Lingua Franca

One of the most stimulating aspects of living on foreign soil is the language. French is not a million miles away from my own and familiarity has taught me just how entangled they are.

Because we share some of the same roots, I can usually get by here when stumped for a missing word by dredging up an under-employed English word with a Latin root and then pronouncing it with a Gallic flourish. Words like ‘punitive’, ‘expedition’, ‘(im)permeable’, ‘fortifications’ and ‘ostentation’. Get creative with your endings and your syllabic stresses and the natives will often comprehend.

The French are enormously proud of their language. So proud that it has made me in turn more proud of my own than I’ve ever been before. I take great delight in throwing little controversies into the equation to see what will transpire. I should be ashamed of myself; it’s rather like a child poking a cat with a stick to see how the poor creature reacts. But that smug self-righteousness is just ripe for the undermining.



Walky-talky or talkie-walkie, jury?



So I might, for example, suggest that English developed from a richer cultural mix than French did, or that there are at least twice as many words (‘The horror! The horror!) in the English lexicon than in the French. And if they don’t believe me, which they never do – because I am a foreigner – they can read about it for themselves. They never do. They just sink into a state of recalcitrant denial.

Pride breeds protectiveness. There is a Salon de Something in Paris, which meets to discuss and to pronounce on whether new words can be subsumed by the mother tongue. Not that long ago, something similar existed for names. If you wanted to christen your new baby something like Justin or Kylie, you’d have to first seek approval at the local Mairie. Anything other than variations on Philippe or Marie-Claude would necessitate debate, deliberation and documentation in triplicate. Friends of ours were denied the chance to spell their daughter’s name Maya and had to settle for Maïa (or vice versa). But it was a losing battle and there must now be a whole phalanx of French Kevins.

And so it went with language. Despite the efforts of the Salon, French is now littered with Anglicisms. The French being the French, though, it wouldn’t do to adopt them, they have to adapt them. Put a French stamp on things to pretend that they originated in France. And so a walky-talky, in the name of General de Gaulle, becomes un talkie-walkie! A pair of jeans is transformed into un jean – as if you can ever buy one-legged denim trousers outside a specialised outfitter for life’s less fortunate). A brush-and-blow-dry is referred to as le brushing. And if you decide to sign up for an image makeover, you go through what’s called un re-looking.

My favourite, though, is the metamorphosis of leggings to un leggin. On a literal level, you can’t really argue with it. Indisputably, you put your left leg in and your right leg in, and then you pull them up and shake around a bit. And I like the way that there may be no such thing as a un leg-over, but there is un leg-in.

It’s a bizarre business, language. I’ve always found it a fascinating subject. I was one of those rare creatures – a freak of nature perhaps – who actually enjoyed Latin at school. I think I liked it because you didn’t have to speak it, but you could sit down and work it out as you would a crossword puzzle. But one thing has always puzzled me about language – and I’ll leave you with this to ponder until next time, when I might talk about our daughter’s linguistic development as a bilingual child: Who sat down and invented all the rules? Was there a kind of salon in ancient times? Did they play around with things on their wax tablets until they settled on nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative cases and associated endings? Did someone come up with the idea of the gerund and the gerundive?

Only asking.