Interesting. I'm frantically revisiting my secondary school French before moving across the Channel and am puzzled by the need for a comma after "sûr". It wouldn't be necessary in English, although I suppose you could justify the use of a colon or semicolon to add impact. I would have thought the French version could also have been written "Je suis sûr que ta soeur ..." I clearly have some way to go before I get to grips with these Gallic niceties.
I agree :)
Quote ""Je suis sur ta soeur elle va bien" or " I am on top of your sister, she is ok".
Lol.. nice one Peter..
Good one, Andrew
Every language has been since it existed. That is what the vernacular forms as dialects, accents and slang are. They suit local needs and habits, hence here in SW France with Occitan influences it is very different to Normandie or... I do not know how many dialects Paris has but remember the AF people being outraged about banlieu dialects some years ago. Perhaps it is like London where it is accepted that there are about eight 'regional' dialects, possibly more, and that the stereotypical of Londoners speaking Cockney is in fact so far in decline that it is probably one of the minor ones. In fact, despite AF or Oxford insistence on standardisation the languages are perverted for convenience, have been to make them the languages they have become in all of their forms and shall continue to be. So rather than anything else we should be celebrating that.
Hello, Brian,
Really interesting. I'd like to reply, but I miss time and courage to do it in English (I was up all night) and skills too, probably (that might explain it all). I generally agree, though. But, still,... one cannot let a language be perverted for convenience. :)
except that no amount of punctuation can change this one, Romuald:
Je vais me faire une jeûne OU je vais me faire une jeune...! :-O
Couldn't care less - the language is on it's way out anyway. fewer and fewer people on the planet speak French!
Except that this time the AF's recommendations have been ignored for 26 years. Oh well, a bit like lighting bonfires on roads forbidden to all except...
Every couple of generations language changes radically so that rhetorical and written forms cease to be comparable, especially as dialects in urban areas develop distinct localised vernacular, slang if you want to call it that. The French spoken today is not that at the end of WW2, old newsreels of de Gaulle or other people speaking give that away. Both much of the written and spoken form of the language I learned at school in the first half of the 1960s seems remote now.
I have been editing a book with three co-editors, all have English but two are first language German speakers and the other Italian but almost as well French. Between the four of us I have gone mad at times. One uses punctuation like and American so that every conjunction has a comma before it, that is American usage and our target language is Oxford English, so the other reinserted commas where she thought they put in pauses that made the syntax better. Read aloud the who thing would have been in effect read X number of words then pause but that often makes it seem like a completed sentence. People have forgotten to compare oral to written to check those things. When in doubt read aloud. After edits of one author's English text I contacted him and asked him to send me his Spanish original. I eventually translated it into English that said what he originally wrote. He started by translating his Spanish by reading it in English as he knows it when he speaks. Different animals entirely. A few edits later when I got it for the English I could not understand half of it. Anyway, my point is that the three of them are about 70, 50 and 32 years old respectively and learned English very well but at different points in time. A large part of their work is always using English language but that throughout the couple of decades between when each learned the language it has changed. It would be unrealistic to expect them to be the same as the other. However, despite all three believing they were using standard English as per the UK one had become somewhat Americanised, the next standard English then the younger very English. Mix all three in order to see me get very bad tempered. This happens with all languages. It is part of language evolution as sociolinguists constantly remind us. French is doing this two. The difference is that the Académie Française runs the show in France albeit it that it appears that there is even resistance to them making necessary reforms.
I have so often see traditionalists insisting that language works best in 'traditional' forms. So does English have to go back to being that of Shakespeare and French to Poquelin, sorry Molière? Their languages have been left behind by language evolution. About 30 years ago I ordered two books by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation and Du contrat social, in the original written form from Chapitre in Paris. I waited weeks and weeks, eventually they arrived. I quickly went back to my modern versions. The French is not even radically different but it was enough to be tricky for me. I still have the two books so that after a chuckle yesterday evening I threw a glance into a few pages of Du contrat social and chuckled again. It strikes me that it is time for a bit of a tweak here and there.
I allso looked at a couple of articles about language reform generally and saw the fuss that occurred when the Québécois began writing Québecois and even Quebecois and how the Académie Française tried to lecture them on the need to retain accents. They had also proposed dropping cedillas since many people had already stopped using them thus their version of François became Francois, which the the Louisiana Creole French speakers had long since dropped from the written form of their language. Now this is where it gets funny. Creole, according to some 'experts' is French plus X with the French caught in a time warp. However Antillean Creole and Haitian Creole have kept a lot of African language roots but taken on a lot of other Caribbean language influences, especially English Creole, Barbadian and Jamaican patois. In fact, they have largely progressed by adapting.
Here in France there is occasional outrage about the adoption of English words and phrases, young people have been severely chastised over the last few years because they have perhaps more than ever. Let us think about it. Every city, town and many villages display P signs, often explicitly saying 'parking', then 'fin de semaine' has become 'week-end' but is now being made back into its English form 'weekend'. Football may have been bastardised into 'foot' but it remains English because it ain't 'pied' then there are 'camping' and 'camper', 'discount' and so on. Some English has been borrowed so long ago people have forgotten. The faux outrage about English introductions forgets it is a two way thing, indeed some of the French used in English is so established nobody actually notices or cares much. If you disagree, RSVP!
So, here we are. A reform from 1990, traditionalists and right wing politicians jumping up and down protesting, a few people sighing with relief and I imagine teachers who have to feed the language into primary aged children among them and actually in sum total the vast majority of people not giving a damn, after all when you are texting all day long do you actually use accents. Let's say people who text me do not, so let us assume I am not an exception and let it be as we would say in English a fait accompli. Bonne journée!
Let's face it Romuald, The Académie Française is a law unto itself ! A bit like French 'agriculteurs' who seem to have the right to light fires and disrupt traffic on the roads when they wish whereas if it was the average person in the street he or she would be put in prison !!
Hello Peter,
Hence the significance of punctuation ! I really don't understand why this sentence was widespread by journalists, because, with the right punctuation (i.e. withe a coma after "sur"), their example doesn't work :
"Je suis sur, ta sœur, elle va bien." = I'm certain, your sister, she is ok.
The punctuation gives the meaning without any ambiguity and, in this example, the circumflex accent seems useless. Furthermore, this is definitely a colloquial syntax. Something you wouldn't write anyway.
However, I wish the example was good. Because I frown on this spelling reform.
The younger generations, who have difficulties with the spelling, don't care about the circumflex accent or the punctuation anyway. Therefore, I believe this race to the bottom of a reform is futile (if the intention was to make the language more accessible).
Original sentence with circumflex :
"Je suis sûr ta soeur elle va bien" or "I'm certain your sister is okl"
Updated sentence without circumflex :
"Je suis sur ta soeur elle va bien" or " I am on top of your sister, she is ok".
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