Language Myths
verre = 'glass', vert =; 'green', vair = 'a type of fur', wrs = 'towards',
w; = 'vcrbe'). Ail of these breach the 'rule' of clarity and are potential
source;, otarnbiguity. liitieed, one of the principal sources of jokes in
French is the pun:
e.g. bhp17k0?i:'Ma sacree tonx' { = My bioody cough!)
Dim officer dikes this to mean 'Massacre;: tout!' (= Mass-~re
everything! j, so liquidates the entire popubtion of the village,
French is a lucid language
It was Riviirol who dcdtired that 'What is nut ckitr is not French.'
WeU, on this count there must he niilhons of deprived people living
and working in France with PAÃ language to call their own. Some
might not be ~ u r p r i c dif the unlettered maiiiics produce jumbled i i i ~ c l
confused 'non-French', b u l even the educated elite, even those people
whose business is style, have thur probien~s:
The idea which people seem to find very hard to grasp h that
languages cannot posiicss good or bad qualities: no language system
can ever be shown to be dearer or more logical (or more beautiful
French is a Logical Latipirqe
or more itgiy) than any other language system. Where differcnees of
clarity a11d logic are to be found is not in the language itself but in
the abilities of different users of the language to handle it effectively.
Some French speakers produce utteras'ice,'i which are marvcllo~isin
their lucidity, while others can aiwiiys be relied upon to produce
> ?
>
iinpenetr~blcgibberish - but it is the speakers who deserve our praise
or blame, not the language.
;
!:
How i s it that soobviou'ilymythic4iJan i d f ~~s the kigic'dit~of French
has taken such strong root in t'rmce and to wnie extent iinioi'sgher
neighbours? The extenifil perceptions of French .ire not too hard to
e ~ p i i i i n- they sicem t o be bound up with the i~,ition~i!stereotypes
which developed in Europe a century dgo and which Are >;idly still
around today. Italian became a 'mu'-.ic,iIiangiiag<-",110 douht because
' : of its aiisoeiistio1-1in the minds of non-Iuiiiins wiih itah'an opcrti;
G c r ~ i u nbecame- a 'harsh, guttural language' l.iee,iuse of Prussian
, miiitansrn; Spanisli becdmc a 'romantic Iangiidge' bi:<:du,-,eof bull-
fighters i>nd f l d m ~ n ~dancing;
0 French :ilmost t~icvit;ihiybecame J
7ogictil language' thanks to prestigious philosopher'! like Desc~rtcs,
whose mode of thinking was felt to conird{itshnrply with that of LIE
prtigniittii. Lngiish'.
But why should the Frem-h have taken ori Ixianl the SYI? tb o f logic
and Jarky st] fully themselves? Here the dnswcr pcrhapt. lies in the
important role piayd in the development of French culture by the
standard language. A standard language is set of ide-is about what
constitutes the best form of a h g u q e , the form which everyone
ought to imitate.
When the notion o f s t d n d ~ r dlanguage started to gain ground in
T-nmce in the sixteenth century, the question of what made the 'best
fonn' of French better than the rest wds a rehtiveiy simpit one: the
*hcst French was the best, because it W B S spoken by the best people
(i.e. the King and his Courtl.' In the age of absolutism established in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hitching linguistic norms
to aristocratic fashion came to be regarded as too crude and too fragile
a basis upon which to fix the standard language. What constituted
the 'best French' had tu be anchored in something more rational and