![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
(No luck yet, btw.)
(I really ought to just go and learn French, I know.)
Today, I hit wikipedia in the end, and you know how that goes, one thing leads to another... anyway, what's interesting is that in the process I discovered that many of the expressions my mother uses that she picked up from her mother, in English or in French, are specifically Belgianisms. Which isn't that surprising, given that my mother's mother is Belgian, of course, but my mother converses in French regularly enough (admittedly by "regularly" I mean "on the phone with her mother so her brother can't listen in" and occasionally "with cab drivers to show off", so it's not really a wide social group there, but she's not me, she can actually understand and speak the language), and I would've expected her to have a few more international expressions there.
Although I can't believe that nobody else in the world tells impatiently hungry children to eat their hand and save the other for tomorrow. Maybe if they do they simply never post about it online, the only instances of it I see are either *me* saying it or a very few other people saying it in Walloon to give an example of a phrase they've heard.
On the subject of phrases that I can't find, there's such-and-fuch. My father said that. I can remember him saying it, I can hear his voice. And yet, if I google the phrase, I find only a few links to me saying it online. Nobody else.
It makes me feel almost lonely, really.
(I really ought to just go and learn French, I know.)
Today, I hit wikipedia in the end, and you know how that goes, one thing leads to another... anyway, what's interesting is that in the process I discovered that many of the expressions my mother uses that she picked up from her mother, in English or in French, are specifically Belgianisms. Which isn't that surprising, given that my mother's mother is Belgian, of course, but my mother converses in French regularly enough (admittedly by "regularly" I mean "on the phone with her mother so her brother can't listen in" and occasionally "with cab drivers to show off", so it's not really a wide social group there, but she's not me, she can actually understand and speak the language), and I would've expected her to have a few more international expressions there.
Although I can't believe that nobody else in the world tells impatiently hungry children to eat their hand and save the other for tomorrow. Maybe if they do they simply never post about it online, the only instances of it I see are either *me* saying it or a very few other people saying it in Walloon to give an example of a phrase they've heard.
On the subject of phrases that I can't find, there's such-and-fuch. My father said that. I can remember him saying it, I can hear his voice. And yet, if I google the phrase, I find only a few links to me saying it online. Nobody else.
It makes me feel almost lonely, really.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:43 pm (UTC)I cannot tell you how relieved this makes me. And no, I haven't heard the expanded version :)
There apparently is an effort to standardize Walloon in order to preserve it - it's a lot easier to save one standardized dialect, teach it and whatnot, than it is to save three different ones.
There are apparently Walloon-speakers in... um... Michigan. They probably don't speak fluent French, all of them, but I doubt they speak exclusively Walloon either.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 06:05 pm (UTC)Makes sense to me.
There are apparently Walloon-speakers in... um... Michigan.
Huh! Whodathunkit.
Not just Finns and Swedes, then.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 06:25 pm (UTC)