4 ms·
As an aside to this aside on the aside… I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort
by aaronharnly 1y ago
As an aside to this aside on the aside…
I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.
But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.
- antonvs 1y agoI imagine the location of the museum would have been different in the original French, but the same European colonial attitude applies.
- croisillon 1y ago* Belgian
- kragen 1y agoNot a thing.
- IAmBroom 1y agoYou don't believe in Belgium? Delaware, sure. But I'm pretty sure Belgium exists.
- rkomorn 1y agoI don't know anybody who calls the French spoken in Belgium "Belgian" (if only because it becomes ambiguous since Belgium also uses Dutch and German). I'm pretty sure that's what the comment was implying.
- kragen 1y agoExactly. Hergé wrote Tintin in French, not in "Belgian".
- croisillon 1y agono, my parent comment was about the museum location: if Hergé was from Québec he might have mentioned a museum in Montreal, if he was from Tahiti he might have mentioned Papeete... since he was from Belgium (a thing) he mentioned Brussels (the capital city of the thing)
- rkomorn 1y agoReplacing "French" with "Belgian" in the comment you replied to is the only way to take your "* Belgian" comment.
- croisillon 1y agothey didn't say "the original in French" but "the original French"
- rkomorn 1y ago"In the original French" means the original French language in which Tintin was written. "In the original French" does not refer to the nationality of the author or the location of the museum.
- kragen 1y agoRight. You're not a native English speaker, I guess, so I'll offer some advice on how you could have read this correctly. You can tell that "the original French" is a noun phrase, because it's the object of the preposition "in", and prepositional objects are always noun phrases in English. Given that, there are two possible parses: either "original" is an adjective and "French" is a noun, or "original" is a noun and "French" is an adjective. In English, adjectives nearly always precede nouns, so the second possibility is very weak. The noun "French" in English can refer either to the French language or (always with "the") the French people. But interpreting the phrase as meaning "in the original French people" is clearly incorrect, because a museum is too large to fit inside a person, and even a somehow miniaturized museum could only be inserted into one person, not many people. So the phrase unambiguously means "in the original French language", that is, "in the French-language text originally written". I hope this helps!
- ascorbic 1y agoThey were written in French.