F is for Cajun French

[muckefuck]

Cajun French I. Faulk, James Donald. Crowley, La. : Cajun Press, c1977.

Long ago it occurred to me that the truly ironic thing about my dislike of French is if it were some freakish marginalised Romance variety instead of an elabourated literary language with 100 million or so native-speakers, I'd be all over it. I mean, what's not to love about a phonology that turns [akwa] into [o] or [insula] into [il] or verb complex that's got more in common with Swahili or Basque than anything Romance? But, unfortunately, French is associated with France and--even worse--pretentious American Francophiles. I've had to spend my whole life hearing people babble on about how "beautiful" it is while they condemn American English for its "nasality" and German for its "gutteralness", even though French is more nasal and gutteral than the two of them put together.

What I needed, I realised, was a freakish marginalised variety of French, one without any snob appeal or fawning devotees. I thought Québécois would fit the bill but the Québécois are, if anything, more annoying about their language than the French. I got excited when I found out that there were vestiges of colonial French in Missouri, but finding anything on this dialect turned out to be harder than impossible. So when e. and bunj asked me what I wanted from New Orleans, I told them, "Find me a book on Cajun French."

And they did--but not this one. All they could find was a recent reprint of a turn-of-the-century French work that failed to turn my crank much. Cajun French I (AFAICT, Cajun French II never saw the light of day) came from a fellow language geek at my previous job. (It's to him I'm also grateful for the only grammar of Latin I've ever owned. It's in Welsh.) In its own way, it's leaves as much to be desired as the aforementioned reprint, but it's got more charm.

How much more? Bumloads more. For one thing, it looks exactly like what you'd expect something cobbled together in a teacher's spare time to look; browsing the typescript pages, you can almost smell the mimeograph ink. For another, the concerns are unabashedly parochial. Don't expect to come away from it able to discuss the latest Caro and Jeunet film, but you'll be able to talk about fence-mending, critter-hunting, and going down to the Lucky Seven for milk with practiced ease.

The transcription system used is the kind of "phonetic English" that would normally have me pulling my hair out by the roots, but somehow it works here. And I love the long lists of vocabulary terms; makes up for the lack of a glossary. Besides, if I want some prettified documents, there's always the slick pages on the Tulane University site that I've discovered in the meanwhile. (Plus it's nice to have collaboration for some of the more unusual grammatical features identified by Mr Faulk, like the loss of the subject pronoun elles or the pronunciation of elle as [al].)

I just can't wait to use some of it on a snooty poseur francophone and have him tell me how atrocious my French is.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

When it comes to individual Frenchmen, I've mostly had good experiences. People warned me before I went to France that the locals are intolerant of bad French, but I got the same positive reactions from my attempts there as I did in other countries.

But, as I point out above, the problem is less the French themselves than, on the one hand, the Statesiders who idealise them and, on the other, their political and cultural leaders, who reflexively turn to USA-bashing when they need to shore up support. The Germans have a very different experience of French political ambitions since the EU is, at its heart, a Franco-German collaboration. However, the lesson the French drew from the Suez Crisis of 1956 is that the USA was getting too big for its britches and had to be counterbalanced within the Western Bloc. Ever since then, it seems it's hardly missed an opportunity to stick one in the eye of the USA (as long as nothing really important is at stake).