d'outre-mer) anymore but a sui generis collecti…

The CFA franc is used by 14 countries. Until 2020, those countries were required to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury. France also maintains a military presence in several of its former colonies. Colonialism may have ended, but France continues to exert influence in Africa.

> Colonialism may have ended, but France continues to exert influence in Africa.

Yes, of course. Lots of countries exert influence in Africa. The PRC just opened its first off-shore military base Djibouti. Russia has whatever fresh hell the Wagner group is bringing - especially to the Central African Republic. America has bases in at least 10 African countries.

Colonialism may be over but challenges in managing international influence will always persist.

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

#495

Post by samus »

yawboakye wrote: post #493
samus wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good that you brought up English, which is also frequently argued to actually be a Romance language and where it is much more ambiguous. Since it actually acquired a massive amount of latin loan words directly and via medieval or modern French. Sometimes the same word twice or thrice. The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations: I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French…

incidentally my latin helps me very little in french but a lot in italian and spanish, for example. in fact, i studied latin to make my task of learning french easier—but that never happened. i picked up habits and rules that produce outrightly wrong and nonsensical french. on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin…

Yeah, I made them same observation when I tried to pick up Latin while learning Italian. It really doesn't make sense to multitask these, unless one is interested in learning both. Even though they are related, it's not necessarily of help when learning it.

Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.

Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:

> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.

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

#496

Post by jjav »

jackjeff wrote: post #319
jjav wrote: post #299

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. 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 prop…

I’d be curious to know where she is from. I’m from Southern France but I have lived in Paris for a few years. I didn’t have a strong accent that would require subtitles on French TV like some people do, but I did have an accent. Nobody would mistake me for a local. I think people over there are generally condescending and don’t care about you. I don’t think the accent is the issue. If not that they would find somethi…

> I’d be curious to know where she is from.

Normandy area.

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

#497

Post by esperent »

achenet wrote: post #344
eloisant wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Parisians are dicks to other French people too - including Parisians. It's not about Parisians ignoring foreigners because they don't speak the language, it's about Parisians ignoring people.

ex-Parisian here (or perhaps Parisian in exile, I'll always be Parisian in my heart, but I refuse to live in the city while it's under the tyrannical mismanagement of Anne Hidalgo) We're nice to each other. The local social codes are perhaps not as obvious to visitors, but if you put some effort into befriending the city, Paris can be very kind. Agree with the whole "Parisians ignoring people" thing though. If you're…

I don't have a lot of experience with huge cities, thankfully. Paris is around ten million people, right? Are other big cities this rude to strangers?

I can think of a few examples: Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok, where I found people quite friendly, and London, where people are close to but not quite as unfriendly as Paris. But that's the extent of my experience.

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

#498

Post by esperent »

foldr wrote: post #422
esperent wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think so. In my experience of traveling around and trying to speak various languages in a broken fashion, the biggest difficulty is the native's receptivity to trying to understand you. The second biggest difficulty is ease of basic pronunciations, and this does vary a lot between languages. For example, currently I'm in Vietnam, and local people do not try to understand foreigners who speak Vietnamese at…

Like the sibling, I haven't found Spain too bad for this. Waiters and other service staff sometimes switch to English on me despite my Spanish being perfectly serviceable for that sort of interaction, but no-one's ever been rude to me about it. One waitress apologised when I said that I like to practice my Spanish, but explained that she also wanted to practice her English. I suspect that's quite a common dynamic. On…

My experience from Spain is about fifteen years ago, so I will concede that maybe I was unlucky, or maybe things have changed there.

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

#499

Post by allarm »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #443
nicbou wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised. I'm from Quebec. I am more comfortable speaking English with anyone than I am speaking French around French people. They just can't get over the accent, like I'm some sort of curiosity at the zoo. There are so many YouTube videos of French people mocking us. It's not curiosity but a distinctly French superiority complex. My friends who learned French had similar struggles in France versus elsewhere…

> They just can't get over the accent French here, with an anecdote: More than 20 years ago I visited Montréal. It was difficult to participate in discussions with french-speaking people because I could understand some participants very well and others not at all, just because there are different degrees of accent. In constrast, it was easy to understand any english-speaking person. > There are so many YouTube videos…

Yeah, I remember how I tried to order coffee in a restaurant in Paris. Even though coffee sounds almost exactly the same both in French and in English the dude refused to understand what I need. Probably it was just for fun, but this type of fun is what stops me from visiting Paris ever again.

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

#500

Post by bsaul »

Toutouxc wrote: post #197
bsaul wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the inability of young generation to be able to write and speak proper french The language isn’t going to stop evolving just because you were born.

there's evolving and there's devolving. As in loss of precision in the grammar and in the vocabulary.
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