Well, I needn't have lugged the computer home; I got home (no l'Amuse, it looked smoky), tidied up some, but not a lot because the cleaning stuff the last person left had the scent "fete des fleurs" and I think I want something less smelly. Then I went to bed. Had a good long sleep. Though for some reason I keep waking up in the middle of the night and not having any idea where I am, this has been going on for a while now.
Anyway, back at work, to get this paper done.
But first, some interesting facts about French I've been collecting....
This one is for Noo. No one says "Qu'est-ce que..." to make questions. Instead of what we learned in class, "Qu'est-ce qu'il fait?" ('What is he doing?'), you leave the wh-word in situ and say "Il fait quoi?" ('He's doing what?"). So I guess French still has problems moving wh-words around, it just has decided to solve the problem in another way for some reason. [UPDATE: Okay, a bit of an exaggeration to say that people don't say this. But in "non-standard French", it's out.]
No one says "n'est-ce pas?" at the end of a sentence. I have not heard that once since coming here.
Vowels can be really different from region to region; there are some people I just can't understand at all.
I swear the nasal vowel spelled like "ein" or "ain" or "in", which I learned to pronounce like the nasal vowel in "bend", is trying to be like the nasal vowel in "temps," which is like the nasal vowel in "bond". Sometimes I think I hear it pronounced like the Boston "a" as in "pahk yer cah in Hahvahd yahd," only nasalized of course, but I've heard it even farther back.
Friday, October 28, 2005
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3 comments:
neat! I had read that French had wh-in-situ, but didn't realize it was actually the preferred option...
There are supposed to be times when it's impossible--long-distance questions, and embedded questions, I think. Try to artfully steer the conversation around so that people produce those.
--noo
I asked about embedded questions, and confirmed that those sound like echo questions if you leave the wh-word in situ. But didn't ask about long-distance!
Hey, I can't view your site properly within Opera, I actually hope you look into fixing this.
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