Words of Wonder
There have been many, many moments of epiphany and even more of puzzlement, as I've learned my French vocabulary. Today, for example, in class (with the very strange Phillipe), when discussing employment and the process for applying for jobs here in France, we discussed the French custom of requiring candidates to submit a hand-written letter of interest. The word to describe this (a hand-written document) in French is "un manuscrit". I had never made the connection between the word manuscript in english and the roots of the word -- manu (main = hand in french), and script, meaning written. Ok, so I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, or often, depending on your perspective.
The other strange thing about this has nothing to do with the word manuscript, but rather has to do with french cultural norms, which are in so many ways so very different from those I'm used to in either Ireland or certainly in the US. French employers will often send your carefully hand-written cover letter to a graphologist who will, for a fee, analyze the candidate. I shudder to think what type of information makes its way back to the employer: "sloppy style, indicating a sloppy mind; left-leaning capitals, signifying an unstable emotional nature; doesn't dot her i's, signifying lack of attention to detail . . ." Uuugh! Strange enough that after all of these years of reprieve from being criticized for my handwriting or at least having it evaluated by my primary school teachers, I now have to start worrying about not only how it looks, but what it reveals about my employability - gulp! How I wish I had tried harder in school to develop a more standard and mature writing style. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure we were instructed in a standard style of writing. I've noticed that very many Americans have beautiful and highly regular, standardized penmanship -- is that a teaching method tauted in particular states or during a specific era? Hmm? Certainly, Irish people write distinctively, but there doesn't seem to have been a strict standard we were held to. Well, that's another subject.
So, here are some of the more head-scratching words I've learned in French so far:
une fermeture Eclair = a zip (yes, a zip)
un ordinateur = a computer
un velo = a bike
un soutien gorge = a bra (I ask you, where does the word "brassiere" come from, if not France???)
un retroprojecteur = an overhead projector
un apparail photo = a camera
A bientot . . .
posted by Gillian & Mike @ 2:11 PM
5 Comments:
How very interesting . . . . Well, being of a "certain age" penmanship was a "class" when I was in grade school. Not something we did once in awhile, but yes, rows and rows and rows of practicing each and every letter - and when we learned cursive, rows and rows and rows of those too!
My girls did not learn penmanship in that way, nor did they have the sample "letters of the alphabet" over the blackboard either!
Well, now we know just how old I am. But for years of taking phone messages and jotting notes of "to do's" the penmanship of old is all but gone. I would hate to have it analyzed now!!
Hi to both of you from,
Sandy and of course, Bill and Nelson!
P.S. SEE YOU THIS SUMMER!
Handwriting analysis? That's BIZARRE--according to my Anglo world view!
Here's a historical oddity. During the French Revolution, a certain Lepeltiere--I may have mispelled the name--had a "vision" for how French children should be educated. He hoped that at every hour of every day every child in every school in France would be learning an identical subject in an identical way: i.e. math at 9:00 AM, with fractions at 9:15, and alegebra at 9:30, and geometry at 9:45; followed by History at 10:00 AM, followed by composition at 11:00, followed by...well, you get the idea. The point being: FORM means AS MUCH as FUNCTION. This is entirely at odds with the way Anglos conduct themselves in the world--and I can only imagine the sort of oddities Mike is running into in the business world!
I was born in the States in 1957. By the time I hit grade school, the "do-your-own-thing" 60s were in full swing. As a result, I was taught "the new math" rather than arithmetic and did not learn my times until I was 12 - and then only on the insistence of my mother. (Thanks, Mom!) I was taught "creative writing" rather than grammar. To this day, almost everything I know about verbs comes from French and everything I know about nouns comes from Russian.
HOWEVER, even in the hey-day of free-love and just about free-everything-else, we DID study handwriting. We did rows and rows and rows of loops and upstrokes and downstrokes to get the basic elements in place. Then we moved on to rows and rows and rows of letters. I got into a huge row with my 5th-grade teacher over the fact that although my finished capital cursive I's looked exactly like the capital cursive I's in our workbooks, the direction in which I moved my hand to write them was, according to him, "backwards." Hey, I'm left-handed - so sue me!
Four decades later, just about the only time I use cursive anymore is to sign my name. This is partly because most of the work I do involves writing a combination of letters and numbers, and it's easier to fit the number motions in if you're printing. But it's also because an increasing number of North Americans seem unable to read cursive!
As for submitting a handwriting sample when applying for a job, I'm all for it, although only to check for some minimum standard of legibility. There are still times when workmates need to communicate by means of handwritten notes or to read each other's notations on files in progress. On occasion I've had to work with people whose printing is a secret code known only to themselves. Not fun!
As for French words, Gillian, one of my favourites is "courriel," a telescoping of "courrier électronique" = "electronic mail" - > e-mail. "Courriel" is current here in Canada - I don't know if the same is true in France?
Sarah
Sarah:
Mike is familiar with courriel and a push in France to use it instead of 'e-mail', but I've never heard the word used -- my french professors have used 'e-mail'.
Speaking of direction of pen-strokes, I'm sure you know that the french accents 'fall'. That is you start above the letter and make the mark downwards toward the letter. After one professor insisted on this and I insisted on knowing why, she explained that the weight looks different if you start at the top and mark downwards than the other way around -- just try it, its true. I can't say that's got anything to do with your rather picky teacher, but . . .
Gillian
"Speaking of direction of pen-strokes, I'm sure you know that the french accents 'fall'. That is you start above the letter and make the mark downwards toward the letter."
No, I didn't know that - and now that I do, I'll do my best to ignore it, 'cause for 36 years now I've been doing my accents graves in the other direction! In other words, I do both accents acutes and accents graves from right to left, which means that my acutes fall but my graves don't. I figure that as une gauchée, I'm allowed. (grin)
Re: French French vs. Canadian French, because language and politics are intertwined here, Canadian French is often more resistant to English loan words. Ce n'est pas le weekened en Canada - c'est le fin de semaine !
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