Tag: french

Let’s do some business…

August 26, 2014 / Josh / 0 Comments

… in French.

I created a map of Louisiana, using Google Maps and a list from this Facebook group, that includes all the francophone businesses known by the users of said group. I think the use of a language in business is possibly the most effective way to safeguard it. One has to know that a language is useful outside of school before one will decide to learn it well. So, I give you this map.

I would be extremely happy to add more information if y’all would like to help me. Visit this link to see it and get more information.

Allons prétendre.

November 26, 2013 / Josh / 0 Comments

C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose

D’être assis icitte en silence
Après guetter les mains de la pendule
De demander pour le temps
“What time is it?”
Ça fait beau.

C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose

De se frotter les doigts en silence
Après guetter les ronds de tes yeux
De parler pour la fin de semaine
“And the one before that?”
Ça s’a passé pareillement

C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose

De s’en aller en silence
Après sourire avec les lèvres prudentes
De demander quoi faire
“Didn’t you have work to do?”
Je suppose je vas jamais connaître

Mais allons parler en code
Allons prétendre
Ça c’est la même chose

This was for another assignment in my Cajun French class. It’s meant to take advantage of diglossia, contrasting semantic extension, and dialectal variation as a sort of follow up to my point from a previous post about what’s lost when a language dies.

(Take it easy on me, by the way. This is my first attempt at poetry in French.)

We shall.

November 22, 2013 / Josh / 1 Comment

Chaoui [ʃawi] is a raccoon in Cajun French as well as a word that sounds like the English phrase shall we.

A recent assignment for my Cajun French class was to make a meme using the language. La Prairie des Femmes shared the memes with the interwebs (here and here). This seems like a great way to create an output for the language that can spread, particularly in writing where Cajun French and Louisiana Creole could both use some love.

A lot of these make use of puns that require the reader to understand English, Cajun French, and sometimes even Louisiana Creole. (Some familiarity with Cajun music doesn’t hurt either.) These cross-linguistic word games help build the case that you lose more than just the language itself when a language dies: you also lose comedic productivity.

Don’t be honte!

November 18, 2013 / Josh / 0 Comments

Honte means shame, har.

So La Prairie des Femmes blog has started up a forum, appropriately titled The Prairie des Femmes Forum. The blog itself is essentially about all things Cajun, which fairly regular includes French related topics. The forum sounds equally broad.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people started posting in French which would be great, not only for the practice, but also for connecting people from various regions of Louisiana so that they can share regional words and grammatical constructions with each other. I have a hunch that part of the lack of standardization in the local varieties of French stems from lots of isolated usage. For instance, it’s difficult to maintain vocabulary when the only two people you know that can speak the language also forget the word you’re looking for. This sort of thing could lead to isolated neologisms, English borrowings, or just the abandonment of the language all together even though there might be ten people in the next town over who remember the word(s) you need. Widely accessible public spaces for communication would probably go a long way to ruling out such a problem.

(I once joked with a friend of mine, who speaks imperfect Spanish, that we could just end creating our own special code if we practiced often together since we’d have to make up words and constructions without knowing if they make sense to the rest of the Spanish speaking world.)

Anyway, check it out, whether you’re interested in language or just Louisiana in general:

The Prairie des Femmes Forum

Papa Guédé will hear you out…

November 3, 2013 / Josh / 0 Comments

… as long as you speak French or Haitian Creole.

So I went to an actual voodoo ceremony for the first time the other night for Fête Guédé, probably more commonly known as either All Saints’ Day or Day of the Dead. It was held in New Orleans in a small home converted into a sort of temple down a dirt alley with all sorts of decorations:

Papa Guédé

It was a really nice ceremony. There were probably 30-35 people plus more passers-by who I think just wanted to watch a little out of curiosity. For nearly two hours they walked around an altar (I think it was to Papa Guédé himself), writing things on the ground with dust of some sort, lighting candles, and saying prayers. This was interspersed with chanting in a call-and-response style as well as drums which reminded me a lot of Cuban rumba. The aura of the whole thing was definitely otherworldly and it worked purely based on the fact that so many people were involved. I mean, they were singing in a language I couldn’t really understand–which may have been somewhat poorly pronounced Haitian Creole–and I find it hard to believe that they all actually spoke this language so here we have some 15 or so people who bothered to memorize chants in a language they don’t even know. It made the whole thing feel real and for all intents and purposes it was. It served a symbolic purpose that could be appreciated even if it didn’t actually do anything. The ceremony was meant to communicate with the dead and as long as the atmosphere was right and no one cared to question whether it really worked, it might as well have been working.

I did feel a little confused about the authenticity of the ceremony, though. The woman leading it had long ago been ordained in Haiti, where the religion is still prominent, but it still felt somewhat like appropriation. As I mentioned, the chanting was all done in what may have been Haitian Creole and the woman leading the ceremony was definitely speaking Standard French. The people of Haiti use these languages because those are their native languages but it’s unlikely to be the same for the faithful here. The use of a language that’s not understood does help serve the purpose of creating an experience that clearly feels demarcated from everyday life but it’s also questionable whether it’s a sign of pure exoticism as well. I mean, it’s unlikely that any of these people grew up practicing voodoo–even the woman in charge grew up Jewish–but, really, there’s no rule against converting. I suppose the part that makes it seem somewhat like appropriation is that the people leading it aren’t people who grew up in it necessarily.

Ultimately though, it’s a bit sad that voodoo has been almost completely reduced to horror stories and sales gimmicks as it seems like a quite beautiful religion. I plan on checking it out more and maybe talking to the different priestesses in the city about it as well as the way that language fits in.

Les fous.

August 11, 2013 / Josh / 0 Comments

Around 48 seconds in, Murray Conque, imitating one of the characters he’s describing, delivers a punchline in French. The crowd, or at least part of it, gives a good laugh before he gets to any sort of English punchline or explanation. I missed what he said myself, other than calling the umpire an idiot at the end.

I was initially struck by this because it seemed as though the crowd knew what he was saying. I thought maybe this was a local Louisiana crowd that still had enough speakers that the joke worked or maybe the audience had some French speakers in general in it. Then I realized that people were probably just laughing at the obvious communication barrier between the two characters he was portraying. In that sense, the line almost seems almost like a mockery, with people laughing at the character, not with him.

This is possibly a direct contrast to what I described in a previous post with the bilingual joke in The Simpsons. That joke involved Spanish, which is certainly more widespread in the US than French and so likely to be understood. The Simpsons wasn’t mocking Hispanic people, they were simply banking on the idea that enough people would literally know what’s being said that it would be funny. Conque’s joke doesn’t seem to rely on that. In fact, his whole routine in that clip seems sort of like a mockery. It’s not that suspenders and small wooden houses don’t exist in Louisiana, it’s that those aren’t the only things that exist. They’re stereotypical, which I suppose is (or was) at least somewhat necessary for connecting to a wider audience, which is a bit of a shame.

When I saw the title, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I figured there was no way someone was doing comedy in Louisiana French, although comedy seems like a great arena for enriching and spreading the language. I also wasn’t expecting the comedian to be the butt of the jokes. It feels a little too self-deprecating and maybe Conque came to the same conclusion later on: in more recent clips he’s standing on typical stages wearing plain red suits.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that the intention was to convert any negative bias attached to these stereotypes as opposed to proving that Cajuns are respectable because they assimilate easily. I guess this is where the fine line is drawn between maintaining one’s identity and surviving within the larger culture.

Are English R’s ridiculous?

July 6, 2013 / Josh / 0 Comments

La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, sung by an opera singer from Spain/Mexico:

Now sung by another opera singer from France:

They’re not singing in English, obviously, but what caught my attention was that Plácido Domingo uses alveolar trills (rolled R’s produced in the front of the mouth) while Roberto Alagna uses uvular trills (produced at the top of the throat, although he does use one alveolar trill around 2:17). Alveolar trills don’t really exist in French except for in older dialects of Quebec French, at least according to Wikipedia, but they do exist in Spanish. Nevertheless, I was more surprised by Alagna’s pronunciation as I’ve heard plenty of native French speakers use the alveolar version in French opera.

This happens in English opera quite a bit, too. Check out this clip from Britten’s Gloriana, particularly around 1:45:

Aveolar trills abound (as well as some unnatural sounding vowels such as in good when they sing “good countess”). These definitely do not exist in any dialect of English and yet these singers are all native English speakers. What’s the deal? Apparently English R’s are ugly and lack clarity. A quick web search will pull up this claim repeated ad infinitum but I’ve yet to find anyone state exactly who decided on this. Afterall, I personally find trills in English singing to sound silly and to completely ruin clarity (I recently watched that Britten opera and had to use subtitles).

I e-mailed a well known phonetician about this as I knew that he also sang in a choir of some sort and he responded that this is a holdover from Italian teachers. This makes sense. Opera is really an Italian form and alveolar trills definitely exist in Italian. Even the vowel shifts make sense with this explanation. Good in the Britten clip sounds like [u] to me, like a Spanish U, which I believe is the same as an Italian U, whereas it should be [ʊ] in most dialects of English.

I’m not too sure why singers have just taken these claims for granted for generations, though. This suggests that basically all music sung in English other than opera sounds terrible to them. Maybe it does. I can name more than one classical music fan that’s pretty elitist in their attitude towards other genres. Maybe it also has something to do with the potential for people to accept authority with little question. Coincidentally, I was recently doing some ethics certifications for human subject research and the Milgram obedience experiment came up: