Why I Can’t Stand to Speak French!

The French just announced that they will make some major changes to their language.  They will get rid of a lot of words.  They will simplify some spellings.  They will even get rid of the circumflex.

This is a major move.

You see:  the French are not only the great bastion of culture, they are the great bastion of high culture, mainly because they were the first culture to specifically engineer their language so that it would not change.  And that is why their culture remains with us—constant, immutable–a monkey embryo preserved in the cloudy formaldehyde room of specimens.

mokey

The puissance of the French language came about during a time when they had reached the height of their power and saw within the periphery, a great decline in the wasteland that is the future.  This happened in the 18th Century when the French would produce all that god-awful Rococo furniture and emerge with the crowning achievement of verbiage:  la dictionnaire.

In that cultural monument,  they foresaw what was to come:  England and America and Russia and China would sweep them into the great dustbin of history, a repository of tourist kitsch and puzzling fashion choices.  Like a society woman in a shabby subway, the turn to language engineering was their way of clutching their pearls to their chest.

pearl-clutching

Still, the decline of French was a long way off.  And for a time, the French language became the great ambassadorial language of the modern age.  And there is a reason for that:  France had—and still holds—a vast empire that hopscotches through the continents of India, of Asia, of America, of Africa.  French is still the most widely spoken language in the world, mainly because of a deep colonial past in Africa, and it will remain a language spoken with gusto because Africans reproduce at a rate that makes the rest of the world uneasy.

I speak French but refuse to speak French.  It is one of the ways that my mouth is branded—a mouth not made mine, a thousand times unspooled.  I choose not to speak French because I want to erase a bit of this colonial past, as if I were a priest in a bare chamber involved in a tedious act of self-abnegation—with my hairshirt, my cat of nine tales, my breviary.  I will make myself clean.

cat o nine tales

But here’s a paradox:  I can’t stand to speak French to an American (the accent is just awful, the dog-like need to display facility—grating).  I can’t stand to speak French to a Frenchman (there is too much history there and I would rather make the French uncomfortable and deal with the fact that he has to speak to me in English—a comeuppance, of sorts).  The Canadians can hardly be said to speak French at all (at least a French I can understand).  I’ll speak to Africans (out of solidarity but only if I need directions).

The Vietnamese language was first transcribed by the Chinese over a millennium ago, when they occupied the land.  Later, a Portuguese priest named Alexandre de Rhodes arrived and translated the Bible, ensuring that the process known as Romanization would crystallize.  By the time the French arrived to begin their great colonizing project, a system was in place that would allow the native people to be easily exploited…that is to say, “educated.”

Alexandre-de-Rhodes-1591-1660

There is a double-edged sword to Romanization—all mighty Falls carry with them the sword and the rainbow:  Romanization meant that literacy spread to 95% percent of the population—a quantum leap over the mere 5% that could use Chinese letters.  And it is in the Romanization—the agent of oppression—that there came to arise a language of liberation.

I can deal with the change in spellings–the simplifications, which are simply an acknowledgment that we are all barbarians in our own way.  But I don’t know exactly how to feel about the loss of the circumflex, which is a hold-over from ancient conventions of spelling that are no longer relevant.  The circumflex is something iconic.

The circumflex always makes me think of the subjugation of my people through the act of translation. My mother always made me know about the circumflex, which she called the “petit chapeau”–a little hat; and my childhood was spent looking for it in every word.  For me, the “petit chapeau” was not a Western hat that dapper gentlemen wore but the conical hats that conjure the familiarity of rice patties and white egrets and peasants working in the muddy water.

hat

The circumflex always seemed like such a powerful word to me as a child, because there was also that part of it that had to do with making a muscle, and all boys–small boys–want muscles. All boys are called upon to “flex.” Then, it makes me think of a camera–a Rolleiflex–in a sad Brasilian Bossa Nova. The song was written by Tom Jobim. The lyrics are about ingratitude. It is also about sadness and nostalgia. But chiefly it is about love, I think.

conical hat

One thought on “Why I Can’t Stand to Speak French!

  1. Language is so deeply intertwined with culture, Khanh, that when one culture subjugates another, its language becomes the symbol of that domination. So I’m not in the least surprised by your feelings about French. It reminds me of a conversation I had about fifteen years ago or so with a South African gentleman who’s a member of the Zulu nation. This was not many years after the end of apartheid, and the country was just beginning to think about sorting itself out. I was there for a conference and got the chance to seak with this gentleman about the use of language. He said he didn’t mind speaking English, and he understood that it’s a world language (and therefore, with some pragmatic value). But he didn’t choose to speak Afrikaans. To him, that was the language of oppression. Interesting parallel…

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