This is an attempted joint review of two excellent books, both in their own way about French, its joys, development, history, and historical importance and--most of all--its continued importance and utility in a world that needs French as much or more than it ever has. This is the best pairing of books I've been lucky enough to stumble on to since I read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf back-to-back with John Gardner's Grendel, so I'm posting the same review for both. The two books are Flirting with French, by fellow Yankee William "Guy" Alexander, and The Story of French, by Canadians Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow.Alexander's book is a bitter-sweet narrative about his simultaneous efforts to overcome his own limited facility in second-language acquisition and his on-going heart failure. At 57, he never quite says learning French is on his bucket list, but that's the clear subtext to what drives him. Alexander is, by his own admission, a poor linguist, with aptitude tests showing he has a dramatically lower prospect of learning a second-language than even most adult learners do. A few knowledge errors in the book, such as believing Finnish and Swedish are related languages, reinforce his self-assessment. But his reflections do include the rare self-knowledge that living in any mono-lingual world is to live in a ghetto or self-imposed isolation. In his own quest to master the language, Alexander shows that most of what English-speakers think they know about France--from Parisians' famous rudeness to the country's nation-wide sloth and outlandish chauvinism--is dead wrong, and moreover he shows what mono-linguists are missing: exposure to science, literature, cuisine, and culture--in short an entire world of thought that the English-only world is unaware of. Alexander's book is light and fun, but provides serious lessons. The most astonishing "findings" were the increase in his overall memory ability, not to mention scientifically measured brain activity, that results directly from his Herculean efforts to learn a second-language. Sudoku is all fine and good, but any middle-aged person worried about Alzheimer's or similar decline should seriously consider taking up a second language. Alexander's example is well worth reading. Learning a language IS much harder for grown-ups, but not impossible, and not a waste of time even if the results are less than perfect.The other book, The Story of French, is more academic in tone and is as much about The Meaning of French as the story of French, looking at its local development in France, its spread both through colonialism and prestige, and the continuing status of French throughout the French-speaking enclaves from Romania to Baton Rouge. The authors included a welcome bibliography, and the book is very well-annotated (William Alexander included The Story of French in his bibliography for Flirting with French--go figure!) Nadeau and Barlow are, respectively, French Canadian and Anglo-Canadian, and their collaboration on this project includes the perspectives of learning each others' language. If you've ever struggled in learning French, this book will confirm everything you've believed about its ridiculous spellings, its arbitrary conjugations, and its obsession with the Ideal, known as "the norm" (norme): a perfect form of the language that each generation believes was spoken by the one before but which, of course, never existed. English speakers have our concept of "the norm," too, which is why speakers of Ebonics or northern dialects in England remain socially and economically hindered until they learn The Norm. But the French take this much farther, and internalize it much more. This is partly because French is in some ways a language as artificial and contrived as Esperanto. It did not develop or evolve naturally, instead, it was shaped out of the local Parisian dialect in very conscious and deliberate ways to be a tool of the intellectual elite and of the state. But people who see this as a bad thing fail to realize the useful point: to create a precise, immutable tool for exactly describing meaning. This exactitude is why French became the first international language of the modern era, and why in part it created the modern world: precision, accuracy, and unwavering standards. French is the linguistic equivalent of the metric system. Its spellings remain divorced from pronunciation so that the connotative implications deriving from etymological origins are not lost, but also to prevent homonyms that would result in confusion. Similarly, the tradition of French lexicographers--and speakers--is to reject the reality of synonyms: no two words ever mean the same thing. This is a far cry better practice than the current American-English belief that any single word can mean anything, e.g., "impact," (ugh.) This linguistic conservatism is of course highly silly on some levels, and generally ignored by the masses who speak French however they feel like it, including slang, Creoles, mixing it with English or other languages, and creating new words or new meanings for old words. The conservative, protective attitude toward the language also forms the basis of English-speakers' near-universal contempt for the French Academy, which actually has little power and serves a largely symbolic role of upholding the norm. But ironically, such strong linguistic institutions give those who revel in linguistic apostasy greater freedom to create without seriously threatening to destroy faith in the language.French remains a great language and a great tool of study, particularly for anyone wanting access to international academic discoveries or cultural diversity. Its precision and moreover its contrast to English modes of expression and English-language thought patterns, along with its widespread use and extensive literature in all human endeavors, argue for its continued place among the select group of languages that have been designated official status as international languages both by the UN and by the millions of second-language learners who choose French as their second language of choice in order to gain entry to a vibrant gated community--the francophonie--where the rest of us, perhaps too resentfully, have always suspected the best parties are happening just out of earshot. If you are going to choose your second language, choose French--and start by reading these books.
Out of all the books that have taken me *forever* to read recently, this one is my absolute favorite. By far. Sure, it gets a little draggy toward the end (when they go through every single way that French could ever apply to anything in the modern world ever. But so much more than that, it's a history of the development of French, the development of its influence, a culture, a worldview, outposts of thought; everything, really. Will you still enjoy it if you don't speak French? Absolutely; it's just that some of the examples will have less resonance for you.The logic of French purism since Malherbe has been that each word should have a precise definition; no two words are perfectly synonymous. In Webster's English dictionary the word tolerate has a definition. But put up with is defined merely as "tolerate," without further explanation. No French dictionary would ever do that. A French dictionary of synonyms goes much further than an English thesaurus, which merely lists the synonyms. It will either give precise definitions for each equivalent, categorize the synonyms as literal, analogous or figurative or differentiate them in some other way.My favorite fascinating new fact? The difference between Creole and Cajun cultures in Louisiana. Cajuns (and their culture) are descended from French-Canadian Acadiens who relocated into Louisiana. Creoles (and their culture) are descended from refugees of the Hatian civil war following that country's independence. (And I can't resist throwing in a fascinating fact that I already knew: creole (note the small "c") is a linguistic term referring to a "created" language. When you have a group of people working or living together who are all native speakers of different languages, they sometimes develop a pidgin. [Fact from the book: One of the earliest recorded examples of which was Lingua Franca, developed by merchants and traders around the Mediterranean.] Pidgins don't really have much in the way of grammar. However, as speakers of pidgins have kids and the language is perpetuated over the course of a generation or two, a grammar develops, and it becomes a creole, a completely independent language. No one grew up speaking Lingua Franca, so it never grew into a creole. [Another fact from the book: Linguists believe there are creoles currently developing in a couple of Francophone countries in Africa.])
Do You like book The Story Of French (2006)?
In addition to being THE authoritative history of the evolution of the French language, this thoroughly-researched work identifies where French is today and what its future may be. The evidence presented identifies the largest impediments to the advancement of the French language: the attitude and misunderstandings of the people in the mother country – France. It is interesting to note that just as these observations could probably not be made by Frenchmen, the authors of this book are French Canadians.A bit repetitious at times, but a great insight as to why the French language continues to expand its presence in the world despite the onslaught of English.
—Walt
I don't speak French at all, but my wife does, and I picked it up thinking this would be a good 'put me to sleep' book. Boy, was I wrong: this thing keeps me up late. I read once that in order to understand the history of a people, you must learn the history of their language. This is the perfect book for someone who's curious about European history/languages, but doesn't want to be bothered with actually learning another language.Okay, now I can say that the first third of the book is the most
—Erok
This is another book that took me forever to read because I savored and annotated it to the point of compulsion. Authors Jean-Benoit Nadau and Julie Barlow, Canadians who are life partners as well as writing partners, earlier wrote a book called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong, which I also enjoyed. While the first book was about understanding contemporary France and French people, The Story of French is a much more global look at the French language, how it began, developed, and where it is going in the future. The history is interesting, but I was much more fascinated with the discussion of how French has spread globally due mostly to France's 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th-century colinization efforts in North America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Quebec's efforts to preserve the purity of the French language. Whereas the French themselves have become a little complacent lately in allowing English words to invade their language, the scrappy Quebecois (of whom author Nadeau is a part) are adament about giving every new technological or pop culture word a French language equivalent. The authors discuss the advent of francophonie (with a small f), which is the global collection of all French-speaking countries, and La Francophonie (with a capital F), which is an official organization, not unlike the British Commonwealth, that attempts to keep the French language thriving and growing globally. The Francophonie has such unlikely members as Bulgaria, Romania, Cambodia, Laos, and Moldava, which have a lot of French speakers and want to see the language preserved in their countries. However, Algeria, whose Arab-Muslim population is still peeved at the French, refuses to join the Francophonie, but still keeps the French language thriving in the country, since they learned the hard way that using French is more advantageous to their development than falling back on Arabic. The authors assert that the importance of French as a global language is not going to diminish any time soon, but they suggest the concept of pluralingualism--the embracing of more than one language in various societies--to keep all sorts of languages thriving. Tables in the back of the book contain a lot of interesting statistics that rank world languages in order of use. For example, French is second only to English as the most influential language in the world, French is the second-most used language of the Internet, and French ranks ninth in the world for the most speakers, behind English, Spanish, Hindi and Chinese, but neck-and-neck with Portugese, and well ahead of German, Japanese and Arabic.
—Helynne
