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 d if 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~is in their lucidity, while others can aiwiiys be relied upon to produce iinpenetr~blc gibberish - but it is the speakers who deserve our praise or blame, not the language.

How i s i t that soobviou'ilymythic4iJ an i d f ~ ~s the kigic'dit~ of French has taken such strong root in t ' rmce and to wnie extent iinioi'sg her 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,iI iangiiag<-", 110 douht because of its aiisoeiistio1-1 in the minds of non-Iuiiiins wiih itah'an opcrti; Gcr~iun became- a 'harsh, guttural language' l.iee,iuse of Prussian miiitansrn; Spanisli becdmc a 'romantic Iangiidge' bi:<:du,-,e of bull- fighters i>nd f l d m ~ n ~ 0 dancing; French :ilmost t~icvit;ihiy became J 7ogictil language' thanks to prestigious philosopher'! like Desc~rtcs, whose mode of thinking was felt to conird{it shnrply with that of LIE prtigniittii. Lngiish'.

But why should the Frem-h have taken ori Ixianl the SYI? t b of 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 tdnd~rd language 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