Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Bonjour America: French arrogance explained
I came across this funny video blog from Cyrille de Lasteyrie, a French blogger who dreams of meeting Clint Eastwood. French are perceived as arrogant, especially across the atlantic (and pretty much everywhere else too...). Why is it so? Cyrille has the answer: it has to do with French and English grammar. French puts a name before its adjectives in a sentence (a cat blue and sleepy) while it is the reverse in English (a sleepy blue cat). So when an american talks to a frenchman, the latter gets impatient because he is waiting to understand what the story is about... Got it know?
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1 comment:
Hi Thankis for posting!
Sorry, but Cyrille's explanation makes no sense to me. All latin languages (Spanish included) use the same order (name + adjectives).
Maybe french's perception abroad has more to do with the french habit of "leaving the french way", which has a direct translation into Spanish, "irse a la francesa".
Or maybe your whole post was ironic and I did not catch it!
That makes me think about the joke on what is heaven and what is hell. I should post it on my blog.
Best!
Patxi
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