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Fun fact after that last one, while France will call a French drain a drain, Quebec (the French-speaking part of Canada) actually calls it a "drain Français" du
by belval 5y ago
Fun fact after that last one, while France will call a French drain a drain, Quebec (the French-speaking part of Canada) actually calls it a "drain Français" due to the influence of English neighbours. We translated the guy's name.
- mrosett 5y agoOff topic, but I got a good laugh when I learned that the French call French toast "Pain perdu Americain"
- espadrine 5y agoWe only call it that when we visit the US though.
- Kydlaw 5y agoI'm sorry to announce you that somebody fooled you. Source: I'm french, lived in many different regions and everybody called it simply "pain perdu". Moreover, french people usually do not add the origin of a recipe like american do on a regular basis.
- glandium 5y agoAlso, pain perdu and French toast are different things. You don't use fresh bread for pain perdu, that would be a waste (pun intended).
- dnautics 5y agois that like stop signs saying arret when in france they say "stop"?
- belval 5y agoNot quite, the stop/arrêt thing is because of a law that says our official language is French so everything HAS to be in French. If a product's packaging does not have a French side it simply cannot be sold in Quebec unless it has an exception of sorts.
- joemi 5y agoThere's a great bit about that in the movie Canadian Bacon where a police officer in Canada (not sure if it was actually in Quebec or not) catches some Americans writing anti-Canadian graffiti. The officer informs them that they need to have French translations and helps them add it, and then moves on.
- matrix2596 5y agoYou must see the Latin correction in life of Brian then
- kzrdude 5y agoSounds very Pythonesque, indeed
- bmn__ 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU
- joemi 5y agoThanks. It's been quite a while since I've seen it. Guess I slightly mis-remembered it, but got the gist of it right.
- wwalexander 5y agoIn Montreal, there is a flashing neon sign on top of a former flour factory [1]. This sign originally read: FARINE FIVE ROSES FLOUR The first line is French for “flour”, the second line is the brand name, and third line is, well, “flour” in English. When Bill 101 passed, they had to remove “flour” from the sign as it was an English word. However, they were allowed to keep “Five Roses”, as opposed to “Cinq Roses”, since it’a a brand name, so now it simply reads: FARINE FIVE ROSES The owners have apparently tried to take the sign down, since the brand has since been sold to their competitors, but capitulated to public outcry. Apparently, it’s quite expensive to maintain, but I can see why locals don’t want it to go. It adds a lot of character to the skyline. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farine-five-roses-sign https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farine-five-roses-sign
- kzrdude 5y agoI'm a bit interested in why all the European countries standardized on STOP for that sign. Apparently that's mandated by the convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... which has wide support in Europe and sporadically other places. It's impressive/weird to me that the convention got all the countries to use the english word on the stop sign, for consistency.
- jorams 5y agoWhile I don't know the answer, I would guess it has something to do with it not just being the English word. It's also the Dutch word (spelled exactly the same) and, based on some random clicking in Google Translate, Croation, Norwegian and Czech. It's a secondary translation in a bunch of other languages. I don't know how much of that changed after the road signs, but it looks like a good international basis.
- kzrdude 5y agoit is not norwegian, as we would write STOPP in norwegian. In that sense, it's annoying, it's a word you understand, but the sign is also "misspelled".
- hnbad 5y agoSame in German. I remember teachers lecturing us in school about this. "Stop" certainly has become an acceptable spelling in colloquial German for some people because of this, much to the despair of language purists. Even the Duden (German standard reference dictionary) seems to have adopted it even if with some caveats: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/stop https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/stop
- apocolyps6 5y ago> Even the Duden Good. The purpose of a dictionary is to record how language is used, not to gatekeep or social engineer what is "proper" language and what isn't. Linguistic prescriptivism is the purview of bigots and school teachers.
- disintegore 5y agoThere are multiple French-speaking parts of Canada
- belval 5y agoOf course! I didn't mean to say that French is only spoken in Quebec, you can read my comment more as a one of the French-speaking province, didn't mean to exclude anyone :)
- robertlagrant 5y agoToo late! Your comment commanded everyone else in Canada to speak English, and French is now excluded.
- sergers 5y agoYea I have had heard disdain from born in France speakers who immigrated to Canada, about Quebecois or Canadian french. Alot is literal translation of English to French, not using a specific french term or word for an item. Example I always hear of: sour cream is translated to Crème Sure in Canada french. Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche
- wwalexander 5y agoWhile they’re similar, crème fraîche and sour cream are different foods. Sour cream usually has additional ingredients and is noticeably more viscous, and has a much more sour flavor. You wouldn’t really want to put it on fruit or breakfast pastries like crème fraîche.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Sour cream usually has additional ingredients While sour cream may sometimes have additional stabilizers, the main difference (both are cultured cream products made with a similar process) is that crème fraiche has a significantly higher (~30%) than sour cream (~20%).
- belval 5y agoOfficial French from Quebec has some pretty atrocious words that where forcibly "adapted". My favourite example is "mél" which is "mail" as-in email. Before you ask, no, no one uses that.
- 908B64B197 5y agoOther way around. Quebec uses "courriel" and France has settled on "mél". https://blogs.mediapart.fr/robert-chaudenson/blog/210513/email-mel-ou-courriel-le-francais-nouveau-sur-le-tapis https://blogs.mediapart.fr/robert-chaudenson/blog/210513/ema...
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Yea I have had heard disdain from born in France speakers who immigrated to Canada, about Quebecois or Canadian french. Ironically, the brain drain seems to only be going one way. > Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche Rarely identical.
- snotrockets 5y agoThere's a similar story about you'll hear from tour guides in East Jerusalem – there's a neighborhood there called at-tel al-faransiya (in Arabic) or ha-giv'a ha-tzarfatit (in Hebrew), both translate "The French [people] Hill". When your tour passes by that neighborhood, your guide would surely tell you that it is actually named after the British general John French who was stationed there, and a similar mistake as the one above made it change nationality. Everyone laughs, and continue with the tour. But those that would later search for general French woill find he didn't serve with his Majesty's forces in Palestine – and that the hill is named after the French monks from the Monastery of St Anne…
- fortran77 5y agoAnd in France, a "French Kiss" is just a "kiss."
- glandium 5y agoIn France, a French kiss is a shovel.