Ma querelle avec la langue française
(plus a few observations on the French)
David Jenness June 2011
I had the chance recently to listen to French, spoken by native or near-native speakers, over a period of almost five weeks. By listen I mean an unfocussed sort of attending, aimed not at decoding meaning but at the sound of the language itself. I want to record some impressions, not that they have gone unnoticed by others, but because I came away from this exposure with, I think, a deeper understanding of the nature of the language. In these remarks, I take as a frame for comparison my awareness of English, German, Spanish, and Italian, the only languages I can ‘hear.’ Since linguistic communities are non-homogeneous, I also have reference primarily to adult educated speakers of the middle or professional classes.
Early on during this period it struck me that French, attended to passively in this way, sounded, to put it in positive terms, engaged, animated, vital. Put negatively, the speakers I was hearing sounded, by and large, truculent, mildly outraged, and generally pissed-off. I do not get this impression from hearing other languages. I have tried to analyze why this should be so. Some aspects have to do with the language itself, others with me myself.
First, French is spoken with a raised palate, high and forward in the mouth, with a good deal of articulatory force involving tongue and teeth, and without resting upon a deep column of air. This means that the important acoustic information comes early in the phoneme: the first forment (roughly speaking, a concentration of acoustic and phonetic power at a certain pitch) does most of the work. For articulatory purposes, the over-all pitch of ongoing speech is relatively high. When you add to this the general pattern of upward glides toward the end of words, phrases, or sentences, it yields a forceful, even agitated impression. Paradoxically, even when stress climbs toward the end of a unit, the phoneme may remain unclear, owing to the final nasals, the muted e, and the like. So one has the impression of abrupt beginning, rapid decay. [It is perhaps relevant to observe that, while I have known Americans with strong ‘southern’ accents to speak French fluently, they never get the contours right. Basically they speak in too relaxed a fashion.]
Second, by any direct measure of phonemes per second, French is spoken at a rapid rate. My impression is that Spanish may be spoken as quickly, but with a less front-loaded production. Italian is on average slower, with a more uniform amount of time spent on each vowel, and a far more sculpted intonation contour across a phrase or sentence. (The only unit of speech over which French speakers linger, for expressive force, is the adverb, as if only there is editorial emphasis permissible.) English and German are slowest, other things equal, and come in more uniform chunks. In addition, the crucial information tends to come toward the end of linguistic units.
The pervasive use of elision in French casts a sombrous blanket over what a foreigner hears: you get some information in the first word or two, and you can generally dope out the last few phonemes from immediate memory: in the middle, it’s mush, with an occasional noun or adverb sticking up like Mont Blanc out of the clouds. I don’t know German half as well as I know French, but I can ‘hear’ spoken German far more easily, because the basic phonological units are more bounded, discrete.
Third, for non-natives, the phonology of French is complex and inherently ambiguous. Italian uses only six or seven basic vowels; what sound like diphthongs arise from rapid vowel to vowel elision. English uses 12 pure vowel sounds plus 8 diphthongs. French uses 30 pure vowels plus 5 diphthongs, all 5 diphthongs being absent in English. So the sounds of French are hard to hear, and it’s not just a matter of the vowel-consonant nasals. Many other sounds are clouded for an English speaker, the most obvious being the r. In Spanish and Italian the r’s can’t be missed, since they are trilled or flipped, which helps one form a starting hypothesis about the word in question. All the languages I am familiar with use elision, mostly consonant into vowel (least so, German), but the other Romance languages also use minute aspiration (glottals, et al) as dividers of sound or clarifiers of sense far more than French does. French even needs a special marker to counteract the tendency to elision: for example, the insertion of the t in y a-t-il or va t’on.
All languages show lots of variation, depending on the immediate linguistic context. This aspect of speech is what linguists refer to, intriguingly, as ‘variable rules’ in phonology. But spoken French may use more than most; I don’t know how to measure the claim. The vocable France may have one syllable, one syllable plus the shadow of a trailing vowel, or two syllables --depending. A final s, t, c, q, even a final –er ending a word or name, may be present or suppressed -- depending. You just have to listen and listen, and eventually learn, instance by instance. The word for light, léger, does not sound the –er; the painter’s name does. The participles élus or inclus drop the s, but I say Camus with the s (some don’t). Did you know that fancy art historians say Degas with the s, claiming that the family pronounced it that way? When does plus sound the s? When does jus? Why does banc drop the c, but donc sound it? [There are indeed some relevant variable rules, painfully educed, but this is not the place for them.]
And native speakers disagree. I asked a Frenchwoman, this trip, whether in compound subordinating connectives like lorsque, puisque, tandisque, you voice the s. Her reply was elaborate but ultimately decisive, no: you do not -- except some do, sometimes. That evening, watching a bit of French TV news, I heard puisque with the s.
As to intra-language variation in general (although I tried above to specify my representative French speaker), there is obviously the same sort of variability owing to class, age, and region that one hears in English. For example, a young adult or professional class speaker says, for oui, wee; an older working-class adult may say whey; an old farmer may say whoy. And disagreement is not just on the phonological level. I was taught forcefully, by my first French teacher, presumably a competent speaker, that one never never never begins a sentence with S’il vous plaÎt. I heard it many times during the recent trip: the variable rule here seems to be that if you regard this string as an opening sentential fragment, then it’s permitted.
I do not know how to quantify syntactical complexity, but certainly French must lie toward the extreme end. In one regard, it is less complex than English in that, where we use particles to condition the meaning of verbs (stay away, put aside, go after, come in, etc.), French tends to build these aspects directly into the verb. Of course, native English speakers are spoiled by the relative syntactical simplicity of their language, which is at the simpler end of the spectrum with regard to tense, case, and gender markers. Our conditionals and subjunctives and exotic verb forms are so lightly marked that most of us are not aware of them grammatically. The rapidity of spoken French is paralleled by the density of short sub-lexical units, which aggravates the problem. French is infected with bothersome little lexical/phonemic units: en and y, notably, but also the insertion of what seem to English speakers like redundant articles signaling the accusative or dative case. [This is the one aspect of French grammar that for me not only makes the language hard to hear but sometimes hard to comprehend in written form.] Italian has some of this referential or deictic redundancy, and in German there is the wandering zu.
All languages show odd features and what seems like conceptual illogic. I have touched on these matters without a methodical cross-language analysis, not simply to point out some rather technical aspects that are worth attention for their own sakes, but for a stronger reason. I am putting forward a claim that French is, in my view, inherently the most difficult of the second languages that educated Americans commonly try to acquire. (Italian runs a close second, I believe.)
However, I must acknowledge some special difficulties that have to do with me as a language speaker. It would be fair to say that I suffer from – let me put it abstractly, so as to buffer myself from shame – a condition of meta-linguistic hyperawareness. I would sooner be caught urinating in public than voice an ill-formed utterance.
I mentioned that German is easier for me to ‘hear’ than the other Western languages, even though I have little over-all competence in that language. I could take dictation from moderately complicated spoken German and get it more nearly right, lexically and syntactically, than from French. The basic reason is that I am hopeless when it comes to processing language by fundamentally aural means. Even in English, when I have heard something ambiguous, I have to clarify it by running several possible strings across the teleprompter in my mind, in order to determine what might make semantic sense. All of us do this in hearing language, but I do have, I think, what amounts to a neurological defect. I connect this directly to the way in which I (a well- trained musician) cannot process heard music easily unless I transform it into a string of solfège with an accompanying harmonic analysis running, on parallel tracks, in my brain. Once I can see the music mentally, I can hear it. But not the other way round: I am an excellent sight-reader, but cannot ‘play by ear’ except on the most rudimentary level.
In both natural languages and in music, the sight/sound correlation that is the basis for meaning (that, by the way, is the basic definition of grammar) is for me very heavily tipped toward visual representation. I have enormous trouble memorizing music: it is almost impossible for me to perform music with confidence unless I can complete the feedback loop between reading a score in real time and simultaneously singing or playing what I am taking in visually.
In English, and to some degree in other languages, my short-term memory for exact verbal strings is good -- better than most people’s -- so that, within limits, I can often take what I have just heard and represent it as a mental score. It must be that my own difficulty with French is to some large degree peculiar to me and my particular sensorimotor abilities. The situation becomes especially fraught when I attempt to speak French face to face with native speakers at a normal interactive pace. My ability to hear and mimic the discrete sounds of French (and any language I have some knowledge of) is excellent. Thus, I can, at times, produce a string of French that is phonetically close to perfect; and if it is a short utterance, it may be grammatically perfect as well. My ability to get the sounds right has been attested to many times, including on my recent trip. It leads my interlocutors to assume that I “speak French” -- and to respond by speaking French back to me. That’s where the trouble starts. What they say back to me will, in seven out of ten cases, be a meaningless blur.
It gets worse. I love, I “groove on” language, and have very high standards for myself (and for others, alas). This attitude reflects no doubt some mixture of respect for language and an inordinate self-regard. Since I cannot bear to emit an ill-constructed utterance, I enter into a linguistic interaction having mentally scripted --- put up on the mental blackboard -- my opening move, which may be quite elegant and complex. Having uttered it, I am momentarily pleased with myself. Naturally, when I anticipate a sustained interaction, I plan several moves in advance: once I say this, s/he will say something on the order of that, and I will respond in such-and-such a way. But my actual French conversant will, naturally enough, take the interaction in some unexpected direction, and I will be struck dumb. I cannot, will not respond with a time-out or place-holding verbal formula while I get my bearings, yet I refuse to lob back anything consequential without first running it through the mental teleprompter to make sure it is acceptable. That takes time, and it is not the way real conversations proceed. At best, I end up putting the ball back over the net with something I can say, rather than something I want to say. Soon it dawns on the other speaker that I sound as if I speak French, and indeed must have studied the language -- but cannot in fact converse in it. It is at this point that he or she will take the graceful exit, and comment that my French pronunciation is so good -- forbearing to add: So why the hell can’t you converse?
I am not quite so neurotic in bumbling through tourist interactions in Italian or German. For there my self-esteem is not at stake: I have never really studied those languages, so I am willing to take time, try to get it right, and not agonize over mistakes. But French? I’ve been working on French for 60 years!
Which takes us back to the top. The French do speak fast, it’s an especially complex grammar … and so on. Perhaps my particular status may be of some interest to language teachers and neurolinguists. When I first started learning French, the big push in second language instruction was for the use of the ‘direct method’: immersing the student in the sounds and the ongoing grammatical flow, with the tutorial conviction that eventually comprehension will form. Not true for me. In recent years I tried this approach again with Spanish, with the same bad outcome. For someone like me, the only way to master a foreign language is to receive both aural and written input simultaneously, or nearly so, to have a teacher (conceivably electronic) that will provide me continually with a flow of information on both levels at once. If I were younger, I would test this, probably with Italian, which I wish I could speak. But as things stand, I am stuck with this lifelong frustration. Perhaps there will be someone reading this who shares it. I try to forgive myself, but it is difficult. In any event, my advice to parents and teachers is that, in foreign language learning as in everything else, people differ in their neurological capacities and learning styles. Always doubt the proposition that there is only one way.
Some observations about the French as people
Having run on about the language, I’ll add a few observations about the French as people.
First, what everybody knows remains true: the woman, when young, are preternaturally chic, even when they are not good-looking. The same can’t be said about the men, at least not in the provinces. [Gender differences across cultures always fascinate me. Young Spanish men are good-looking, but the women are rough. When English women are pretty, it’s in the coloring and the complexion, and the same tends to be so for Germans of both sexes. All Italians, whatever the gender and at almost any age, are sexy.]
Older teenagers and young adults, even upper-class, continue in provincial France at least to smoke a lot, even in the face of official attempts to institute sanctions against it. It’s disturbing, and somehow it seems to me to express not only the foolhardiness of the young – it won’t happen to me – but a certain arrogance among the French as to their personal right to ignore societal, i.e., officially promulgated, norms. At the same time the French insist on strict social (i.e., interpersonal, group) rules when it suits them. [Another language oddity: this past trip, I was corrected twice when I used de rien to mean It’s nothing or Don’t think twice about it. The revision was our old-fashioned friend, il n’y a pas de quoi. But why pick on me? The French say de rien all the time. I guess they just like to correct foreigners.]
Smokers in cafes and outdoor settings flick their used-up cigarettes into the middle distance with a flick of the thumb and second finger, without putting them out first. Again, to me this bespeaks a disregard for others, let alone a lack of concern for fire.
This trip I noticed that usually (not always) the two-cheek kiss is not a kiss at all, but a choreographed mutual pressing of cheeks, without lip contact. The two persons involved do not hold onto each other briefly on the arms or shoulders or back, the way those of us in our culture do who engage in social kissing. It all makes for a nicely desexualized ritual, which is I suppose the point. There is also the brisk, one-motion handshake, never the sustained pumping we do, and again, never with an arm around the shoulder or on the lower arm. It gives a certain brusque punching-in quality to the transaction, equivalent to using a time clock or flipping a switch to say, I’m here.
It also interests me that the French will come to a café for a small coffee or a beer, and bring their own food with them – a croissant or brioche, or some easily portable junk food. This wouldn’t work back in the USA.
Decades ago, one had to ask, Service compris, Service inclu? No longer, even at higher-end restaurants. (I don’t know about Paris, actually.) Taxes and service are built into the check, a far better system than ours. What comes with this is the graceful, friendly way that staff in brasseries and cafes and restaurants treat each other, helping each other out as a matter of course because no one is vying for tips.
A final irony. In the Bordeaux wine country, the Chinese are taking over, not only cornering markets and vintages but buying entire wineries and vineyards. They’re everywhere that has to do with wine, and these days they have the money. Historically, it was the English who bought the vineyards and controlled the wine trade. The new Chinese entrepreneurs do not speak French (there are exceptions) any more than the English wine lords did. But in the earlier era, the English would simply speak English (loudly) and the French would pretend not to understand a word (by and large they understood perfectly well). These days, the Chinese do not speak Chinese in the wine regions, but English --and the French speak it right back with no apparent resentment. How cultural patterns shift over the ages! I wonder if there’s some residual racism at play here: English and even Americans ought really to speak French (and should be punished when they don’t), whereas Asians can hardly be expected to be aware of the supremacy of France in cultural history.
Of course it is generally true that, in my lifetime, English has become accepted as the functional language-in-common all over Western Europe, even among those who are probably only marginally literate in their own language. This of course is part of the frustration for those of us who continue to try to speak French in France: after a moment or two of uncertainty, of wasted time, the French just shift to English, even when you don’t want them to. In Paris, I simply accede to this, since I am generally intimidated in Paris. On this trip, I actually had the temerity sometimes to say, No no, I prefer to speak in French, even if badly. Most of the time I got cooperation – up to a point.