I know some fransaskois and Acadiens who would beg to differ. Quebec French is a subset of Canadian French. Probably the largest group numerically, but the French spoken in Quebec differs somewhat from the French in the west and the east.
One fransaskois I know was griping one day about those darned central Canadian francophones who insisted on the wrong word for a gopher - way too highfalutin’ and not used by folks out west where gophers actually live.
I can’t remember the terms, but it sounded like a francophone variant on the gripe that Canada Parks officials in English insist on calling gophers “Richardson’s ground squirrels”. Not a term we use out here.
As for Canadian French retaining archaisims, my high school teacher was an Acadian and mentioned that he grew up saying “je ne suis point” instead of “je ne suis pas.”
“Probably”? The Quebecois French are not just obviously and by far the largest group numerically, they are also the most dogmatic, intransigent, and politically empowered, seeking at all costs to “protect” their language from the perceived malign influence of English linguistic and cultural influence from the rest of North America, which is a tough job and tends to make them very crabby. These are the guys who set up a Gestapo-like goon squad of “language police”, dictating the maximum size of English text in commercial signs relative to the French (it has to be microscopic, basically), insisting that commercial establishments with national or global trademarks drop the apostrophe-s possessive (the venerable old department store chain Eaton’s had to become “Eaton”), and putting a stop to such transgressions as a motel chain daring to ply its trade in Quebec under an English pig-dog name like “Blue Dog”, or restaurants in Quebec daring to list items on their menu like “pasta” and “grilled cheese”, which the alert Language Police recognize to be the verboten English.
The funny thing is that cultural influences and cross-pollination from other languages is precisely what makes languages like English so much richer and more expressive than they otherwise would be. But it’s the mission of Quebec French to deploy jackbooted thugs to make sure that never happens to it.
All I know is that we had to pick a foreign language in 6th grade, so I took French … because it sounded beautiful. I’ve spoken/heard a lot more languages since then, but I haven’t changed that initial opinion.
Anyone who takes a gorgeous language and coarsens it deserves to have a croque monsieur rammed up their *je ne sais quoi *… I don’t care if you’re a Québecois grammar cop or an Alsatian goatherd.
Of course, there are other languages that are also “soft and melodious”… Swedish and Italian are in that category, too. German and Chinese… not so much.
A friend working in an hotel in a very touristy Italian city mentioned to me that a significant number of second generation immigrants coming back to visit Italy don’t realize that they don’t speak Italian at all. They speak, for instance, Napolitan or Sicilian, which is going to be pretty much unintelligible for a Northern Italian. And since regional languages are quite alive and well in Italy, people are likely to speak, say, Toscan, even though they’ll probably adress the visitor in Italian.
Since Italians are still using dialects at home, it’s quite likely that your MIL’s parents used one too back then, and that she can’t understand or speak Italian. Add her many years forgetting whatever she was speaking and how it was actually pronounced by her parents, Italian locals having some heavy regional accent of their own she isn’t accustomed to, hearing people around her using yet another dialect (and dialects aren’t even standardized, hence change from one city to the next within the same region), and I can see how she could end up being very confused.
Knowing German quite well, and French somewhat well, to my ears the alleged “guttural” quality of German and the alleged “sweet” or “melodious” quality of French are both exaggerations. Can it be that when you begin to understand a foreign language, it soon becomes impossible to make subjective judgments on how they sound? I know it’s nearly impossible for me to do that with regard to English.
Of course the ‘tune’ of a language is very subjective. I find French to be melodious and wistful, Italian is charming and forthright, Spanish fast and monotone, Chinese fluctuating in tone and nasal, German melodious and incomprehensible, Tagalog, Thai and Hindi are difficult to categorize.
Scottish is sometimes incomprehensible, for his 80th birthday gift my Glaswegian great uncle asked for two medallions with some sanskrit engravings on them. His accent is quite difficult to understand, but I think what he said was he wants Scottish hindi pendants.
Of course, the notions of beauty and the coarsening thereof are to some extent in the ear of the beholder. But this supposed “coarsening” is exactly what’s been happening to English for some 1500 years, and it would be hard to argue that the language of Shakespeare is “coarse”, nor its more modern incarnations which are the basis of much of the world’s poetry and most of its contemporary music. Strictly from a count of its artistic works, it would be hard to argue that there is any more poetic or musical language than English.
This is not about the virtues of French vs. English as each has its own beauty and one is a better person for knowing both, but there are specific characteristics of English that could be argued make it the easier language to work with in poetry and especially song. It has a rich and expressive vocabulary, a relatively flexible syntax that makes it more amenable to structuring rhythm and rhyme, and generally pleasant phonemes that can be further softened in song. One of the interesting things about English-language popular music is how this softening tends to gravitate to such a common baseline accent, with the general impression being American country, even if the singers are British (or French) who sound totally different when they’re speaking.
Moreover, I don’t think the Quebec language zealots are primarily motivated by the putative aesthetics of the French language or its alleged “purity”, because if so, it wouldn’t have morphed into its own dialect different from the French spoken anywhere in France, which has its own dialectical variations anyway. They may think they are defenders of its aesthetics, and I certainly have spoken to enthusiastic Quebecois who rave about the intrinsic beauty of their language. That’s fine with me – at its best, it enriches the Canadian culture and is good for everyone. But that’s not what it’s mostly about.
What it’s mostly about is protecting and insulating a culture, and from a linguistic standpoint what they’re really up in arms about is not how pretty French sounds, but that the heavy dominance of English in commerce and the arts and sciences creates a situation in which the prestige language is English, or some heavily anglified French dialect, and traditional French risks being relegated to the backwoods and the peasants. To a large extent this already happened, and they’re trying to reverse it. One can’t blame them, but what I object to is the ruthless incursion on the civil rights of the English-speaking Quebecois that has been happening in the process. But that’s a topic for a different place and time.
Thank you. Yes, her confusion was/is completely understandable.
The fact she decided the native Italians were the ones speaking badly and that her half-remembered rusty mongrel immigrant personal dialect was the very Platonic Ideal of proper Italian was the funny part that makes the story worth telling.
Knowing her it was also completely predictable. But funny nevertheless.
I work with a whole lot of native Portuguese speakers from Portugal (I don’t speak it at all myself but I can read some of it). It always sounds to me like Spanish as spoken by a Russian. Romance language my ass. It is very harsh sounding to my ear.
I have to agree the rhythm and cadence here do sound remarkably authentic to me. I’m impressed by the way the sounds coming out of him sound as if they are actual yet nonsensical words, unlike in scat singing or doo-wop backing vocals where you woudn’t expect that.
When I hear people talk about the melodious nature of French, it’s more about the fact that so many consonants are dropped. The idea is that hard consonants are what make a language sound harsh. It also lacks those hard bag sounds, and stress is different (if it exists at all–I’ve seen arguments that French doesn’t really have syllabic stress. It sounds like it does to me, but that’s what I’ve heard.)
I would have thought it was the beating the French took by the Germans during WWII that made them soft and melodious … they don’t want to pick any more fights with the Germans …