correct terminology

[bob]

Apologies if this is a tad OT but you lot have the best brains on any newsgroup ,creep creep,so here goes,what is the correct translation in French for "direct from Aquitane" once again many thanks

[Lino expert]

Directement =E0 partir d'Aquitaine

[bob]

many thanks,my schoolboy French is embarrasing,but i am working on it and it is a lovely language

[John]

many thanks,my schoolboy French is embarrasing,but i am working on it and it is a lovely language

Try:

[Lobster]

I really wouldn't dream of using that for anything 'mission-critical' - it's just about OK if you want to get the gist of something (eg an incoming foreign email) but not to produce translated text intended for a foreigner's consumption.

A good test is to googlate your English into language 'X', then googlate it back again to English and see what you get - any discrepancy indicates that all is probably not well...

David

[ARWadsworth]

Is it not "DIRECT FROM AQUITANE"?

Cheers

Adam

[ARWadsworth]

Is it not "DIRECT FROM AQUITANE"?

Cheers

Adam

[Dave Osborne]

No, you wrote that too fast.

[Andy Champ]

I'm with Lobster. Use it on foreign documents, and laugh at the English. Then think hard about what it's doing going the other way.

Luckily for me my wife speaks ... err... counts... six languages. Two of them very rusty though.

Andy

[John]

IMHO it's a bloody awful language, all snotty and snivelly and oily. Hated it at school 30-odd years ago and still hate it now. As to the 'nuts and bolts' of it, I cannot get to grips with this idea of gender. A man is masculine, a woman is feminine - how the hell can inanimate objects such as tables and chairs be masculine or feminine? Stupid! BTW, this is said from the perspective of someone who's trying to get to grips with the Czech language :-)

[Andy Champ]

And a ship is "she" because...

At least some kinds of Chinese have no linguistic genders - and Swahili has over a dozen different classes for nouns, which are the nearest equivalent.

Andy

[Clot]

I beg your pardon? I learnt Welsh both within the community and at school as a child. I even used the language as a teenager working in my father's shop in Conwy in winter when few folk would be speaking in English (1960s). French in the Grammar School was a doddle as a result of Welsh, both because of a similarity and the gender of nouns.

I didn't use French until my 40s when working on Standards Committees and dealing with the EU. It soon kicked in. I still have serious problems with the compound nouns in German though!

Good luck with Czech!

[fred]

Welsh has never done it for me but spoken French does it for me every time . . . . . .

[John]

I absolutely agree. This is what I have always done when using AltaVista and other translation services.

[Steve Walker]

At least in English you can just call a ship "it," whereas in French you even need to know gender to do that!

Personally I think we should all use Latin - there isn't even a need for a word for "the" or "a", never mind one with gender attached!

SteveW

[geoff]

Why - there is a perfectly good international language which has reached critical mass

it has various forms, it adapts itself to the local language, the local dialects differ, but it is universally understood to some degree

it's called english

who, in international communication gives a toss about latin? Nobody

it's dead jim, whatever its advantages (which tend, in the most part, to be keeping latin teachers in business, AFAICS)

If you just want a simple language, Indonesian would be far better than latin - tenses are only defined by words like "yesterday". "Tomorrow" etc or "I will" or "I have", no verb tense change. Multiple are denoted by a repeat of the word (e.g. Anak=child, anak-anak=children). Not a language I'd choose if I had to pick a world language, though

English is a hybrid of so many languages from which the bits that work have been/are being distilled

latin is a bit stuck when it comes to words/phrases like dvd recorder, mitochondrial DNA Higgs Boson, software, etc - let it die in peace

[The Medway Handyman]

Things do sound more exotic in French.

Remember that French piano player Michel Le Grand?

Over here he'd be called Big Micky.

Double entendre restaurante

Jacques Cousteau, Yves St Laurent

Ou est la plume de ma tante?

C'est la vie, ma crepe suzette.

[Steve Walker]

It wasn't a serious suggestion!

SteveW

[geoff]

Gave me a chance for a rant, though

[Steve Walker]

Happy to oblige :)

SteveW