Fran-glais'd Tomates

As mentioned in my previous post, I invited some friends to the country place to plant tomatoes and peppers in the garden. Despite having an entire weekend at our leisure this didn't happen. Instead we gorged ourselves for two days on my barbecue chicken, potato salad, ratatouille salad, green bean salad, and strawberry shortcake. Oddly enough despite this gorging, I lost about 200 grams. Combined with the fact that "the communists are in the funhouse", it's a miracle really because I definitely ate about 200 grams of mayonnaise this weekend never mind the chicken and the whipped cream and everything else I managed to get down my gob (which is my favourite word for mouth when used in the context of eating more food than my fat ass needs).

So thank God I'm not trying to grow tomatoes as a side business or anything. It's an experiment. An attempt for me to use knowledge and other people's experience to accomplish something that I'm normally not able to accomplish. My landlord-neighbours are talented with plants. Enough so that they do it for a living and I, will persevere if not today, then tomorrow.

Amidst all the brunching and rosé my landlord-neighbour's son came round. My friends CV and GM do a lot of translation and teach English and my friend AE is a professional translator, so I thought with so many varied native English speakers in the hiz-haus it would be a perfect chance for him to practice as we had 5 different accents for him to chose from. CV's a native French speaker and I'm a native Korean speaker, but we both speak near perfect English (do I?). CQ is from Northern Ireland, GM is from Australia, and AE is from America.

So the five of us gave CP an impromptu English lessons, but when he isn't sure in English I tell him the equivalent in French. So he, in all his adorable 8 year old-ness says to me, "But I thought I was to speak English". I told you he is a adorable.

Me and the awesome 8 year old make jokes about Franglais. Franglais is when you mélange French and English. (See what I did there?) But it also got us to talking about Franglais in general.

There are, let's say two different types of Franglais.

Type I: Mostly spoken by foreigners with little knowledge of the language who truly believe that by insertinng one word of French into their sentence that it will keep the waiter from spitting into their food.

Type II:  Spoken by both native English speakers and native French speakers who are either partially or fully bi-langue either to show their skill with both languages or their lack thereof. For example a skilled speaker of both languages might use either English or French words to perform cunning feats of jeux de mot for either witty or humourous effect or, in the cases of the truly fluent speaker of Franglais, both. For the unskilled Franglais is a necessity of communication, but in no way does it suggest that a previously unskilled speaker of Franglais might not progress to the level of a skilled speaker.

Examples of Type II Franglais from an unskilled speaker:

I'll just check my agenda.
Agenda = diary (UK English) or planner (American English), not your secret evil mandate.

I'll just go get my car from the parking.
Parking = car park (UK English) or parking lot (American English), not going to a secluded area to make out with a car.

I need to look at my planning.
Planning = schedule (UK & American English), not the method by which crazy Christians believe children should be conceived.

Examples of Type II Franglais from a skilled speaker:

Je ne care pas.
French: C'est n'importe quoi.
UK English: I couldn't give a toss.
American English: I don't care.

Ou est le swimming pool?
French: Ou est la piscine?
UK English: Wanna kill yourself at a festival? (It's the name of an English band.)
American English: Where's the pool?

I frapped the port cinq times!
French: J'ai frappé la porte cinq fois!
UK English: I was knocking at your kip five times!
American English: I banged on the door five times!

Now of course there are English words that have long been accepted into the French language and visa versa. But after quick discussion I decided after consultation that while those words are old Franglais, that Franglais in its modern form must involve using words from either or both languages in a way that would probably never be acceptable use in their own language.

We didn't spend nearly as much time discussing Franglais amongst ourselves yesterday as we have this morning and given that the sun is shining and the tomatoes aren't getting any closer to planting themselves I suppose I should hurry up and fais something about it toute suite.

Mostly because it's just occured to me that my blog is its own experiment in Franglais...which would be hilarious except that it just took deux people une hour to come up with this post on the aforementioned subject.