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Re: OFFTOPIC: What is "francais hexagonal"?

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 18, 1998, 7:24
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 > > >----- >See the original message at=
http://www.egroups.com/list/conlang/?start=3D18497
> >
Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "R=E9sister ou servir" homepage: http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html