Re: OFFTOPIC: What is "francais hexagonal"?

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, John Cowan wrote:
> >
> > > I ran into this term, and was mystified: obviously "hexagonal
> > > (six-sided?) French" is not a useful translation.
> >
>
> That's how other have said. 'L'Hexagone' is the word used by the media, politicians
> and economists to refer to France trerritory without the DOM-TOM. It's also
> called 'la Metropole'. You may not notice it right away when you come here
> but when I came back to France after staying for years in Japan I've realized
> French are quite cut from the rest of the world in their mind. It's very
> centralised, the State is a kind of god with Enarques and X engineers as
> great-priests. Europe will be ok as long as they think they can rule it.
> Hexagone is a nicely regular, symetrical shape. During the Revolution, it was
> planned to be divided into 100 neat squares and time was to be divided into
> 10 months and weeks into 10 days and hours into 100 minutes. In the xixth
> century French deliberately stopped speaking their own hundreds local
> languages 'for the Nation's sake' and eagerly told their children to learn
> well and only the Nation's Language. And here was French the only language a
> cent!
ur!
!
!
!
>  y !
> later. The funny thing is that French think they're SO individualistic and rebellous ;-)
> Mathias
>
>
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> See the original message at http://www.egroups.com/list/conlang/?start=18497
>
>


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See the original message at http://www.egroups.com/list/conlang/?start=18499