General Announcement

In the interest of this linguistic endeavor, I will now be taking a sabbatical from the English-speaking world.
A fancy way of saying that I have not gone one day without speaking, hearing, or seeing English since I have arrived in France, and I'm feeling a bit cheated out of my "immersion" experience. I have also spent a good deal of time and energy convincing myself and those at home that I had not, in fact, fallen off the face of the earth. And I have enjoyed doing it!
But, finding that a year is not a semester, that life does not pause at home just because I am here, and that I can't keep going with this "get by" mentality, I've decided to take some time to be fully present where I am, with whom I am, and doing what I am. I will be by no means distant (well, in the figurative sense) or unreachable: if anyone needs to urgently contact me during the week, please use the email crhamilton.abroad@gmail.com; any other emails can still be sent to my Manchester account (crhamilton@manchester.edu), and I'll check through them on Sundays. I will ALWAYS love to hear what you have to say, I just may be a little slower getting back. I expect to try this for the next month or so.
So, I wish you all the best of months, and encourage you to take some time being "fully present" wherever it is you find yourself.

Paris: Check

Meet up with the Jan Term group of MC Professor Thelma Rohrer, the woman who does everything: Check.

View of Paris from the amazingly elevation of the Sacre Coeur church (which used to be in the countryside outside of Paris: Check.


Visit the oh-so-opulent Opera Garnier, home to the Phantom: Check.


See (at least) two sections of the impossibly large Louvre museum: Check.


Be silly in the courtyard of the Royal Palace: Check.


Visit roomfuls of Monet's waterlilies, Orangerie Museum: Check.


Stand next to a VanGogh painting in the Musee d'Orsay: Check.


Bask in the stain-glass-window-tainted light of Ste. Chapelle, the "jewel box" of Paris: Check.

Also accomplished: the Musee Cluny (medieval and Renaissance art), Centre Pompidou (contemporary and modern art), an afternoon in a cafe, mastering the metro system, good and adequate sleep and food, entertaining company, and no missed trains!

Things to love (and love to hate) about the French language

It is very empowering to be able to speak and understand another language, especially one that has been fervently arguing itself “the most beautiful language in the world” since at least the sixteenth century (see “Defense and Illustration of the French Language,” DuBellay, 1549). Sure, in some areas, French falls desperately short of English: just look at any bilingual dictionary and you’ll see that the English-to-French section is thicker thanks to English’ broader vocabulary (half of which was borrowed from French during the three-hundred-year Norman [northern French] rule in England). In French, you can’t “storm out,” “speed away,” or “tiptoe around,” only “leave like a storm,” “move away quickly,” and “walk on tiptoes.” Nevertheless, I like French: not in a self-justifying way because I’ve put so many years into studying it, and not in a rose-colored way because I’m speaking a “romance” language (a silly English mix-up of the adjectives that describe love stories and also things stemming from a Roman or Latin base). In fact, I don’t just like French; I revel in it, in all its exactness and absurdity. Here are a few cases of both:

Pronominal reprise

French is maddeningly and wonderfully repetitive. Grammarians try to give the impression that every upstanding French Academy-trained citizen over the age of six moves onto the most succinct and efficient forms of linguistic exchange; after all, French is the world’s most beautiful language. But I am just as likely to find “baby talk” like Elle est où, la mer? “It is where, the sea?” coming from the mouth of a six-year old, a fellow university student, and my host mother. But let’s not be prescriptivists here, judging good grammar from bad and rapping knuckles for improperly-conjugated verbs. Asking a question in English can be unbelievably cumbersome, and it’s a wonder any of us can correctly use the word “do”: Do you have a pen? When do you think I could borrow it? A miracle of linguistic acrobatics, and quite unnecessary when a rising inflection (when speaking) or a question mark (when writing) confer the same meaning to a declarative sentence (a statement). Thus, the statement You have a pen becomes the question You have a pen? without messing around with “do” or inversion (placing the verb before the subject, as in Have you a pen?). In French, not only is it perfectly acceptable to change your statement into a question simply by changing your tone at the end of the sentence, it is also possible to just repeat yourself.

Il est où, mon stylo? It is where, my pen?

Ton stylo, ça je l’ai vu là-bas. Your pen, that I saw it over there.

Tu es sûr que c’étais mon stylo à moi ? You’re sure that it was my pen of mine?

And yes, when you respond, you even have the opportunity to refer to the same thing three times. The first time, you identify it by calling it what it actually is ton stylo. Then you insert randomly (you really have to have an ear for it) the pronoun ça, which means “this/that” but is used mostly as a filler word. Then you confirm what you’re referring to by using the pronoun le (l’ before a vowel) as a direct object: “I saw the pen,” “I saw it.” Whenever you use this structure, you are being about as inefficient with your words as possible and managing to avoid any sticky linguistic rules. Bravo! Then, just to be sure we’re referring to the same pen, the pen that belongs to me, I reemphasize my ownership of it. I saw this used quite a bit during the student rallies in “Our university of ours!” I don’t know when this ingenious technique came about in the French language, or what the prescriptivist linguists thought of it, but I guess if you can’t beat it, name it: and thus was born the reprise pronominale.

Impersonal expressions: Il faut and universal law

Although language students will never cease to complain about and probably will never completely conquer the subjunctive tense, it is inexplicably useful when preceded by the expression “Il faut.” The subjunctive is just a different way of conjugating every single verb to convey a notion of doubt, obligation, and other things too complicated for my purposes here. We don’t use it very often in English, except to say things like “If I were a butterfly…” when normally we would say “In a former life, I was a butterfly.” Regardless, the expression “Il faut…” in French means someone like “one must,” but implicating a God-given way something “must be done” without outright implicating the person who must do it this way. So if I say Boire, conduire; il faut choisir “Drink, drive; one must choose,” I sort of imply that if the choice is not made, the world stops turning. One cannot proceed without choosing. And yet I say it without specifying that I am the one that must choose, nor am I the one imposing the choice. I’m just describing a fundamental law of the universe, something French-speakers do without so much as shrugging their shoulders. If I do decide to specify that I am, at a particular moment, the object of concentration of a universal law, and say something like Il faut que je parte (and here comes into play the subjunctive tense) “One must that I leave/I must leave,” I manage to convey the absolute necessity of my depart while sloughing off the responsibility for leaving. Who am I to argue with universal law? It’s a convenient way to avoid stating how one actually feels about leaving, regretful or otherwise.

Reflexivizing any verb I darn well please

Okay, so “to reflexivize” is a word I just made up, which is ridiculously easy to do in English. It refers to the group of verbs called “reflexive” in French that one automatically uses for expressions that involve oneself, including body parts. For example, “to brush my teeth” or “to wonder” are actually me laver les dents and me demander, “to brush myself the teeth” and “to ask myself.” I haven’t quite gotten the logic of not being able to call the hair on my head “my hair” and reflexivizing a normal verb screws up everything you thought you knew about it’s past tense form…but it has its upsides. On top of this “Il faut” ability to express judgment without in any way implicating oneself, but by referring to a God-given way it “must be done,” French also allows the speaker to impart rules of propriety without involving oneself or reverting to passive constructions (example: “The cat eats the mouse” is direct, forceful, and does not use the verb “to be,” an overused verb and thus weak in meaning, like in the sentence, “The mouse is eaten by the cat.” This passive construction degenerates even further when the acting agent is unknown, which is most of the time, resulting in “The mouse is eaten.” Doesn’t “degenerates even further” sound much better than “is made even worse”?). In English, we have no choice but to say either, “One eats chocolate croissants at breakfast,” or, “Chocolate croissants are eaten at breakfast.” Even worse, the impersonal “one” is falling out of use and sounds quite “hoity-toity” in today’s English, which leaves us with the statement, “You eat chocolate croissants at breakfast.” In French, I can just take the verb “to eat,” make it reflexive (like “to ask oneself” or “to shower oneself”), and voilà! the pat expression Les pains au chocolat se mangent pour le petit déjeuner “Chocolate croissants eat themselves for breakfast.” You can do similar magic with the verbs dire “to say, That says itself often,” faire “to do/make, That does not do itself like that,” and acheter “to buy, These often buy themselves around Christmastime.” Once you accept that you don’t really mean what you are actually saying, you start to realize the creative process of reflexivizing verbs and telling people (again) the God-given way things “are often done.”

What do all these words have in common?

suis es est sommes êtes sont

été étant

étais était étions étiez étaient

fus fut fumes fûtes furent

serai seras sera serons serez seront

sois soit soyons soyez soient

serais serait serions seriez seraient

The miracle of French: all these words are just different forms of the verb être, “to be.”

Copied from a page of the Bescherelle verb conjugation pocketbook, a priceless commodity for any French student or student of French. Note: several forms, for reasons too complicated to explain, have been left out.

English’ saving grace: ambiguity

Not that I feel any need to defend my native tongue, but these days it feels almost positively secretive to speak English. If can say “a friend” without specifying gender; use any adjective I please without making it agree in gender and number with the noun it modifies; start a sentence with a verb like “wish you could come” without giving away exactly who wishes it, since verb conjugation doesn’t change between I, we, and they. Plenty of grammatical nuances make English more complicated (in French Il pleut means both “It rains” and “It is raining”), but at times it can be blissfully ambiguous.

Why can’t I say “to can”?

A linguistic riddle for you to ponder:

I can, you can, he/she can, we can, they can but

I will be able… and to be able…

Hmm. Tell me if you find a linguistic study on that one.

Cheerio (an outdated British farewell as well as a type of cereal...oh language!)

Christmas 2007 in the Touraine

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays…

French Cuisine

They tell me Lyon is the capital of French cuisine, but I have a hard time believing it gets any better than the dining room chez Marrec, the grandparents.

I would just like to take this moment to recount how I have been spoiled and indulged in the last several days. Good cookin’ bar none:

Welcome dinner

Aperitif: munchies (pistachios, chips, cashews) and kir, a drink made of a dab of fruit liqueur (often cassis, blackcurrant) and white wine or champagne

Appetizer: tomato and egg dish

Main dish: rabbit in a red wine sauce

Potatoes

Always bread

Cheese: goat cheese, tome, camembert, gruyere…

Ice cream cake

Tisane: tea specifically to aid digestion or sleeping.

Christmas Eve lunch

Aperitif: munchies, kir

Appetizer: oysters

Main dish: chicken on rice

Eggs and vegetables with homemade mayonnaise

Cheese

Apple tart

Coffee.

Christmas Eve dinner

Start time: 8:30pm

Aperitif: octopi, eggplants and sun-dried tomatoes wrapped around goat cheese and pepper sauce, kir

Appetizer: clam

Second appetizer: foie gras (fattened duck liver)

Main dish: salmon with red wine sauce

Cheese

Ice cream

End time: 12:30!

Varieties of wine served: four! Champagne, a late-harvest (sweet) white wine, dry white wine, and red wine.

Christmas Day meal

Aperitif: munchies, kir

Appetizer: oysters, shrimp, snails, crabs

Main dish: chicken, rib roast, again with red wine sauce

Cheese

Chocolate and coffee

My modest contribution to all this? Mom’s cinnamon rolls, which of course never turn out quite like Mom’s. The family was thrilled. I took a picture of them all taking a picture of the rolls, but since they’re all in pajamas, I decided for their sake not to post it. I was glad to give a little, after all I’d devoured and digested and delighted in!

Needless to say, it was exhausting. ;-)

The rest of the vacation I recuperated at the Noë’s home near Orléans, with no less excellent meals (though smaller portions, to be sure), still in the excellent company of Isabelle, Frédéric, Lucie (11), Louis (8), and Charlotte (3). I dug into the seventh Harry Potter book and didn’t venture too far from the fireplace. Even in the “Garden of France,” the weather was terribly gray and rainy, so we were all content to stay put, except for a day trip to the two nearby chateaux of Cheverny and Chambord. I slept a good deal…really accomplished nothing of importance…just enjoyed family and movies and a good book…a successful break, I’d say.

I entered 2008 before you did!

I made it back to Strasbourg without too much trouble (then again, I can’t think of anything to rival my previous experience), and Leslie and I rang in the New Year at her apartment in the city. There were plenty of fireworks to watch right out the window, and we had our bottle of Crémant d’Alsace (because Champagne only comes from the Champagne region of France), and our comedic abilities are highly-prized: so we got along alright. Cheers to all of you, wherever you were when the second, the minute, the hour, the day, the month, and the year changed!

2008 is a year I haven’t ever given much thought to: 2005 was graduation, the big change from high school to college; 2006 was the supposedly-uneventful-but-ever-so-eventful year; 2007 revolved around leaving for France and, along the way, discovering a garden. 2008 I suppose will include returning from France, and all that that entails; starting a last year at Manchester, but not finishing it until 2009, so that’s next year’s thought…Could 2008 be the year of improved posture, the one resolution I made? What does 2008 hold for you? What are you expecting, in the sense of both hoping and waiting for?

General Announcements:

I’ve booked my return flight for 29 June.

And enough with the peanut butter! I’m swimming in it! I think I now have enough to return to the States with at least a jar. It was a very good thought…but then all of you had it! Please see below my current collection (which does not include the jar already sitting in my cupboard). So much for moderation in all things: