“Citoyens, le dix-neuvième siècle est grand, mais le vingtième siècle sera heureux. Alors plus rien de semblable à la vieille histoire; on n’aura plus à craindre, comme aujourd’hui, une conquête, une invasion, une usurpation, une rivalité de nations à main armée, une interruption de civilisation dépendant d’un mariage de rois, une naissance dans les tyrannies héréditaires, un partage de peuples par congrès, un démembrement par écroulement de dynastie, un combat de deux religions se rencontrant de front, comme deux boucs de l’ombre, sur le pont de l’infini; on n’aura plus à craindre la famine, l’exploitation, la prostitution par détresse, la misère par chômage, et l’échafaud, et le glaive, et les batailles, et tous les brigandages du hasard dans la forêt des événements. On pourrait presque dire: il n’y aura plus d’ événements. On sera heureux. Le genre humain accomplira sa loi comme le globe terrestre accomplit la sienne; l’harmonie se rétablira entre l’âme et l’astre. L’âme gravitera autour de la vérité comme l’astre autour de la lumière.”

(Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables”, Part V, Book I, Chapter 5.)

“Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then there will be nothing that resembles the history of the past; unlike today, people will no longer have to fear conquest, invasion, usurpation, national rivalries pursued by force, an interruption of civilisation depending on a royal marriage, a birth in the hereditary tyrannies, a division of peoples by congresses, a dismemberment because of the fall of a dynasty, a battle of two religions head on, like two shadowy stags on the bridge of infinity; they will no longer have to fear famine, exploitation, prostitution caused by distress, misery through unemployment, and the gallows, and the sword, and battles, and all the highway robbery of chance in the forest of events. One could almost say: there will no longer be any events. People will be happy. Mankind will obey its own law just as the earthly globe obeys its laws; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star. The soul will gravitate around truth as the star does around light.”

This paragraph is omitted from my English translation, although it is in the Nelson Classics edition in French, where I found it. The words are spoken by Enjolras, a revolutionary at the barricades in 1830, but how much of it did Hugo, quite a hothead in his young days, believe?

The current stand off between the two factions in Ivory Coast has brought the former capital Abidjan into the news again. The French-derived spelling tells us that the nearest English pronunciation of this name should be /æbiˈʤɑːn/, and yet I don’t think I’ve heard a single broadcaster say this. Invariably, it seems to me, the affricate is replaced by a fricative, completely ignoring the orthographic <d>.

This is another example of English-speakers shunning the affricate in a ‘foreign’ word, with less excuse than in the case of Beijing, because here we have clear orthographic evidence that the pronunciation should include a stop before the fricative, or, in English, an affricate. Are we afraid of seeming ignorant if we succumb to using an “English” sound in a “foreign” word?

Language Log today has an example of amazing French official duplicity, arrogance, ignorance and dishonesty.

A representative of the Académie Française claims that the minority languages of France are nothing more than debased dialects, unworthy of being recognised as languages at all, having failed to produce writers of the calibre of Balzac, Montesquieu, etc. On top of that, the European initiative to recognise minority languages is all a German plot! Germany being the only EU state to have no minority languages (is that even true?)

So Basque, Catalan, Occitan, all with long and eminent literary histories, are to be consigned to the  dustbin of history because a few narrow-minded French chauvinists (rightly is that word borrowed from French!) can’t be bothered to find out anything about them.

There are surely more Catalan speakers, for instance, than Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonians. Does the Academy not want to recognise these languages either, as being not worthy of notice? And yet they are national languages.

I think the French state feels very insecure. Inferiority complex?

Athel Cornish-Bowden in Marseille asks about the final -s in some French place names, and French versions of non-French place names (e.g. Douvres, Londres, Cornouailles).

The final -s in these names is often the final remnant of the Old French masculine nominative singular case, which in turn is the left over of Latin final -us in masculine names. Old French retained two of the Latin six cases: the nominative, and the accusative (called in Old French the oblique). Masculine nouns seem to be perverse in this form, in that the nominative singular ends in -s, while the plural does not, and the oblique singular has a zero ending, while the plural ends in -s. As the two case system “decayed” into the no case system we have today (except for the pronoun declensions), the nominative was the form of most nouns that disappeared. Not always, however, and those names that retain the final -s are the last survivors of the Latin case: Charles, Georges, Gilles are three boys’ given names that retain -s – and note that in two of these cases so does modern English (Charles and Giles). Many place names also retain this final -s, and in English we have kept more, it seems, than the French themselves. Marseilles (English) or Marseille (modern French) is just that. Until at least the Second World War, Marseilles was pronounced /mɑːr’seɪlz/ in English, and the final -s (or /z/ sound) was dropped when we English started to realise that the French don’t say it that way – just like the change in Lyon.

Athel makes one very common slip in his lists of names: while Algiers is spelt with final -s in English, Tangier is not. In French, neither name has a final -s.

In fact, French names cause all sorts of problems for English speakers, not least of where to put the stress. French, of course, has no lexical stress, but it would be impossible for an English speaker to avoid stressing at least one syllable in a name. Where should that stress go?

The names of Presidents of the Fifth Republic provide a fair sample.  De Gaulle was no problem: two syllables, the first has a neutral vowel in both languages, so the second was the natural choice for stress. But then Pompidou was the first of three to have three syllables. The nearest to a stressed syllable in French would be the last, as phrasal stress falls there. That would lead to Pompi’dou, and also Mitte’rrand, and Sarko’zy. None of these sounds natural in English, but interestingly, while the first two lend themselves to initial stress in English (and this was the BBC recommendation in both cases): ‘Pompidou and ‘Mitterrand, the current President seems most comfortably stressed on the second syllable: Sar’kozy. In fact, as we know, Sarkozy is not a French name at all, but Hungarian, in which language it would have been stressed on the first syllable. However, the BBC recommendation is to stress the final syllable, with the predictable result that many journalists, who are not obliged to follow the Pronunciation Unit’s advice, ignore it, and go with Sar’kozy, which is neither French nor Hungarian, and sounds the least French-like to me.

Interspersed between these three, we had Giscard d’Estaing, who fits quite well as ‘Giscard des’taing, and Chirac, whom most people stressed on the first syllable (which was the BBC recommendation), but a few who “knew better”, on the second. Americans, mindful of the fact that these are foreign names, almost invariably pronounce the letter A as a long one, so /ʃirɑːk/. They also have a tendency to stress all shortish French names on the final syllable, so mostly /ʃi’rɑːk/.

On a lighter note, Pompidou caused some childish hilarity in Norway, as “pomp i do” in Norwegian means ‘bottom in toilet’.