« Fungi of the Morvan in autumn and winter | Home | The Museums of Beaune: The Hotel-Dieu and the Wine Museum »

Faux Amis and Accidental Truths

There are two aspects of the way I speak French that get me into trouble (well three if you count the fact that my grammar is the wrong side of shaky.) But that third is pretty standard: the first two are I think both my strengths and my weaknesses.

One is that I’ll fly cheerfully into a sentence without any real idea of how it is going to end. Usually I’ll find some form that works, even if it is something less than elegant. The man in the bricolage understood exactly what I meant when I asked for “the thing around the door that stops the wind”, even though the French for draft-stopper was well out of my range.

The other is that if all else fails, I’ll try the English word said with a French accent: thank those Norman conquests for the fact that this works a surprising percentage of the time.

But sometimes it goes spectacularly wrong, for there are what are known as faux amis (false friends), which produce a word far from the intended meaning: the standard example is librairie – which is a bookshop. What you wanted was the bibliotheque.

But it got much worse than that when I was trying to tell a French neighbour about a fox I had seen that morning which was suffering badly from mange. Having launched into this sentence I realised of course that I hadn’t the faintest clue of how to say mange*.

I tried informal sign language (something it is surprisingly effective – it was how I managed to ask the librarian in Anost why the bullocks of the region were traditionally harnessed by the horns rather than across the chest – and also probably explains why the locals there think Englishwomen are very, very strange and believe that library floors are made for crawling on). But in this case my elderly neighbours didn’t get it.

So I went to the second fallback – English with a French accent. Unfortunately, however, mange in French means to eat. And that’s why I then found myself trying to convince this French couple that no, I didn’t want the local hunters to knock off a fox for me.

Still, proving that even false friends can hold a form of truth, I’ve found from Graham Robb’s excellent The Discovery of France that I wasn’t so far out: In Burgundy fox was considered by some to be a delicacy: “provided that it was hung out in a garden, on a plum tree, for two weeks during the frosts.” (Phew – I had an out then; it wasn’t yet frosty.)

Red squirrel was also eaten in the Morvan, Robb notes: “tame enough to be killed by an old person with a stick.” (I’m sure both of my neighbours – a spritely 86 and 73 respectively, and an advertisement for the local lifestyle — could manage that easy. So I’d better be careful what I say…)

* Renard galeux is mangy fox – just in case it comes in handy.