I had crème brûlée for dessert this evening.
I’m not normally so decadent, but it was a special occasion, so why not have some fine French food? Continue reading
Triste!
French language
French-Language Thoughts
Yesterday on Facebook, I wrote briefly about the French phrase tenir la chandelle (literally to hold the candle), which means to play gooseberry. This got me thinking a little about the French verb tenir, which then led me to think about how it relates to the French word maintenant.
And yes, this is all about French, but in honour of France qualifying for the World Cup Final tonight*, I thought it was time for a little change of pace, and some French-Language Thoughts!™ Continue reading
Saint Martin/Sint Maarten
I occasionally like to visit this site’s statistics to have a look at all you lovely readers come from. I’m always amazed and grateful to see people from all over the world (I’d love to know if the two visits from Greenland were two different people, or the same person visiting two different pages).
It was interesting to notice that I’ve had a few visits from both Saint Martin and Sint Maarten. Continue reading
Calque or Loanword?
Reading about Anglish yesterday, I realised that one of the most useful methods for proponents of this form of English is creating calques.
What’s a calque, I hear you ask?
A Soupçon of Mustard
I don’t know if you know it, but I love the word soupçon. Long before I knew what it meant in French, I just loved the sound of it, and its general cheeky French air.
Hours, Minutes, Seconds
I had another of those putting-two-and-two-together moments today. I was trying to elicit the word second from a student. This was in the context of saying a date. This is often quite tricky for French speakers. In French you refer to a date as, for example, le vingt decembre (today’s date). If you were to literally translate this into English, it would be the twenty December, as opposed to the twentieth of December. French speakers often therefore take a while to get used to adding the the and of, and using the ordinal form of the number.
Le Grand Chelem
Watching Roland Garros this summer, I learned a new French term: Le Grand Chelem. Not that it was very new, as it’s not different from an English term I was already aware of.
English-Language Thoughts 