Re: CHAT: OFF: Eddie Izzard (Re: CHAT: Champaign!)

Christophe>>>>>>
Paul Bennett wrote:
>
> Christophe>>>>>>
> Just a small message to tell you that to celebrate the 1000th person
> who landed on my webpage (the counting began on the end of July) last=
> week, I asked David to give me subdomains directing to my page.
> <<<<<<
>
> Hehehehe!
>
> The title of your message reminded me of an Eddie Izzard piece, where=
 he
> mentions that the French have the opposite attitude to the English re=
garding
> Beer and Champaign.  The French will, according to Eddie, celebrate _=
anything_
> by opening champaign, and reserve beer for special occasions:  "You h=
ave
crossed
> the road? Champaign!"  "You have bought a new car? Champaign!"  "You =
have
found
> some money down the back of your couch? Champaign!"  "You have had a =
baby?
> Here's a beer..." *
>
        I don't know this man. Most American showmen are unknown in Eur=
ope and
especially in France, you know (well, I think it must be the same the
other way round too :) ).
<<<<<<
He's English, not American.  He has French (Norman?) ancestry (Original=
 name
"Isard".  Possibly this indicates Sard origins?).  By far, he's the fun=
niest man
living, IMO.  He goes on stage with 3 or 4 fully-prepared jokes and man=
ages to
keep an audience laughing for 2 hours or so with (semi)improvised surre=
al
tangents.


>>>>>>
> Not that I'm suggesting that your website isn't worthy of champaign! =
<G>

        Sometimes I wonder... :)

 It's
> very interesting, I haven't had a chance to look over all of it yet. =
 Much of
> the site seems to be only in French only, but The Altavista Babelfish=
 (and
some
> careful reading) makes fairly short work of it.
>
        I never tried Babelfish for long texts, but seeing how it works=
 for the
bits I give it sometimes, the result with a long text must be awful! :)=

I long for the Universal Translator of Star Trek...
        As for my homepage, it will unfortunately stay a long time only=
 in
French, as I don't have the time to translate what I've already written=

(too busy adding things and trying to cope with real life :( ). But if
someone finds the time to do that for me, I would be very grateful :) .=

<<<<<<

See if you recognise this (unedited) Babelfished extract:
Babelfish>>>>>>
Astou :
It is the language of people missing one or two centuries before our er=
a (one
does not know very well) : Dhastem. Although the still existing documen=
ts are
very rare, the language itself is rather well known (the way of life of=
 Dhastem
is much less). The disappearance of Dhastem as of their continent seems=
 to be at
the base of the legend of Atlantis. From the structure point of view, A=
stou is a
rather original language because it seems to contain features as well b=
ringing
it closer to the Indo-European languages as of the languages of South A=
merica.
Azak :
The structure of this language approaches that Hungarian or that Turkis=
h. Only
the suffixes and the position of the word in the sentence indicate if t=
he word
makes verbal or nominal sense (the roots do not have a value by themsel=
ves). It
is a ergative language. Moreover, it is characterized by a rather origi=
nal
written form .
R=E9man :
It is a Romance language, i.e. resulting from Latin and same family as =
French or
Spanish. She however seems to have undergone a different evolution (lik=
e that
which moved away English from the Germanic languages) and one finds the=
re even
points of structure close to the Semitic languages.
<<<<<<
It's certainly close enough for me to understand.  At least I understan=
d the
result, whether it is what you intended is another question.  I'd say i=
t's close
enough to "hand-tune", certainly.


>>>>>>
> So ... yeah, ObTinyAlmostRelevantBit:
> I really must get on and webify myself.  I've started, but it doesn't=
 amount
to
> enough to tell about.
>
        The beginning is always the most difficult part. After it goes =
on by
itself :) .
<<<<<<
Well, I've got most documents in HTML (Netscape Composer is my wordproc=
essor of
choice, at home anyway).  It's just a matter of building the glue to ho=
ld it all
together.  I'm trying out Deja.com's Homestead service for doing that b=
it.


>>>>>>
> Eddie Izzard is the only comedian who includes the French language in=
 his act
> (that I know of).  He's also the only person who speaks large chunks =
of French
> that I can understand in "real time", which probably explains a lot.
>
        Interesting. How does he do with a mostly monolingual audience?=
 Is it a
humour more on intonations and movements than on words themselves?
<<<<<<
It relies mostly on the fact that the French he uses is *very* simple F=
rench,
generally "first/second person present indicative" of the kind that eve=
ryone
remembers from school (or at least remembers enough to grok it).  A lot=
 of the
French he uses is based on his experiences learning French.  He himself=
 is
fairly fluent, I think you'd have to be to come up with a lot of what h=
e comes
up with.

The school visit includes a tour of a glue factory, with a description =
of how
the factory works that goes something like this: (from memory)
Teacher: "Un cheval - Pas de glue ... Pas de cheval - Beaucoup de glue"=

Student: "C'est merde pour le cheval!"
Teacher: (thoughtfully) "Oui"

Now, for some reason, that's highly amusing to an English audience (at =
least to
me and the audience on the video), don't ask me why...




=


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