Quiptease - French from English

05/07/2011

I enjoyed your column (Quiptease Mature Times, July '11) Catherine. Although I was a French/German teacher I didn't know why there was no 'd' in the French word 'amiral' until you drew our attention to the Aabic amir-al-bahr, lord of the sea.

 

I suppose you knew that the word 'riding coat' was borrowed by the French, but found its way back into English as a different word, redingote.

 

'Boat people' for refugees was adopted by the French but, probably as it doesn't end in -s, is not usually recognised as a plural, so if one such refugee is rescued and interviewed on tv the caption will often read 'un ancien boatpeople', a former boat person.

 

When French words are taken into the English language that contain a sound we're not used to, e.g. garage, that part of the word is often changed to a more familiar sound, so the -age is changed to rhyme with 'bridge'.

 

When the Welsh get hold of such a word, instead of just adopting the French spelling, they convert it to look like the corrupt pronunciation and spell it 'garej' which is crazy! They also re-spell Latin words and end up with curriculwm vitae!

 

A story to make you smile. My daughter, who teaches English, gave a poem about winter to a low set for their end-of-term assessment. 3 difficult words were indicated by an asterisk at the end of the relevant lines with definitions as footnotes. One boy wrote that they'd put snowflakes in the margins!

 

John Green

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