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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, February 18, 2002
23:02 - Y'know, it's good to be versatile...

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You ever notice how in Canadian bilingual announcements, the French voice is always female and the English voice is always male?

I'll bet all kinds of psychological and philosophical conclusions and speculations can be derived from this, about gender roles and societal norms and cultural significance in a world context-- but not by me.

At any rate, the leg of the flight from Toronto to Chicago (hi, Marcus-- no AirPort in O'Hare, dagnabbit!) was an actual Air Canada flight, not merely a United flight where everyone mentions Air Canada a lot. So we had all the bilingual signage, a last fond reminder of Canada on the way home.

I always find myself noticing, though, that French is getting harder and harder to keep in sync with the English content. I can understand enough written French to get the gist of a piece of text and know what it says and what it doesn't say, and while reading the in-flight magazine, enRoute, quite apart from the fact that it has half the content of most such magazines with the same number of pages, I noticed a number of interesting little omissions and translational stumbling blocks. A story in English that talks about "putting shrimp on the barbie" (with reference to a Barbie doll surrounded by shrimp in a particular surrealistic dish) converts to French in the form of "barbiecue", which is cute, but misses out on the majority of the historical and international punnage that leads to the joke's existence in the first place. In another place, the English version of a story talks about how "Since the tragic events of September 2001, people have been turning more toward the comforts of the kitchen"... but in French, September 2001 is never mentioned. I can only begin to speculate why.

There are always space concerns. One only has to look as far as the seat in front of you to see how the relative word bloat of French ends up impoverishing the meaning of what is written in it: "Life vest under front of your seat" translates to "Gilet de sauvetage sous votre siège", which doesn't specify the front of the seat. The versatility of English allows for concise constructs like "life vest", whereas French finds itself groaning under the weight of its rules. "Prière de garder les ceintures bouclées," the sign continues-- trying gamely to absorb a useful word like "buckle", but finding it unwieldy under French phonetics.

French and Spanish both make no distinction between "security" and "safety", a shortcoming that seems rather silly in this day and age. The two languages both use the same word for both concepts-- securité and seguridad, respectively. It's hard to argue that there's no difference between the words. But as I said in an earlier blog, the shades of meaning available in English (where there's a meaningful difference between "after" and "following" and "in the wake of"), while daunting to those first learning the language, make for a lot less potential confusion. When there are lots of synonyms for a concept, and any one of the possible words will hit near the speaker's intended mark, it's much easier to make oneself understood in such a language than in any of the nightmare circumstances of American tourists in Europe fishing desperately for the right word-- the lone, single possible right word-- to express a thought in the Romance language of the region.

English isn't the prettiest language on the planet, not by a long shot-- particularly not the way Americans speak it. But as a tool that can drive just about any bizarrely-shaped screw on the workbench, there's never been anything like it. Nor is there likely to be.

And since English, like Perl, encompasses parts of the vocabulary and even the syntax of many of the foreign languages that have been agglomerated into it, I can think of worse fates for the languages of the world... at least in airports.

UPDATE: Matt Robinson informs me that "buckle" actually comes from the French word. Okay, okay-- I admit I didn't do the etymological research to make sure the example I had to hand was a good one. But the fact is that I could name a dozen others off the top of my head: cederóm, for instance, the word for "CD-ROM", or the weirdness of seeing "kitch" in a French sentence, as it was in another article in the same magazine (to say nothing of "sandwich"). And when the best translation they can do for a column called "Counter Culture" is "Le Challenge du Chef"... :)



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