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As a French native, I don't see any pun in "demi-gratuité", but I may be missing some context. "you'll get a half-free/be half educated" seems like a stretch.
by Zababa 5y ago
As a French native, I don't see any pun in "demi-gratuité", but I may be missing some context. "you'll get a half-free/be half educated" seems like a stretch.
> As a UK-ian I enjoyed the reference to Perfidious Albion (though note the capitalisation, as it's all a name in UK we capitalise it all but that's not French practice for such a term; this is changing in UK English though).
The name is just "Albion", "perfidious" here is just an adjective like any other. We use "Grande Bretagne" for Great Britain. Notice the two capital letters.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoNo, Perfidious Albion is the whole name, my French teacher said such capitalisation of adjectives wasn't done in French. Country names are a special case. It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). I can't really add anything further. I'm open to being wrong.
- Zababa 5y agoThe thing is that Albion alone is also a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion. Most of the references in the French wikipedia article on Perfidious Albion don't capitalize "Perfidious" either: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion. > It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) That's how it works I think (although we would say "voitures françaises" because "une voiture" is feminine but that's a detail). > If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). That's true, but Albion by itself is also a reference, while Alliance by itself is not. For example, we also have the "Triple Alliance", which is another alliance, but we don't have another Albion. The perfidious Albion and Albion both refer to the same thing. I'm far from being an expert in French though, I'm only a native speaker, so I might be totally wrong about specific points like this.