More lampposts for drunks

In an earlier blog post, I introduced my tacky concept of Lampposts for Drunks: phrases that stick out of a stream of spoken French, allowing one to grab ahold and, with luck, right oneself. Here are some more.

Parce que. This is the conjunction "because," and, to Anglophone ears, it sounds like "Pass kuh." (Strictly speaking, the phlegmy French r occurs before the s sound in there, but it is not prominent.)

Maintenant. "Now." Sometimes it's said with two syllables ("mahnt-nahnt"), and sometimes with three ("mahnt-uh-nahnt"). Nevertheless, distinctive.

D'accord. "OK." Resist the temptation to say D'accord all the time. It is easy, but can get you into trouble.

To continue another theme from earlier in the blog: I love how so many perfectly colloquial French expressions translate literally into rather grandiose English utterances. Parce que is literally "by means of this, that...". Maintenant: the time that one takes or holds (tenant) in one's hand (main). And d'accord means "of agreement." No wonder diplomats used to use French for all international treaties. All you have to do is crack a dictionary, and diplomatic language spills out like chantilly.

The bloom is off the Rosetta

I owe everybody a post in which I compare various language learning programs such as Fluenz and Rosetta Stone. This isn't that post. Instead, my jumping-off point is the historical Rosetta Stone itself.

I suspect most folks reading this are familiar with the story. Napoleon's troops in Egypt found a stone inscribed with the same text three ways: in ancient Greek (known), in Egyptian hieroglyphics (not known), and in an alternate Egyptian script (known). The parallel text gave researchers their first toehold into the decipherment of hieroglyphics, thus paving the way for many Scooby Doo mysteries.

I've been wondering recently: just how parallel were those supposedly parallel texts, anyway? Here in Europe, where multilingual texts are everywhere, it seems fiendishly difficult to say the same thing in different languages. For example, here near the Mont Blanc tunnel, a major European truck thoroughfare, signs in French, German, Italian, and English are all over the highways. We often drive a very steep grade where signs in each language advise truckers to use a low gear-- except for the German sign, which says instead Gehen Sie zurück! "Go back!" Fortunately, one does not see jackknifed German trucks littering the valleys, probably because all the truckers these days are Polish or Slovenian anyway.

Either Gehen Sie zurück here is an error or else a German motoring term I am not familiar with. But you find plenty of instances where texts differ in ways that seem intriguingly intentional. Our family spent last weekend in a hotel in Italy, in which placards gave emergency instructions in Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. I'm not competent to say anything useful about the last three languages, but the first four advised guests to remain calm in precisely the grammatical spot where English speakers were directed to "keep quiet!"

Do Italians think Anglophones are loud? Louder than, say, the klaxons? I daresay the words for "quiet" and "calm" in various languages fill out a kind of cloud of meaning, and the translator happened to select an English word from one of the outer precincts of the cloud. But it is still very easy, and a lot of fun, to see the specter of linguistico-cultural nationalism.

I have never found a purer example of non-parallel parallel texts than a lowly placard I once saw in a U.S.-based airliner lavatory. The English said, as it always does, "Please use your towel to wipe the basin for the next passenger." There was a French "translation" below, but even with my then much weaker French I could readily see that it was not the same text at all. It read "The washbasin is a shared resource. A simple coup of the towel keeps it presentable for everyone."

This took my breath away (to be fair, the condition of the lavatory made that easy). The French translator could have provided a word-for-word translation of the English; but this anonymous philosophe determined that, in place of the English speakers' appeal to be nice to a randomly selected fellow passenger, Francophones were more likely to be moved by an invocation of civic virtue.

What are we missing between the lines of that Rosetta Stone, anyway? There must be something hiding in there, some epochal secret, probably about ancient Greeks' personal grooming.

Clocked again!

The second most disconcerting thing that happens to me regularly here in France: I'll say Bonjour to a stranger, and he or she will immediately reply in English. How do they know? It's not as if I am wearing sweatpants and a University of Illinois baseball cap.

After I spent several weeks befuddled, somebody finally clued me in. Diabolically, French loads into its most routine and commonplace greeting not one but two sounds that don't occur in English. It is a perfect shibboleth. There's the nasal o in bon, of course, and then there's the French r, which is less a consonant than a phlegm-clearing maneuver. Each of these sounds takes a lot of practice. The o, in particular, benefits from practice in front of a mirror. Whenever I think I am rounding my lips enough, I am not.

(An aside: It feels invasive to have to use my lips this much in speaking. Dang it, I've got boundaries!)

The #1 most disconcerting thing is, of course, when strangers address me in English even before I've opened my mouth. Yikes. I really do try hard to avoid giving out blatant clues that I am American: when in public, I don't wear shorts, chew gum, or display firearms. Maybe I should start smoking.

No extended pinkies here

Here's a surprise I've encountered recently: some of the most common informal phraseologies in colloquial French have a word-for-word mapping to very formal English.

I have already written about Est-ce que, the unbelievably helpful phrase that introduces a yes-or-no question. Literally, it means "Is it that...?" For example, Est-ce que vous voulez manger ce soir? means "Is it that you wish to dine this evening in the solarium, Your Lordship?" Okay, I made most of that up.

Here's another. In English, using "one" as a pronoun ("one cannot fathom one's dismay!") often sounds either lawyerly or frumpy. But in French, the pronoun on works the same way, but its connotations are downright matey. A shopclerk might call out On arrive! to an incoming customer. "I'm coming, okay?"

Right now in our little town, there's a banner over the main street advertising an upcoming youth biathlon. It shows a picture of two kids in ski-bum attire with the caption On est vos champions! The intended sense is not so much "One is your champions!" [sic] as "We're the champions, doodz!"

So if you were wondering how dudespeak works in French, there's a glimpse.

How many is "ont"?

Every language has a fleet of small sub-languages. Examples: how you count, the names of days of the week and months of the year, how you name relatives, and so on. Counting is especially important, because everybody loves buying stuff, and that means a trip to the marché.

French markets often feature extremely elaborate motorized stalls that fold themselves up hydraulically and turn themselves into a truck, ready to head to tomorrow's market in some nearby town; these often have digital cash registers, a boon for monolingual tourists. But at simpler stalls, it's up to you to understand prices quoted orally. I'm not a big fan of endless flashcard drills, but for numbers I make an exception. When there are ten people in line behind you, rapidly comprehending six euros quarante-neuf centimes is a good skill to have.

My French language CD-ROM (about which more in a future post) made a clever point: the terms for 30, 40, 50, and 60 all end in a "t" sound, which makes them distinctive. Actually, I learned that the hard way. The first few times I heard something like cinquante neuf euros, I heard it as cinq ont neuf euros. How many is "ont"? Is that... eight?  Wait, eight is huit. Is "ont" some kind of wacky "dozen"-like quantity word?  Auuugh!

That last idea is not too far-fetched. In most Francophone countries, the way you say eighty is literally "four twenties": quatre-vingts.  To continue the lunacy, ninety-two is literally "eighty-twelve"... which, recursively, is "four-twenties-twelve": quatre-vingt-douze. Because eighteen is "ten-eight," ninety-eight is quatre-vingt-dix-huit. I am sure French did not devise this to kick the legs out from under my confidence, but it worked for a while.

I don't mean to suggest I've mastered French numbers yet, but I don't try to count up to "ont" any more.

Eight fun facts about France

1. O fellow Americans: Orangina, it turns out, is terrible. In France, Schweppes sells an orange drink called Agrum' (the apostrophe is part of the name) that is way orangier and way yummier. Oddly enough, you must ask for the drink by its complete name: Schweppes Agrum'. If you just ask for "agrum", the nice person behind the counter may ask you to confirm that Schweppes Agrum' is what you want, even if cans are sitting right there. The "u" has an "ooo" sound.
2. In English, correcting another adult's spoken English means "Shut up." On the other hand, when you start speaking French, almost every interaction with French people will involve them correcting you. Are they doing that because they want you to shut up? Unlikely; if they wanted you to shut up, they'd just ignore you. Instead, they've probably concluded, based on the fact that you are trying to speak French, that you want to speak French. Lunacy, eh? These corrections are offered in a positive spirit, and if one can hear them that way, they are gold.
3. Being in a country with a national problem of dog owners not picking up their dogs' poop really adjusts your feelings about the old "five-second rule."
4. Although France has a vast history of Catholicism, today it is officially a secular republic. But there are still peculiar protrusions of the faith into France 2012: the official France weather website will tell you, for example, which saint's feast day it is. I am writing this on St. Firmin's day, for example. He converted 3,000 people to Christianity and then was beheaded. Um, also, partly cloudy, rain in the afternoon.
5. One odd adjustment Americans must make abroad: coins. Sure, the United States has coins too, but mostly they are nuisances, except for quarters on laundry day. In France and other Eurozone countries (and Canada, the U.K., and Switzerland too), coins are real money, and people expect you to spend them. If you always proffer 20-euro bills at stores, people will look at you funny (once a guy at a wurst stand in Germany glared at me and said "Ich bin keine Bank"). You'll also wind up with a small fortune in the coffee can on your dresser.
6. I'm told France is McDonald's second biggest market worldwide. Is this because French people's appreciation of fine food is overrated? Or is McDonald's somehow haute-ier in France? No and no. I am not sure why "MacDo" is so big here, but I have one theory. Almost all French restaurants have a rather rigid daily schedule: for example, a restaurant may be open all afternoon, but all you'll be able to get until mid-evening will be coffee, ice cream, and crêpes. If, for some reason, your circadian rhythm happens to be off-kilter today with respect to the rest of the country, MacDo is there for you.
7. Chopsticks are called "baguettes."
8. Speaking of baguettes: an iconic scene of France is someone bicycling down a road with a baguette in the bike-basket. Once we Americans wrap our heads around the idea of someone having gone out for a purchase and not brought it home in a car, we have one question: "Why isn't that bread in a plastic bag? Isn't it going to go stale?" So, as an experiment, I put a baguette in a plastic bag.
   
   Normally, a just-bought baguette has a delicious crispy crust and a distinctive interior, neither too moist nor too dry. (That's why people buy them daily.) But my plastic bag distributed the bread's moisture evenly throughout the loaf. Now the crust was squishy, the interior was gummy, and the whole thing was unappealing. It seems that Monsieur le Boulanger has a few tricks up his sleeve. So I'll be going back tomorrow for another baguette.
   
   No, the first one was not free.

Eat of the tree of the knowledge

I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, where at least a few of my fellow congregants confirmed the stereotype by believing that Jesus spoke King James English. And why wouldn't they? That language is so sonorous, so stentorian, that it simply fills your head and pushes everything else out. What else would Jesus have spoken, anyway? Some humdrum lingo like Aramaic? That seems unlikely, since Aramaic is not associated with smiting.

I am no longer associated with the Southern Baptists, to say the least, but I still have King James rattling around in my head. Perhaps this is why it does not seem so odd to me that, in French, one says "I want of the coffee" (Je veux de café) and "I change of the money" (Je change de l'argent).

There is a sophisticated discussion lurking here on the difference between universals and particulars, but I think I have had enough of celestial matters for one blog post.

Remembrance of things

When you travel to France, you'll see signs like this everywhere. What does RAPPEL mean? Obviously, "slow down," right? Ummm...

It doesn't mean "straighten me up" either

After seeing RAPPEL for the thousandth time, I finally looked it up. It means "reminder" or "recall." Aha! Appeler means to call (as in Je m'appelle Brian, "I call myself Brian"), so rappel is literally "re-call." How elegant. And it brings us to an interesting point. In France, one of the responsibilities of a driver is to know, by heart, a table of the standard speed limits on various types of roads. That means, in turn, that a driver has no excuse for not knowing what the speed limit on a given road is. The word RAPPEL on a sign means "You should already know this; this sign does not indicate a departure from the previous regime." How admirably tough-minded.

Hey! You're a star!

In this post, I 'fess up that two people have been playing an outsize role in my consciousness of late, because they have come to serve as very important mnemonics for me.

The first is my friend Jae, who has babysat my son in Seattle. His name is pronounced the same as Jay, and I use his name to help me remember how to say j'ai properly. It is critical to do so because je means just plain "I", and j'y is a ghastly creature all its own (I'll write about it in the future).  These three commonplace utterances differ in sound only in the vowel. So I am grateful for all the help Jae can give me. Thanks, man!

The other important person: former San Francisco mayor, and current California lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom. I have a terrible problem with saying my s's as z's, for example, in the phrase nous sommes, "we are." Back in his mayoral days, he could be spotted at upscale San Francisco bars, seated alone, hard at work with a drink and the city's business spread out in front of him. This may be the most un-French evening behavior possible, so it makes him an even better mnemonic.

Jae, on the other hand, would never do that.

Parenting, the Game of Inches

Our four-year-old may finally be acclimating to France and French. He just asked me for a Nutella sandweeeech.

Careful with that eggplant, Eugene

Although my brain can never tell me where the checkbook is, it does a super job of retaining facts of questionable value, such as that people in the U.K. call eggplants "aubergines." They also call zucchinis "vegetable marrows," which makes me even less excited about eating them. But I digress.

On one of our first visits to France, I saw a cheerful roadside sign declaring Auberge de Jeunesse. "Aha," I thought, "I seem to remember that jeune means young, so that must be some kind of restaurant: The Eggplant of Youth. I bet it serves some kind of extremely sincere vegetarian food and has colorful plates."

Then I saw several more such signs, in a variety of settings and formats. Ummm, a chain of restaurants? A sincere chain? Eventually, I was moved to crack a dictionary. Auberge, it turns out, means inn or hostel. So une auberge de jeunesse means, of course, a youth hostel.

This is exactly the sort of ridiculous error that is God's way of telling one to start a blog. So: Bonjour, mes amis. I've got plenty more errors coming your way!

There is a right way

Neal Stephenson has said that French culture possesses "an admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the metric system, the force de frappe, Airbus, and Arrêt signs in Quebec." Having spent several months in France now, I think that this observation goes too far. Hanging out in France is not like being penned up in some kind of sadistic etiquette school. People are perfectly willing to go with the flow, particularly in service of a reasonable objective. This is why waiters are so patient with my attempts at French, other than just being nice human beings: I have a credit card.

Why did French feel the need to coin a French word for e-mail, for instance? Were they just being stiff-necked? I thought maybe the latter, until I discovered that the word émail is already in use in French. It means "enamel." Hence the need for courriel.

Lost in translation

One key downside of languages in which verbs are conjugated is that "SLOW CHILDREN" signs aren't funny anymore. Without this bit of classic comedy, how do Francophones find the will to survive?

The word ralentir is an infinitive verb and would never be misread as an adjective. Sigh

Lubricated in L'Hexagon

Any mnemonic in a storm, right? Mnemonics tend to occur to me when I am messing up. I was in a gas station a few weeks ago, trying to communicate that I was at pump number twelve... except I suddenly couldn't remember how to say twelve. Eventually, I wound up just pointing at the silver Citroën, at which point the clerk said "Ah! Douze!"

Yes, it's like "dozen." But the mnemonic that occurred to me at the time was that it's pronounced to rhyme with "booze." That, in turn, reminded me of how the French word for bottle, bouteille, is pronounced: "boo-TAY". Ha ha. I was tempted to give you a YouTube link there, to help you remember boo-TAY, but I would like to keep this blog wholly safe for work.

It's consistent except when it's not

I am really enjoying Fluenz French, the software package I'm using as the formal backbone of my French studies, in part because it doesn't shy away from painful truths. I had long been baffled by the the way possessives (mon and friends) behave. Okay, I sorta get it now, in a rueful, disappointed way.

These words agree in gender with the noun they modify. Well, that is fine and to be expected in a Romance language. The wrinkle that is a trap for people with brains like mine: the words for "his" and "her" are the same. So you must say sa chemise and son mobile, because shirts are feminine and cellphones are masculine, regardless of who owns which. Arrrgh! There is information in my brain (the sex of the person I am talking about) that I am not allowed to share!  I do resent being told to hide my candle under a bushel.

My personal gripes notwithstanding, this is all logical enough so far. Now for the further wrinkle: suppose your feminine noun begins with a vowel, such as écharpe (scarf). Because vowels back-to-back are yucky, you must say son écharpe. And you must still keep whether it's his scarf or hers out of your head.  Luckily for me, the trade name for ibuprofen in France (Nurofen) begins with a consonant.

Cheap Trucs

In my last post, I wrote about "Lampposts for Drunks." Herewith, another of my French language learning concepts, and one I don't have a good name for yet. These are just tricks for dummies: ways to get your meaning across in an absence of knowledge or skill.

My favorite is le truc. This is French for "thingamabob," but easier to say.

My second favorite is that you don't have to remember what gender a noun is if you say it in the plural.

Lampposts for Drunks

Some language learners find speaking easier than understanding others' speech. I am definitely in that category, perhaps because of the fact that I don't mind grammar, or perhaps the fact that I am a total narcissist. Nevertheless, comprehending a stream of spoken French may well be a special challenge: consonants are fond of detaching from one word and cuddling up to the next. This inappropriate behavior, I have learned, is called "liaison," with all the attendant jokes.

More generally, French speakers pride themselves on a very rubato kind of delivery. I often find myself   not so much listening to a stream of French as allowing it to wash futilely off me. "Arrgh!" I think. "Can you just slow down one eensy weensy moment? And also give me some kind of handle, or step stool, or in fact any kind of protuberance I can grab onto and step on board?"

I have come to learn that there are a few common words in French that are just so: an affordance for getting a latch-on. My term for these words, which I name here so as to assert a copyright on it, is "Lampposts for Drunks." In a sea of slippery sounds, these words are often said firmly enough, and stickey-outey, enough, to allow me to parse them and the several words following.

Here are three of my favorite Lampposts for Drunks so far:

Est-ce que. This is the phrase that introduces a yes-or-no question, and it is my favorite feature of French so far. It is easy to say: "ess kuhhh." Not only does it stand out prominently in others' French, but it also is a terribly useful crutch for new speakers of French. Getting listeners to understand you are trying to speak French is half the battle. Saying "ess kuhhh" declares: "Hey! I am about to try to ask you a question... and it will be in my best attempt at your beautiful language! Heeeeeelp!"

In my experience, French speakers do help.  But that's a topic for another day.

Chaque. For some reason, the French word for "each" is pronounced with the firmness of a hatchet coming down. Such a relief.

Glace. Ice cream! In France, ice cream may well be a food group. Perhaps the reason why the word for ice cream stands out in conversation may be due to the functionings of my subconscious. I find myself craving some right now, for example. But people say the word with emphasis and care. Restauranteurs probably pay special attention to the word because their profit margins on ice-cream desserts are excellent. Nevertheless, I've been eating a ton of ice cream here in France, to the benefit of my language ability and the detriment of my cholesterol count.

Une bière, s'il vous plaît

Here I am in the land that is a temple to wine, and I really don't appreciate wine at all. I am a beer guy, especially the in-your-face IPAs of home. As far as I can tell, they don't have really hoppy beers here, the kind I like that feel as if a fistful of pine needles is being shoved up your nose.

But there are still some okay French beers. One that I usually default to, because it is readily available, is a beer from Alsace called 1664. But how do you order that if your French is awful? One thing I have learned definitively: nobody calls it un, six, six, quatre.

My working hypothesis is seize soixante-quatre (in other words, "sixteen sixty-four"). If I were more of a barfly, I would know for sure by now.

Oh, compost

How excellent it would have been if, during one of my first extended stays in a non-English speaking place, I'd gotten arrested! I spent a week in Munich for work once, and was very proud of myself for mastering the subway system... except I didn't get the memo about the need to validate your ticket. I learned at the end of my stay that the term for a subway scofflaw in German is a "Schwarzfahrer". Being an official Black Rider would have been very cool except for the arrest part.

So now I am jumpy about validating tickets. In France, ticket-validating machines are signposted with the words Compostez votre ticket, which makes me think of what I would have said (in English) had I been caught.