Yes, I have always loved the fact that my in-laws as Italian speakers had their dialect (late mother-in-law had one I could not cut through but father-in-law can actually speak proper Italian if he feels like it) then spoke Hochdeutsch instead of Schwyzerdeutsch and a really classy French instead of Romance. However, Romance is the weirdest French of all because from one valley to the next it changes and in the middle of nowhere you might just be in Paris or somewhere else in cosmopolitan France!
Yes it's funny how some things change and others don't from area to area - the north south thing is very vague! as for Italian dialects - not a great deal of experience except for the Tuscany where casa is pronounced with a spanish g as in gerona, and at friends in Sardinia who took me to meet their parents who spoke in sardinian... Italian no problem but sardinian was impossible. oh and another near modena who taught me vag-a-ca instead of vado a casa. My OH sometimes teaches me the odd phrase in occitan just to make people laugh and I love using some of the local patois il m'a espinté, il était engané mais il a fait une sanade pour s'en sortir...!
Lynda, you have a scientific point there. Whilst I could still generously imbibe alcohol over dinner I used become reiduclously fluent (we all believed), with just a couple I was really quite good, now with a single glass limit I seem to be less fluent. Now that's where the boffins ought to put their money!
I moved to France (Provence) eleven years ago, with a background of O level French ie. basic grammar and basic vocabulary, none of which had really been used during the intervening 35 years. I have never taken French classes and spent the first few years here with a good French/English dictionary and the invaluable book '101 French Verbs' by Christopher Kendris, as my constant companions.
With three children, then aged 9, 11 and 13, going straight into the French education system, my policy was total emersion.... for all of us. No English friends, no English speaking television or radio and all lessons in French for the children. Additionally, no taking the easy way out and reverting to English when shop assistants decide to speak to us in English! 'Lentement' was our most frequently used word! We all struggled and it probably took two years and alot of help and correction from French friends before we were all vaguely comfortable with the language. Now I have three grown up children who are all fast and fluent French speakers . My French remains very far from perfect and my accent is horribly English, but I can communicate in almost any situation and even defended us in a court case a few years ago). The most recent revelation has been the arrival of numeric television, because after watching American police series with French dubbing for the past eleven years, it comes as a sometimes unpleasant shock to hear the real voices of the American actors.
I have just started giving English conversation classes to adults where I have to slow down my normal rate of speech to help everyone understand me. I try and incorportate various colloquial phrases that they might come across and I explain that in all languages the speed is the biggest problem and that as we progress I will begin to speak at a more normal rate. It is interesting to observe that with my pupils as well as myself... we all become more fluent and speak more quickly after a few glasses of wine! And they all correct me when I make erros with my French grammar!
But despite all that, the most difficult challenge remains being a guest at a party or dinner party where there are several conversations going on at once. I remain convinced that I will never succeed to fully be able to participate as I would if I was speaking and listening in English. At the end of the day, each person needs to find their own method of learning the language. What works for one person might not work for another.... and you never stop learning... ever.
Wow, I never expected it to roll out like this. However, I called my friend to come over to read the entire chain. He is now sitting back with a glass of my Laphroaig chortling (he uses that word!). He suggested I should write a book, I responded (in the context of what I am actually or at least supposed to be doing at present on my own area of research: "...and what the heck do you think I am bl**dy well doing right now?". He replied something like "English vernacular, now there we could start a discussion". We high-fived and he poured the Scotch whilst I turned to this. At the end of the day I have played with my children a bit, taken the older to her judo class and had fun with this. The research proposal with Friday a.m. deadline is till not finished and the book, ha... I might use more English vernacular if I think about that! Otherwise this has helped a lot and perhaps one thing is becoming clear, well actually not that, since I mean as clear as mud!
Here quatre (Lalinde area) is quat' and many other re endings simply vanish but it is also a peneu and 'e' endings tend to be pronounced. In fact, my wife occasionally slips back into Ticinese Italian dialect and instead of asking for 'formaggio' at a cheese counter selling Italian products says 'formaag' which they take as a bit of an error but understand perfectly well. I reckon my six years of rotten classics at school, especially the Latin, have made this all the more fascinating when I remember that even one of the important Romans (forget who) wrote that the Rome local dialect Latin had been transplanted into a vast empire whereas only a small minority of the people who are in what is now Italy spoke it then!
I am lucky, the rest of me is as mad as a hatter so I had them already! No, I am a linguist anyway, so would get lost if I ever blathered and have done it. Once in a meeting in Lima we had Spanish, German, English and French and I really crossed wires being the one person in the room who did all four so was used to mediate several matters. Wrong language to wrong person is putting it midly and that with so-called 'delivered' (slow and steady) speech!
I'm sure these disfluencies happen in all languages, and even though the speaker might be perfectly fluent and educated, perhaps disfluencies are hard wired into humans in order to allow transfer of new ideas / new words from parent to child, or perhaps from teacher to student? Perhaps in order to overcome the basic tendancy to um and er, the person in question has to spend time perfecting their speech patterns. Maybe you as a lecturer actually taught yourself to speak smoothly and slowly instead of with a normal blathering pattern? (Oh dear i don't mean to say that you were once a blatherer - I am not very good at putting into words what i mean to say, even in written form!).
At university we had numerous lecturers, and interestingly some of the more interesting and informed ones were terrible ummers and errers. And yet they held my attention, perhaps even more so than a straightforward speaker. In retrospect in some ways perhaps I felt they were actually seeking for concepts and connections as they spoke, in that what we were being told was something completely new and exciting, hot off the press and very difficult to understand.
down here a pneu is definitely a peneu, and all the final 'e' are pronounced être, notre, quatre are two sylables not one and so on ;-D - as for patois, yep it's all occitan on the farm and I can't understand much but I got my own back in corsica - I was the only one who could understand the patois as it's so close to italian!
Too right! Nice one...
Yes, there are so many like that one that still gob smack me. Now let's try that expression 'gob smacked' on the ones who tell us all about English and how it should be - just for perverse fun!!!! :)
Off topic I love the fact that when a doc listens to your chest in UK he says 'say 99' while in france he says ' say 33'
I guess quatre vingt dix neuf' doesnt give the required resonation!
Yep - I was teaching in a horticultural college when I first heard that one - I understood that one of the pupils had fallen in the apples in the playground and I had to call the firemen...!
Valais round about Syon is neuvante or neufante, but perhaps that is only how I hear it from different individuals. But Nonant (sorry about the v when I meant n) is indeed in both countries.
Disfluencies, sure, I know about that too. However, in supposedly versed adults they should be avoided by having clear thought and not speaking faster than the brain responds to collecting thoughts. They are very helpful monitors but if you look further at the topic you will find there are reasonable limits and some very fast speaking French public people go well beyond that. It is not unique to them since Spanish and Italian speakers can be their equal and, according to a Japanese friend, the Japanese language is absolutely fraught with them as, I suspect, are many other languages. However, precise and measured speech is also shown scientifically to be best, for instance, for lecturing with pauses for students to take in new ideas and concepts and I did that for many years myself without any obvious problems.
I'm pretty much sure the septante and nonante are standard in Switzerland too. Yes they always say that the purest French is spoken somewhere between Tours and Blois... I can't stand their accents - give me a good southern accent any day - spoke to a bloke on the phone from Grenoble the other day - he couldn't believe how broad the accent is down here in the Aveyron (Just listen to Bernard Laporte - he's from Rodez)
I get messed up and in the discussion this morning that raised this question I also asked about why the French have never gone the road of the Wallons and many Swiss Romandes and have Septante, Huitant and Neuvant or Novant? He chuckled and explained how the Academie Française was set up to advance French language and culture and from that day to this has refused to accept change. That was his answer, followed by a smile. I get the picture. Now, I started life stronger in German than English, my parents stationed in Cologne and having strong Scots dialects/accents and began to go to school in London sometime after my seventh birthday. I had a real Bläckföß (Cologne area Platt German) dialect and had to learn Hochdeutsch at school before we left Germany on my father's demob. Consequently I knew about dialects and got Saouf London and Oxford English at the same time. I was young enough. Back in Germany I adapted to the Berlin dialect socially and used Hochdeutsch at the university. It was socially acceptable. Here in Aquitaine I am always wrong. I use Oc expressions like 'Come va' instead of 'sa va' and get it in the neck, in fact I have been instructed I should speak as though taught from an Academie Française manual on the use of the language more than once. Again, the learned man chuckled and said that the French are born with hangups about their language and that the dialects and accents do not exist according to the Academie and that is that and foreigners should speak as it is taught.
OK, I began to learn French in 1960 and now I am told I should continue to learn it 'properly', which I actually refuse to do - indeed we have a Burundian friend and I am tempted to ask her to teach me their patois just to get back at the critics. As for the rest of it, too fast and on top of each other, well I learned about that in Peru where the Limeños could give the French lessons in talking without pauses between syllables and/or words and all at the same time excitedly. Nonetheless, I am seeing how the idiosyncracies of French do make it hard going. Ditto, as Andrew rightly says, English which is in pure theory not a language at all but a mish-mash of other languages cum dialects that became a language then went out into the world and now has umpteen different locutions, grammars, syntaxes and spelling conventions...
I've adopted that too. With my "Quand meme" "Et Alors!" and 7th Dan blackbelt shrugging, it kinda works , even when I'm stopped for speeding with the cops. ;-)
when I was at Uni, we had a french student who was so laid back he was almost horizontal he was quiet and cool etc.
Then when we went to see him in his town in France, revelation. He was hyper manic, a leader and always buzzing.
It was simply he could not be fast in english and yet it led us to a completely different interpretation of his character.
Oddly I seem to speak French twice as fast as I speak English and my repertoire of tics, shrugs, bofs etc make people think I am French (if they dont speak french themselves)
Gretchen makes a very good point about the use of slang. I moved here in 2003 (the year of the heatwave) & when, at that time, I was speaking to a friend's wife she said it was so hot on the Metro "J'ai faillit tombé dans les pommes" (I nearly fell in the apples) as opposed to 'I nearly fainted' I spent a good long time gawping at her like a twit until it was explained that that meant 'fainted'