Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

En réponse à Philippe Caquant :


>Much is unknown to 95% of the population.
So what? I'm describing actual French use, not prescribing how French 
"should" be spoken. In that case, what is unknown to the population just 
has no existence, and no interest.

>  For ex, the
>difference between "censé" and "sensé" is unknown to
>about 99,5% of the population, including teachers,
>journalists, editors, authors and correctors.
So what? I personally know the difference, but if people don't know it, 
does it make them wrong?

>  The
>difference between infinitive, imperative, indicative
>and passé composé for the verbs of the 1st groupe
>(avancer, avancez, avancé, avancés...), is unknown or
>at least unclear to a wide majority of the population,
That on the other hand is incorrect. The correct spelling may be unknown to 
them, but they use those forms everyday without mistake, and even if they 
don't know the fancy words describing them, I'm pretty sure they could 
describe the rules of use of those forms correctly. Do mistake lack of 
spelling skills with lack of grammatical knowledge. Those two things are 
completely independent. You're making the usual French mistake of confusing 
a convention used to represent a language with a visual form with the 
language itself.

>which doesn't prevent them from eating, sleeping and
>voting normally.
I agree for the first two. Not sure about the last one though...


>Vian's main romans are very poetic (L'Ecume des Jours
>is probably the most famous; but also L'Automne à
>Pékin, L'Arrache-coeur, L'Herbe rouge...).
Yep.

>But Frederic Dard's romans are also totally
>unrealistic, and he himself claimed it so. In most of
>his books, the story has so to say no importance at
>all and every event related is totally unbelievable
>(except maybe in his first ones, still a little
>conventional). So after a while, you don't try any
>more to understand anything about what happens, and
>you concentrate on the style and the language (and the
>apartes to the reader); and so you really enjoy them.
>This I discovered for the first time when reading "En
>avant la moujik !" (And now for the mujik !), which
>made me read about 100 or 150 more of them later. I
>remember that at a moment, I stopped trying to follow
>the thread, and just started reading for pleasure. And
>when I closed the book, I thought with astonishment:
>Oh, so it IS possible to write and publish books like
>that ? It was a real discovery. (Another discovery,
>later, was Joyce, of course).
I actually never read San Antonio, but that's because I'm not much into 
French literature. Even Vian found its place here by "mistake" ;)) .
_________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Joe :


>>"I remember a comic theatre play from a while ago that I liked very much.
>>Its title was "le gros n'avion", with the "n" indicating such a "wrong"
>>liaison ;)"
>>
>>Why wouldn't it be [gRozaviO~]? Any reason why [n] was chosen instead of
>>[z]?
>>
>
>I'd guess it's because 'gros' is pronounced [gRo](or similar), and, to
>the less well educated, it is  not directly obvious what the correct
>liason is. Although the choice of <n> is a little bizarre, to me.
Well, better get used to it, because it's the most common choice in 
uneducated or childish French ;)) . Philippe showed a possible reason for 
it. In my family idiolect, there's also "nourson" (instead of the more 
common "nounours" that Philippe talked about) instead of "ourson" ("baby 
bear").

Note that this kind of phenomenon sometimes ends up taking over in the 
language. That's why for instance you're talking about ingots when we in 
France talk about "lingots". Originally, the French word was "ingot", which 
with the article made "l'ingot". But people began feeling the article 
actually was part of the word, and reanalysed the whole thing as "le 
lingot". If such is possible, re-analysis of "un avion" to "un navion" is 
just as possible.
Another example is the word for "orange" in French, Spanish and Portuguese. 
The fact that French has "orange", Spanish "naranja" and Portuguese 
"laranja" (not sure about the spelling for that one) shows definitely a 
case of the article becoming reanalysed as part of the main word in Spanish 
and Portuguese.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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