Welcome, Stranger, part two. French, part two

I recently moved to France from America, as I have written in earlier essays. Many Americans are annoyed at the subtlety of the French language. I embrace it, but some people try to find work-arounds. 

One example is gender. As someone once said, every French noun is either a girl or a boy, and you’d better not get them mixed up. There are some patterns but no clear rules to distinguish them. In Spanish, nouns ending with -a are usually feminine, and nouns ending with -o are usually masculine. There are a few exceptions, such as la mano, the hand. But in French there are no general rules. Sometimes, in word pairs, one is masculine and the other feminine, such as le bois (the woods, masculine) and la forêt (the forest, feminine). But there is not much of an alternative to just learning the gender while learning the noun.

It often does not help to read the noun, even when it has a definite article. The school, for example, is l’école, and the L could be either le or la. You just have to learn that école is…um…I forgot.

American writer David Sedaris used one creative approach. Just get two of everything. For instance, the box is le boîte (notice the circumflex indicating that there used to be an x there), a masculine noun, and the bottle is la bouteille, feminine. But for the plurals, the definite article is les: les boîtes, les bouteilles. So just never refer to a noun in the singular and you’re safe. I think Sedaris, as always, was just being humorous. Because the gender never disappears. When you say the boxes to which, it is les boîtes auxquels, but the bottles to which is bouteilles auxquelles. Fortunately, when you are talking, people cannot (I think) tell the difference between auxquels and auxquelles.

The French language is just one thing that the French proudly defend as part of their cultural uniqueness. In an upcoming I will tell you about more ways the French are culturally unique, and provide an evolutionary background for it.

Welcome, Stranger, part one. French, part one.

This is my last essay this year, but I will continue the series in 2024.

As I said in my previous essay, I have just moved to Strasbourg, France. It is a relief to be here, where life is just not as dangerous as in America. In America, there may be more guns than people. And in America, if you need a bottle of Jardiance pills for diabetes, you will have to pay $800, even if you have Medicare and supplemental insurance. In France, it will be a long time before I qualify for French health care, but even if I have to buy pills for myself, it won’t be any freaking $800.

But meanwhile, I am going through a period of adjustment. This is the inspiration for my short series, Welcome, Stranger. Today, the French language.

One problem with the French people is that they speak French. And French is a very difficult language. To people who have grown up speaking it, it is simple, and this is true for any language in the world. My granddaughter, age 5, already talks in French, not thinking about grammar or vocabulary. She just learned it from the other kids at school. She has even gotten the French snotty-sounding R, perhaps a little too much. But for older people like myself, learning a new language is difficult. I have studied French not intensely but consistently for ten years, and I can read it fairly well, and construct a few simple sentences. But a French person speaking at full speed leaves me behind in the dust. I watch Jamy Gourmaud’s Youtube videos, but even at speed 0.75 I can only understand it with the French subtitles.

In Paris, I am told (having been there as briefly as possible on my way to or from Strasbourg), the people pretend to not understand you if you try to speak French. This has led to some comedy routines such as Chef Louis and Garrison Keillor on the old Prairie Home Companion radio shows. Keillor would try to order something off of the menu, and the waiter would get angry at him: “Why did you call my mother a suitcase?” But in Strasbourg, at least, if a native English speaker is quiet, polite, and makes a sincere effort, most people are appreciative. In our suburb, Hoenheim, we are about the only Americans, and my wife and I have the reputation of being the cute little old couple who are trying to speak French.

Don’t get me wrong. French is a wonderful language. Even just to look at it is beautiful. One of the first things you will notice is the diacritical marks. Lots of them. They have two kinds of accent marks for e, one of them rising, the other falling. What is a shepherd? Il élève des moutons. They denote slight differences in pronunciation. Sometimes diacritical marks denote differences in meaning; a means he/she/it has, while à means to. A C with a cedilla means that the C, which would normally sound like a K before vowels a, o, and u, instead sounds like an S: Ça y est! And then there is the circumflex, which as far as I can tell exists only to designate that, in the past, the vowel was followed by an s or an x. In French, forest has become forêt, castle has become château, and hostel has become hôtel. Être used to be like the Spanish estar (to be). When you look at a page of French writing, the diacritical marks poke at you like the piqûres of mosquitoes. It is surely (sûrement) and extremely (extrêmement) thrilling.

And the French love their diacritical marks. Recently the French Academy, the gatekeeper of French language, decided that diacritical marks were unnecessary. But the marks are still everywhere. The French love them because they are part of what it means to be French! You will find them even at tram stops, as in these two photos: the Général DeGaulle tram stop, and the map that says you are here (vous êtes ici).

If the government tried to remove the diacritical marks from public signs, there would probably be a big strike that would shut down the tram lines. Give us back our diacritical marks! Strike is grève, where we get our word grievance.)

 I have more examples in the next essay. See you then.