In and around Ottawa, you see a LOT of things written in both French and English. Often, to save space, the wording will be structured so that the French and English versions overlap, taking advantage of words that are the same in both languages.
Examples:
Poste de Police Station
Rue Bank Street
Fine $100 d’amende
I know I’ve seen a lot more, but I can’t recall them right now. (If anyone else can add any, feel free!)
Anyway, I’d like to know whether there’s an official term for this sort of linguistic merger. Plus any other information about it if anyone has done interesting research…
AFAIK, there is no official term. We just take advantage of the fact that French and English use “different sides” of the term. Thus, as an English speaker, I don’t see French at all:
I don’t see “Poste de,” I see “Police Station.”
I don’t see “Rue,” I see “Bank Street.”
I don’t see “d’amende,” I see “Fine $100.”
I would imagine that native French speakers similarly don’t see the English. At any rate, you get used to it after a while:
“Postes Canada Post”
“Gare Union Station”
“La compagnie T. Eaton and Company” (Yes, I know Eaton’s is dead, but still, I saw this occasionally.)
I think it would be interesting if a term has been coined for this. However, I suspect that it requires a combination of high literacy, dual languages, and a pair of (mostly) uninflected languages with a high number of cognates with a trend toward opposite word order for nouns and adjectives. I doubt that it even could have arisen before the eighteenth century and was unlikely to have arisen before the twentieth, so it is possible that no one has gotten around to coining such a word.
I never recall seeing anything similar in Begium or Switzerland, where the numbers of Dutch/French or French/German or French Italian or Italian/German cognates are rather few.
How exactly are these things printed? In “Poste de Police Station”, for instance, is the word “Police” printed larger and the words “Poste de” and “Station” printed smaller? Or are all the words the same size and on the same line?
Another example, seen today at Lansdowne Park:
ENTRÉE
DOME
ENTRANCE
I find the phenomenon quite interesting, myself. It seems like a great idea in a place where most people are able to read both languages, but might feel alienated by a French-only or English-only sign. It uses the minimum amount of space necessary to make everyone happy.
I do wonder, though, how well it works for people with NO knowledge of one of the languages, especially if they’re a bit shaky with the one they DO know. As my friend put it, “Is there some poor guy out there desperately trying to find ‘pont’ in his Swahili-English dictionary?”
I use the term “cereal box French” and “cereal box bilingualism” to mean “a shaky visual memory of the names of things in the other official language, accompanied by vague memories of how the language works from mandatory classes in school, but unaccompanied by any actual experience in speaking said language”.
In other words, you only remember as much of the other language as you commonly see around you on packaging such as cereal boxes.
I call my (poor, Alberta) French “Product label French”. Most Canadians know at least enough to decipher what’s inside a box or can of the official language of which they aren’t a native speaker.
The practice is hardly limited to Ottawa, and is ubiquitous in Canada. The five dollar bill says “cinq * five / dollars”, a can of Diet Pepsi says “Diet Pepsi Diete” (accent omitted). I can of Diet Coke is divided into thirds; one third says Diet Coke, one third says “Coke Diete”, one third has product information. I’d say about 60% of packaging saves space by using the brand name or by makng an effort to use words that are similar in French and English.
I think most Canadians would just call this “bilingualism” and not elaborate on the concise phrasing or portmanteau factor. Cereal box bilingualism is more along the lines Sunspace says; “Bilingual portmanteau” still implies a one word phrase. Canadian companies don’t want to spend more to have separate packaging in Quebec or be accused of being anti-francophone; they use concise phrases since their is not much room on packaging; nor government street signs. Elfbabe asks for examples, but they are pretty much omnipresent in Canada. And precisely because it is so common (and even more so in downtown Montreal and Ottawa), I think people call it “bilingualism” without a second thought.
It’s almost like the way Chinese names are sometimes written in English to accommodate both the Chinese family-name-before-first-name style and Western family-name-after style, e.g. “Miriam Yeung Chin Wah,” where Miriam is the adopted english first name, Yeung is the family name, and Chin Wah is the Chinese first name.
It is worth noting that public display of such signs is illegal in Quebec. The town I live in had loads of street signs like Boul Graham Blvd and recently was forced to send painters around and paint out the words like Blvd. No language issue is too picayune for a nationalist French Canadian.
