The Awful French Language
Geoff Pullum is a little like Mark Twain. And his LL post entitled The Miserable French Language and Its Inadequacies is a little like Twain’s “The Awful German Language.” The difference is that everyone already thinks German is ugly; but common snobbery has it that French is sophisticated. Au contrair, says Pullum:
... this is a language used by people who are supposed to be the big experts in love and kissing and sexy weekends of ooh-la-la, and they don’t have words for “boy”, “girl”, “warm”, “love”, “kiss”, or “weekend”. ...
I’m not buying the idea that this is a language fit to hold its head high and participate in world diplomacy and lovemaking. This is a language to be tossed the scrap-heap of human communicative failures.
(But what about LL’s misgivings about the Whorf hypothesis and its equation of a culture’s reality with its ability to articulate it?)
Meanwhile, an anonymous author quoted in an LL folo-up opines that “French is nothing but Latin (a gawky language to start with) in an advanced stage of putresence.”
Hey, rip into French if you want, but don’t dis Latin! Finest language ever.
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