I was always curious how this can be that so much would be borrowed from French if English has 1 million words and French has, what, maybe 100,000 tops? Rome invaded England before France did, and there were also the Danish, Norwegian, Greek and Dutch influences, and also English is a Germanic language itself, closest to the endangered language Frisian. (asked by Diane) Well, we’re straying away from French stuff here as we’re going to talk about the English language [Read the rest]
(asked by Ismael from California) A few more just to get some perspective about your answers: How old are you? What part of France do you live in and have you lived in? I don’t mean to get too personal as I don’t want to make you uncomfortable but I think these would be useful to know. Wow, this is quite personal indeed. Well, I value my anonymity dearly, so you won’t get many answers from me as far [Read the rest]
(asked by Ismael from California) Here in America, it is very rare for men to wear capris. The only men I have seen wearing them are gay men and some rock-climber type men and even those are few. My cousin worked at Eddie Bauer in the same outlet that I work at and the French men were always asking about the capris. The funny thing is that they only had capris for women and she had to explain that [Read the rest]
(asked by Ismael from California) I work at an outlet in California. We attract many tourists and I have noticed that many of our French tourists smoke a lot. This makes me wonder because here in America (at least in California where I live), it is socially unacceptable to smoke in public. In fact, many people would give a negative verbal reaction to someone who lit a cigarette next to them. I have to say that I don’t appreciate [Read the rest]