Re: OFFTOPIC: What is "francais hexagonal"?

At 20:12 17/11/98 -0000, you wrote:
>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 centur!
> y !
>later.
        Well, many French didn't stop speaking their languages. I come from
Normandy where 'cauchois' is still a little bit spoken in the country (but
disappearing). And when you see the problems in Brittany, Corsica and the
Bask country (and I don't speak of Provence where Occitan is found
everywhere), you become aware of the fact that the jacobinist decision of
having other languages disappeared 'for the Nation's sake' has created more
problems than it has resolved.

 The funny thing is that French think they're SO individualistic and
rebellous ;-)
>Mathias
>
>
>-----
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>
>
                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"R=E9sister ou servir"

homepage: http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html