I’ve been learning French, for the best reason there is to learn a language: I now live in a French-speaking region.
It’s not the first time I’ve encountered the language, having taken French for three years in school. But, the lessons were hardly inspiring, and I came away with a grim view of French as unnecessarily confusing and complicated.
Since then I’ve changed a lot: I’ve lived fifteen years outside my home country, learned German to conversational level, and even learned a fair amount of Mandarin Chinese more or less for fun. So the second time around French looked very different.
I like French. I really like it.
I think part of this is because of the language itself, and part is because of how I got here.
I spoke English first, and in English it’s the words coming from French that are considered more sophisticated, more polite. So to the English ear, French already sounds refined.
Then I learned German. English and German also have a lot of overlap; but it’s very much in the direct, robust part of English. The German language can perfectly well be subtle and poetic—but it does have a harsh edge to it by default.
And then Mandarin, which is a wonderfully logical language. The complex writing system forces a simple grammar, and the tonal pronunciation allows each syllable to carry a lot of information; far more than English or German it is logical, decomposable and minimal.
Then to French. Learning French has been refreshing. It’s less direct, more polite—to my ears!—than the three others I know. For example...
About my biggest gripe with English—and I haven’t many, it’s a wonderful language—is that there is no good way for an adult to address another adult whose name they do not know.
I can’t call another man “Mister”; that’s somehow insulting. And “Sir” is all wrong. Where I’m from, you can use “mate”, as in, "’scuse me mate, is this bag yours?" But that doesn’t fit with the rest of how I speak.
As a man addressing a women it’s worse: definitely not “Madam”, the best available is “Miss”, which is how we used to address our teachers in high school. Awful, awful.
What do we have in French?
“Madame” and “Monsieur”, which can be translated as “my Lady” and “my Lord”. Extremely polite, in most languages insultingly so; but here, available and recommended for every day use.
I was very pleased to find that to address a mixed-gender group you can say “Messieurs-dames” which translates as “my Lords and Ladies”.
It makes me deeply happy that I can smile and thank someone here with a genuine “merci Madame” or “merci Monsieur”. There is nothing remotely patronizing or insulting about it; it’s polite, pure, plain and simple.
It’s been two years and my French is still pretty bad, but I look forward to years of slow progress until I’m eventually reasonably fluent.
And unfailingly polite.
Amusingly, while the language allows great politeness it seems the French culture, as far as I can make out so far, allows for more swearing than my own English background.
For example: at an eye doc appointment recently the technician was fighting computer problems, and there was a steady stream of “putain” fully audible; which literally means “whore” but is functionally equivalent to saying “fuck!" in English.
Somehow this seems to fit—and again, I’m pretty new here, so please don’t take this as definitive—with a general approach of taking life less seriously. I find it suits me well.
By the way, if you think “whore” as a swear-word is unpleasant—and I’ll readily agree, no argument there, swear words are by their nature often unpleasant—here’s one from Swiss German: “das isch huere geil” translates as “that’s fucking awesome”, but the literal translation is ... “that is whore horny/sexy”. It’s a real phrase that people use—I’ve heard it. But I’m not judging, language is taught—we don’t get to choose. I guess there are some corners of English that could use some work, too. Speaking of which...
Mandarin has the neat feature that “he” “she” and “it” all have the exact same pronunciation, “ta1”, where tone 1 is “high and level”. They are written differently—a different symbol—so you can be precise when writing.
I wonder how this affects the discussion about gender and pronouns.
Checking on this just now, I discovered something I did not know that I find absolutely fascinating:
When the New Culture Movement took place in China in the 1910s and 1920s, scholars were translating literature into Chinese to promote the incorporation of Western ideals like democracy and science into Chinese culture. But these scholars found it difficult to translate she/her into Chinese. Thus, tā 她 was created using the female radical 女 (a radical is a basic graphical component of a Chinese character that imparts linguistic meaning). The invention was met with some initial backlash, but gradually it has become widely accepted as part of the standardized written Mandarin system.
So in fact Chinese simply did not have the “he/she” distinction until it learned it from the West. Before that, the word for “he” was neutral—the symbol just indicates a person—but the addition of an explicitly female symbol made the neutral one implicitly male.
What can I say? Sorry about that; our bad.
Language is a fun topic, I’m sure I’ll post more about it.
So far today, 2024-05-10, no feedback has been received.
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