accent or no

[mint]

Do you need an accent in elle me plait?  I am talking about the present infinitive here.

Thank you.

[idun]

A chapeau on the î, I would say, although frankly my written french is such that I doubt I would notice if I was writing.

[mint]

Thank you, id.  It's what I think too; I just wanted someone to confirm it[:)]

[NormanH]

Don't forget this useful site to check such things:

http://bonpatron.com/

[Hereford]

Not going to happen in France but our son said that I had mis-spelt the phrase "à jeun" and that it should be "à jeûn" ...

I queried this with a French friend and it turns out that France used to have the cicumflex and in Québec (where son lives) they still do. 

[NormanH]

That's interesting, and I diodn't know it!

As you imply BonPatron is a French Canadian site rather than European French so there might be other examples ...

[idun]

Canadian french......... mmmmmm?

think I'll give that one a miss, seeings as when I was in Quebec they, I mean most people we had dealings with, asked if I was french.......... and there is no mistaking my accent, which clearly defines that I am NOT!

[mint]

Norman, I find the site very interesting though I haven't yet worked out how to check a text.

Hereford, if you have been to Quebec, I am curious to know whether you found the Quebecois accent hard to understand?

Edit  sorry id, I am not ignoring your post.  Your post appeared when I was in the other room, fiddling with the modem to get it to work;

[idun]

That's OK. Interestingly when I watch TV5 Monde on 796 on SKY sometimes when there are interviews from Canada, they put french subtitles up.

I didn't find it 'hard' to understand, it just sounded awful and often just plain wrong and you know how good I am at grammar, and even I realised that something was up.

We when to the Citadel and had a guided visit and the guide, a Quebecoise, did the visit in both languages and spoke very odd english, both languages seemed, what we as a family agreed, equally 'bad'.

So the french speakers thought I was french and the english speaking canadians, thought I was irish, not that either. We had a very odd time in Canada.

[lindal1000]

We have a lady from Québec in our village and I find her really hard to understand until I tune in. It's like listening to someone speaking English with a deep south American accent.

[YCCMB]

I think I may have been guilty of introducing the forum to bonpatron. It works extremely well, despite being Canadian, as long as your French is good enough to raise doubts in your mind if a correction is suggested which you don't think makes sense.

Another fairly failsafe way of checking whether what you have written is correct is to simply type the (short) phrase - Elle me plaît would certainly work - into the search bar on Google.fr . You will be sure to get hundreds of results (though I can't vouch for where those results might take you in the case of the phrase above ??) and the spelling used most commonly in those results will generally be the correct spelling.

If you have really made a bigger mistake, then Google will obligingly ask you if you really meant to search for your badly-spelled search, or if you would prefer to search for (correct spelling)

[Hereford]

Indeed we did find that the accent in Québec was hard to understand! Our daughter-in-law's mother was French so her accent is fine but in shops etc it was hard.

Wonderful city of Québec though -we loved it. Everyone was so friendly.

Our son is usually assumed to be French, not English. The Canadian English accent is different from the Britsh too.  Grandson is bi-lingual with a lovely southern Uk accent in English!

[ericd]

Excellent tip Betty ..... I must admit doing the same to check my french spelling (very rarely though ....honestly !).

As for the Canadian accent, it's a hoot ...... sometime difficult to understand especially if they use local words (no doubt french but XVI century french ...)

As you might have noticed, typing on a QWERTY keyboard makes adding accents a pain in the proverbial and I never bother. Those accents that appear in my posts are added automatically by "the system".

[Cendrillon]

Early settlers in Quebec sailed from Charente Maritime and took their Charentaise Fr. language with them.

Mint, at the Orrison auberge on the Camino we met a band of Fr. Canadians and I found their French totally bizarre and hard to understand, their limited English was equally bizarre.

[YCCMB]

I have to change my MS settings for spellcheck to French if using a QUERTY keyboard..all those shortcuts that exist seem awfully convoluted to me!

iPad is a godsend. If you hold down the letter you're typing, a little box pops up with all the accents and you slide your finger across to the one you want. Pity it's so limited in other respects!

[Hereford]

Re typing accents:

My son got me a French Canadian keyboard for my laptop. Wonderful as it is qwerty but has accents too.

The French in Canada are adamant that theirs is correct French and that in France they have got sloppy.

[ericd]

[quote user="Hereford"] The French in Canada are adamant that theirs is correct French and that in France they have got sloppy. [/quote]

[:-))] This is the best feedback for a long time. Imagine Charles Aznavour or Jean Reno speaking in thick Canadian accent ..... A mourir de rire !

[mint]

[quote user="Cendrillon"]Early settlers in Quebec sailed from Charente Maritime and took their Charentaise Fr. language with them.

Mint, at the Orrison auberge on the Camino we met a band of Fr. Canadians and I found their French totally bizarre and hard to understand, their limited English was equally bizarre.

[/quote]

Ah, Cinders, did you guess that I first met les quebecois on the Camino?

Couldn't understand their French other than with the utmost difficulty and, as you have pointed out, their English is basic at best[;-)]

Anyway, I formed a VERY bad opinion of 2 quebecoises.  They'd arrived at a municipal auberge where, because of numbers, they unusually allocated you a numbered bed.  These 2 "ladies" (notice, I put that word in quotes) decided they wouldn't pay any attention to the bed numbers and anyway they wanted MY bed which was near the only window in the room.

No amount of persuasion could get them to relinquish my bed, they claimed that it didn't matter about the numbers!  The result was then I had to just claim another bed, not mine, of course.  Then the person whose bed it really was told me that that bed wasn't mine.

It was chaos as you couldn't have someone's allocated bed without nearly the whole dorm looking for their rightful beds in great frustration to find other people occupying them.  Imagine, if they'd done that in the Albert hall for example, for say, a Mahler concert (Mahler being such a hit with the public), you'd get some very heated verbal exchanges and commotion would ensue.

You can believe that I entertained some VERY uncharitable thoughts against those two as I desperately needed the fresh air from that window as, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was in the early stages of a raging chest infection[:'(]

Those bloody women, I hoped that they had a terrible Camino[:D]

[ericd]

[quote user="mint"]  .... Those bloody women, I hoped that they had a terrible Camino[:D] [/quote]

A handful of large juicy foot blisters to start with !

[NormanH]

There is Canadien French...and then there is the French spoken by the less 'educated'.

In this trailer for a recent film (which was awarded  prize at Cannes)  the head of the educational establishment at the beginning speaks perfectly recognisable French, but I am frankly completely at sea once the mother and son start talking to each other or with their friends...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7rtSqI0ZeA&html5=1

[andyh4]

When most Brits (me included most of the time) cannot tell the difference between a Canadian accent and an American one (Texas and deep South perhaps excepted), is it any wonder that Canadians cannot differentiate between French spoke by French people and non French, or indeed English and Irish accents.

[NormanH]

The ooo sound in 'abooot ' (for about) is th one I notice mist often:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_raising

[mint]

[quote user="NormanH"]The ooo sound in 'abooot ' (for about) is th one I notice mist often:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_raising

[/quote]

Oh now you sound just like the policeman in 'allo, 'allo![:P]

[mint]

[quote user="You can call me Betty"]Another fairly failsafe way of checking whether what you have written is correct is to simply type the (short) phrase - Elle me plaît would certainly work - into the search bar on Google.fr . You will be sure to get hundreds of results (though I can't vouch for where those results might take you in the case of the phrase above ??)for your [/quote]

I just KNEW it was a bit risky to ask.  In fact, I wrote il me plait to begin with but thought I'd better change the gender to make it a bit more innocuous and a anyway, the feminine was more appropriate as I shall explain.

I wanted to write that phrase to a person that I bought a ramasse-miettes from.  Now, there's a word I took a bit of trouble to find out[:)]

In the search engine, I put balai à table, brosse à table, pelle et balayette à table and so on and so forth with very few results.  I couldn't write crumb brush as it was a French site but, the moment I saw the word ramasse-miettes, I couldn't imagine why I didn't think of that myself.

After all, if they have such a thing as un épluche-legumes, it's perfectly logical that they would have une ramasse-miettes.

BTW, I bought a dinky little stainless steel one shaped like a coal shovel and a little brush like a coal brush and it's nice to be able to get rid of the crumbs first if you are going to have a second course.

 Now I can casually drop into the conversation that, of course, one would use one's ramasse-miettes to keep the table clean between courses[:D]

[YCCMB]

's interesting, mint, that all those places you've put an "à" I'd've put a "de"