Showing posts with label French. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
The Guardian newspaper strikes again with "les fuck-offs"
It's all here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/19/britain-france-troubled-alliance
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Knowing French makes you more intelligent (allegedly)!
Irregular verbs, unlikely agreements between words, arbitrary genders - every grammarian says the same thing: French is a difficult language to master. But what if this very complexity accounts for the success of French-speaking mathematicians?
French is a "dreadfully difficult and complicated language, full of knots", so says the writer Claude Duneton in his column in Figaro Littéraire. Look at all "its irregular verbs, its participles that don't agree, its out-of-control adjectives, its singular plurals and its old-fashioned tenses" - not to mention its totally arbitrary genders. Why is "table" feminine and "desk" masculine, and why is it la rose but le lily?
Even grammarians complain about how difficult French is. Claude Duneton, who takes delight in opposing this widely held view, puts forward what he calls a "perfectly gratuitous hypothesis": "What if this very subtlety and these niceties were one of the secret strengths of French? What if the French language encouraged the development of a mathematical way of thinking?" That would help to explain a great mystery: that "French mathematicians and mathematicians who speak French are at the head of world research".
This article, translated by Culturissima's Dr David Winter, first appeared in the literature section of the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro.
French is a "dreadfully difficult and complicated language, full of knots", so says the writer Claude Duneton in his column in Figaro Littéraire. Look at all "its irregular verbs, its participles that don't agree, its out-of-control adjectives, its singular plurals and its old-fashioned tenses" - not to mention its totally arbitrary genders. Why is "table" feminine and "desk" masculine, and why is it la rose but le lily?
Even grammarians complain about how difficult French is. Claude Duneton, who takes delight in opposing this widely held view, puts forward what he calls a "perfectly gratuitous hypothesis": "What if this very subtlety and these niceties were one of the secret strengths of French? What if the French language encouraged the development of a mathematical way of thinking?" That would help to explain a great mystery: that "French mathematicians and mathematicians who speak French are at the head of world research".
This article, translated by Culturissima's Dr David Winter, first appeared in the literature section of the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...
Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
It’s magnifical!
Further proof, if proof were needed, of two self-evident
facts from the world of translation, namely:
i. translators are a waste of money because anyone can
translate;
ii. every French man or woman that the Good Lord has so
graciously bequeathed to us speaks perfect English.
Or maybe not...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)