Le Petit Poucet

We have the story; the French have a noun. A petit poucet is a child (the child) that ventures into a forest and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind. It's nice to be able to use a perfectly-defined noun ("t'es un petit pouce, toi!") instead of a weak comparison ("you're like that kid from the story where…"). Language score: love-one, France.

But the bourgeois metaphors aside, let's figure out linguistically why the French language has such a highfalutin reputation. Get out your GRE vocabulary list and tell me what these commonly-used (as in, commonly used by my 7 year-old students) French words mean:

ameliorer (v.)
inondation (n.)
panoplie (n.)
tempete (n.)
draconien (adj.)
puissance (n.)
exiger (v.)
egalement (adv.)
mendiant (n.)
lumiere (n.)
tenir (v.)
flegmatique (adj.)
quotidien (adj.)
essayer (v.)
os (n.)
pueril (adj.)

Maybe draconien and puerile are more Le Monde than l'ecole, but for the most part, these words are in very regular parlance (voila!). I've had students complain about being wet from l'inondation (attn: hyperbole) and sales clerks wish me a cheerful merci egalement, while I essay just about everything in attempts to ameliorer my French. But can't I just improve my French? No.

It almost bothers me that these words are used with such fluency by my students. For an anglophone, learning "fancy" vocabulary words is like discovering the key to another, more precise language -- but it isn't. Par contre, it's learning synonyms for words in our own language that are already in use by pre-pubescent French children, who I doubt are somehow thinking on a higher linguistic level than college-educated, English-speaking adults. It's simply their language.

Almost 12 years of study, and the language fascinates me more than ever (and improves my English)…

Unrelated language question: does anyone know a word that is the opposite of "steep" (as in, a hill)? The only one I could think of was "gentle," but that doesn't feel right to me. Other languages are encouraged.

In other news, my April (and final!) vacation is planned. I wanted to get the tickets and all that out of the way so I could freely enjoy my final month and a half in the Vosges… (I'm holding out on an emotional blog post; I can already feel the ostrich egg of tears beginning to grow in the back of my throat.)

My itinerary: Brussels for five days, Amsterdam for six, Luxembourg for three. Daytrips to Bruges, Antwerp, The Hague, Rotterdam, and perhaps some traditional Dutch fishing villages (as suggested by my Dutch friend Brenda; see below photo) are all possible. Besides the gastronomic delights I'm prepared to experience -- fries, beer, chocolate, waffles, cheese, and ahem, coffee-shops -- I'm also quite excited to hear some Belgian and Luxembourg French. Different vocabularies, accents, grammar, linguistic influences (e.g., Flemish, Dutch, Wallon, Luxembourgeois). A weekend trip to Basel (Switzerland) is on my back burner, too. I want to get to all the francophone countries in Europe!

 

Out of the mountains and into the low countries.