Silliest French word I learnt so far

[tuga]

I heard somewhere that Indian call centre workers are sometimes trained to speak with a Scottish accent.

I've heard that too.

I also vaguely remember reading a book by an ex-correspondent in India (Mark Tully?) where he tells of an Indian newsreader who was made redundant because his or her accent was better than that of the British colleagues.

 

[wacko]

That depends on their age. Germans around my age (40) and younger generally speak English quite well. With the older generation, I'm often better off speaking German.

About the time the UK joined the EU the German education system was able to make that change. I've met a few young German people and their English is better than many Brits. Wonder how many Brits speak German...

 

[KrisW]

Someone above implied that the German “Handy” was a loan-word. It isn’t.

Despite the best efforts of 18th century revisionists to claim otherwise, English is a Germanic language, and so the basic words remain very similar between the the two: a fine example of this is that the German word for a hand is... ein Hand . The word for a phone handset is Handgerät, which when shortened, becomes Handy, following a common pattern in German for nicknames and short-forms. The only Englishy thing about the word Handy is the use of a y instead of i in the spelling.

That said, modern German is littered with pointless loanwords (the phenomenon is called Denglisch), so you now see “Manager” rather than Chef (itself a loanword) or Leiter; although the most contentious example was when Deutsche Bahn renamed the information-desk signage at every train station to read “Service Point” rather than the more concise German word Auskunft. (The use of English words in the signage is unrelated to the ability of the person behind the desk to speak English, by the way…)

I’m a native English speaker and passable in German, but 0nothing throws me off when reading German more than seeing an English interloper* in the middle of a German sentence. Especially when the grammatical rules of German are applied to them. (e.g., “Eine toughe Lehrerin”)

__
* Ironically, “interloper” is itself a loan-word, of Dutch origin

 

[Stunsworth]

Also, simple phrases (similes) we are all used to in English will not translate, the idioms are different. You can easily translate something like: "I slept like a log" but it may not transfer at all well. To make things worse, many people here take your translated English literally, so a question like " How long have you been here?" in conversation with your neighbour may extract a puzzled response of "5 minutes" even though you know said person moved in several years before.

Indeed. I remember getting confused looks from French colleagues when I described something as a ‘red herring’.

 

[Derek Wright]

When I was working (many years ago) I was titled European Product Manager for several software products. This grand title implied that I was at the base of a triangle on which sat the specific country product managers. I was the focal point for communication to the guys in the US where the products were being developed (to meet US requirements - US Letter paper sizes not A4 etc).
All communication was in English, my job was to answer the questions of the Eurpoean countries, sometimes bundling them together to forward the issues to the US. It was great fun. One notable event was a meeting I attended in Stuttgart that consisted of me, the German country product manager and team of consultants from an office in Munich who had travelled in by train for the day. I was the only native english speaker apart from one of the Munich team who was from the US who had gone native in Germany. He was most impressed that I the only English native speaker would have the meeting in English.

Even in France meettings would be held in English if there was only one out of country attendee at the meeting.

There was the legandary tale of an Australian hitch hike asking a car driver if he was going near to Luger Beruger and if so would he give him a lift. Pity I could not help as I was not going to Loughborough.

 

[lagavullin10y]

Learn from the French:

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08t6mv1/the-etiquette-school-for-china-s-super-rich

The beeb is actively indoctrinating innocent (3 French words I guess) Brits with French etiquette.

Oh la la!

 

[mansr]

Indeed. I remember getting confused looks from French colleagues when I described something as a ‘red herring’.

Now try mixing some idioms for humorous effect.

 

[Bob McC]

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

In school, my English teacher offered a prize to anyone who could read an abridged version of that poem without making a mistake. It went unclaimed.

Not surprised if the poet insists parquet rhymes exactly with khaki.

 

[Cesare]

Which English accent? Most Americans can understand Hollywood villain English (RP) well enough but struggle with, say, Cockney or Scouse. Likewise, there are backwater American dialects that many a Brit would have trouble comprehending.

I dread to think what they'd make of the Glasgow Patter - how did My name is Joe do in the US?

 

[tuga]

Some "English" words are written in the UK using the French spelling, like metre.
Others are plain and simply French words like joy, bureau, or mauve.

And isn't it considered posh to use French words, eat French-style food, drink French wine, greet with a kiss (not a French one, though)?

As a foreigner I find this love-hate relation (p*ss*ng contest) fascinating.

 

[richardg]

I dread to think what they'd make of the Glasgow Patter - how did My name is Joe do in the US?

I recall Trainspotting was released in USA with subtitles. Quite right too. I could have done with them myself.

 

[JensenHealey]

Some "English" words are written in the UK using the French spelling, like metre.
Others are plain and simply French words like joy, bureau, or mauve.

And isn't it considered posh to use French words, eat French-style food, drink French wine, greet with a kiss (not a French one, though)?

As a foreigner I find this love-hate relation (p*ss*ng contest) fascinating.

French was the language of the court of Kings and the Royal Household for many years. So many of the words crept into the talk that commoners used. As a result English typically has at least three words for everything, a polite French version, a coarse Anglo-Saxon one and an Olde English version. Hence the grand size of the Oxford English Dictionary, so 'English' claims the largest vocabulary of all the languages in the world.

 

[wacko]

^ French from 1066 for about 400 years.

 

[tones]

Despite the best efforts of 18th century revisionists to claim otherwise, English is a Germanic language, and so the basic words remain very similar between the the two:

This is basically true for simple words (Man, Haus, Kuh, Land, Wetter), but for anything beyond that, we have the French to thank. Our first German teacher in Sandoz tried to encourage us by showing us that English and German were much the same, and, she'd produce the famous Indo-European language tree with the Romance branch (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) on one side and the Germanic branch (German Dutch, English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) on the other. Why couldn't I accept this? she asked. 1066 and all that, I replied. It would drive our daughters' schoolfriends mad ("How can you possibly know that word?"), when they, knowing only Schwierigkeit, were confronted by its French equivalent difficulté. One of the great blessings of French was the jettisoning by English of the German counting system ("four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"), and having the further good wisdom to stop the French system at 69. In the Suisse Romande, they have made their own adaption of French numbers. When a cashier said to me in Geneva for the first time dix-neuf francs nonante, my immediate reply was dix-neuf francs WHAT? And then I realised that it beats quatre-vingts dix. So septante, huitante (or octante), nonante. Merde, alors! the Academie Française would be mortified.

 

[mansr]

French was the language of the court of Kings and the Royal Household for many years. So many of the words crept into the talk that commoners used. As a result English typically has at least three words for everything, a polite French version, a coarse Anglo-Saxon one and an Olde English version. Hence the grand size of the Oxford English Dictionary, so 'English' claims the largest vocabulary of all the languages in the world.

French is a subset of English.

 

[JensenHealey]

Talking of which, how come that William the Conqueror spoke French anyway? - the Normans were Vikings - had they lost their language so quickly?

But plenty of Viking words are knocking around in modern English and in street and place names 'up north'.

 

[KrisW]

There weren’t that many Vikings who settled in Normandy, and they’d been living in France for 200 years before William invaded England. Trade and intermarriage with the much larger French-speaking population would have done the rest. The pattern was repeated in Ireland from the 12th to 14th centuries, but this time, the English-based branches of the powerful Norman families tried (largely unsuccessfully) to pass laws forbidding such assimilation and adoption of Gaelic customs.

One of the great blessings of French was the jettisoning by English of the German counting system ("four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie")

Flipping the tens and units does make more sense, but we kept the “and”, and just moved it to a different place. Take the number 137: We say One hundred and thirty-seven, they say Einhundert sieben und dreizig. (We both agree to not use “and” between thousands and hundreds). I suspect the influence of this German usage is the reason why Americans don’t use “and” at all when writing out numbers in words (One hundred thirty-seven — which always sounds like a result of a one-sided rugby match to my ears).

I would never call French numbers more logical than those in other languages, just different.. and the names for 70,80 and 90 are just crazy.

The words for numbers are another sign of English’s Germanic roots. Like the other Germanic languages, English pronounces 11 and 12 as something with a strong F or V sound at the end (the theory being that these words come from old Teutonic for "one-left", "two-left"), but then switches to a form "3-ten", "4-ten", etc. for the remainder.

The French, Spanish and Italians all do a similar switch , but it happens at 16 (Spansish) or 17 (the others). This kind of pattern is actually unusual, even though it seems natural to us: Slavic languages just use "one-ten", "two-ten" etc, as does Finnish and Hungarian. (Romanian, a Latin language surrounded by Slavic and Germanic, also says "one-ten", etc.)

The Japanese are very logical, and would say “Hundred Three Ten Seven” (hyakū san jū shichi). But to produce proper Japanese, you have to also ask yourself: 137 of what? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word ). Maybe French isn’t so bad after all…

 

[Mike Reed]

Grammar-wise, languages of Latin origin are a lot more complicated than English.

Not according to most of the many thousands of European students I've taught. Phrasal verbs, which we use frequently, are a real headache for them. Prepositions catch them out, too, though usually with different usages between nationalities. With tenses, despite that most European languages have similar structures, the present perfect, which is our commonly-used tense, had them grappling to come to terms with. As for odd spellings and pronunciations/homophones etc, our bastard language had little phonetic structure to hold on to.

One big advantage of English was the lack of gender. When it came to Chinese and other, mostly Asian languages, with simple past, present and future, the multi-faceted English tense system with 6 major time zones in either simple or continuous sense (making 12 in all) was a difficult task to comprehend.
I only have a smattering of other languages, but I'd be very surprised indeed if English grammar rules and usage weren't at least just as complex as our Latin or Germanic neighbours.

My expertise is in the English language structure, or at least was, as I've long been retired and lack of teaching dulls the memory. I can't speak for other languages; only what I have experience in 20 + years of E.F.L.

 

[Mike Reed]

I heard somewhere that Indian call centre workers are sometimes trained to speak with a Scottish accent.

Glaswegian Hindi? I'm having trouble with that concept as either in itself is a struggle on the phone.

One great beef with me is the (i.m.o.) totally illogical way the Americans write dates. We use day, date, month and year. They put the month before the date, then the year. So confusing I'm not even sure I've written this correctly !!!!!

 

[Cheese]

“Eine toughe Lehrerin”

They go further than that meanwhile, they adapt the words to German spelling. Eine taffe Lehrerin.

What is true is that the word "tough" sounds very good to german ears, as does "kaputt" to yours.