Le Grr, etc.

[rebness]

Disclaimer: This rant does not apply to anyone on my Friends list.

I was reading through a Francophone community today, whereby someone decided it would be a really good idea to write in a mix of French and English. I don’t mean a French introduction, English body of text… I mean something akin to this:

Bonjour, hello… It’s very bonne to meet you all ici. I have been de amoureux avec Paris and France for a tres longue time.

I believe it was at this point that I snapped my pencil in half, to the alarm of my colleagues. I am just so sick of this. It’s infecting LJ like some plague of stupidity.

LOOK. Stop messing up your writing in order to try and look good. We can all use the fecking (grammatically incorrect) Babelfish, you know!

Simple English Lesson

English follows the rule, in general, of Subject-Verb-Object

Subject: I
Verb: Hate
Object: You

French, however, follows a different grammatical pattern:

Subect: Je
Object: Te
Verb: Deteste

(I would have used “Je t’aime” as an example, but the dropped e would have been a pain.)

Therefore, when reading either language, the brain must adapt to the grammatical structure of said language, the nuances of English or the je ne sais quoi of French. Do these writers know how disconcerting it is for the brain to have to keep snapping back and forth into the different grammatical styles every second word?

If you write “I love te” or some such rubbish, I’m afraid you need slapping with a trout. Honestly! If you can't speak French, you can't speak French. Dropping in random French words (nearly always with the wrong modifier) Is. Just. Tiresome.

And revolution-quoting people! Viva is Spanish. Vive is French. Never say Viva la revolution for French, because I’ll spork you good.

Now, I’m not going to be a hypocrite here. When RPing or sometimes when writing a fic, I’ll drop in some French rather than write the whole thing in that language, if only because whilst I’m a pathetic show-off, I’m not so wanky that I expect every reader to be able to speak it. However, I will always do my utmost to make sure it’s an entire sentence in French. A vraiment here, a cherie there, doesn’t hurt anyone. Refer to a woman as “mon” or a man as “ma” and Houston Orleans, we have a problem.

Just…please. If you’re going to use French, learn the entire sentence. It really won’t hurt. There are many good reference books out there. Hell, use a Lonely Planet phrase book if you have to. You may fool some of the people into thinking OMG WTF u sp33k French!!!1! but the rest of us? We’ll be laughing at you. Or snapping our pencils in incandescent rage. Whichever.

Comments

[diana-molloy.livejournal.com]

I have a habit of doing this with Portuguesse. But as you don't speak that (do you?) no pencil snapping pour vous *smirk*. Actually I've done it with French too only because I write as if I am speaking to you and when I am speaking to you I will switch back and forth between languages all the time usually only keeping the grammatical correctness of the main language I happen to be speaking.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

But you speak Portuguese fluently, don't you? That's all right. My brother and I will sometimes switch from English to French or Spanish in conversation, but only to keep up our language and also because it's useful if you're talking about someone or something privately. >:)

However, if you spoke only a smattering of the language or none at all, and were just using to try and look cool... then we break out the pencil-snapping. ;)

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

Here via...I think mirabellwr's LJ. This is exactly what I was going to post. I often find that when I'm speaking with Germans, French, Italians and/or Spaniards, that we switch back and forth, more or less randomly. For business speech, of course, many technical terms only exist in one language or another, but for casual speech, often one person only knows English and their own tongue or that sort of thing and it does lead to rather patchwork conversations.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

I love switching back and forth between languages with fluent people-- you get a real buzz out of it, and also it's a massive help in learning another language if, say, I was to converse with a German or even a Greek. As a learning tool, I think it's fine.