Comments on: French: la langue de l’amour? http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/ Spiritual Guidance by Word, Card, and Star Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:51:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Jeff Lilly http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/comment-page-1/#comment-28215 Jeff Lilly Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:17:06 +0000 http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/#comment-28215 That's a neat site, Kate, and a bold group of people! I very much doubt that anything will come of their efforts -- after all, changing the spelling system of English -- among all the countries who use it -- would cost untold trillions; and the United States hasn't even managed to switch over to the metric system of measurement. But someday it <i>will</i> have to be done: eventually the sounds and spellings of English will separate so widely that they'll hardly have any connection at all. Of course, by that time I suspect that English will have split into dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects, with a single "standard" English that is spoken by almost no one, just as happened to Latin. Each of the mutually unintelligible dialects will have its own spelling system, and the old standard will gradually fall into disuse. That’s a neat site, Kate, and a bold group of people! I very much doubt that anything will come of their efforts — after all, changing the spelling system of English — among all the countries who use it — would cost untold trillions; and the United States hasn’t even managed to switch over to the metric system of measurement. But someday it will have to be done: eventually the sounds and spellings of English will separate so widely that they’ll hardly have any connection at all. Of course, by that time I suspect that English will have split into dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects, with a single “standard” English that is spoken by almost no one, just as happened to Latin. Each of the mutually unintelligible dialects will have its own spelling system, and the old standard will gradually fall into disuse.

]]> By: Kate Gladstone http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/comment-page-1/#comment-24832 Kate Gladstone Sun, 10 Jun 2007 22:40:18 +0000 http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/#comment-24832 Jeff - your daughters and you (perceiving the flaws in English spelling) may want to visit http://spellingsociety.org ... the adults who run it agree with your daughters, and seem resolved to take matters in hand after 99 years of studying the situation. Jeff – your daughters and you (perceiving the flaws in English spelling) may want to visit http://spellingsociety.org … the adults who run it agree with your daughters, and seem resolved to take matters in hand after 99 years of studying the situation.

]]> By: Erik http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/comment-page-1/#comment-24166 Erik Thu, 07 Jun 2007 21:40:53 +0000 http://druidjournal.net/2007/02/16/french-la-langue-de-lamour/#comment-24166 Anne, <i>His mind was boggled, of course, by hearing his native tongue spoken with an Appalachian American accent.</i> My wife is a NC native; she took four years of French at Wake Forest. She once described a scene in her French III seminar - they had a new-to-the-area teacher, and he almost fell over his chair when he started going around the room to exchange greetings and was met with "Bon joor, mon sewer"... Jeff, <i>sometime soon I will have to do penance for this article by balancing it with a link to an article that really is a hommage to French.<i> (Side note - wouldn't that be "AN hommage"? Silent H and all that...) That would be cool too, but in the meantime here's a link to what remains, over 100 years later, <a href="http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/solarmyth/frog.html" rel="nofollow">one of the funniest pokes at French ever written</a>. Anne,
His mind was boggled, of course, by hearing his native tongue spoken with an Appalachian American accent.

My wife is a NC native; she took four years of French at Wake Forest. She once described a scene in her French III seminar – they had a new-to-the-area teacher, and he almost fell over his chair when he started going around the room to exchange greetings and was met with “Bon joor, mon sewer”…

Jeff,
sometime soon I will have to do penance for this article by balancing it with a link to an article that really is a hommage to French.
(Side note – wouldn’t that be “AN hommage”? Silent H and all that…)

That would be cool too, but in the meantime here’s a link to what remains, over 100 years later, one of the funniest pokes at French ever written.

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