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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 73 of 82 19 September 2012 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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With all this loose talk about Québécois French going on here, I suggest that people run, not walk, to the latest post on a site I have mentioned before: www.fluentfrenchnow.com
There in all its glory is a detailed analysis of a conversation in colloquial Québécois French. There are three such analyses of Québécois French on the site, complete with audio and video. Edited by s_allard on 19 September 2012 at 2:28pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 74 of 82 19 September 2012 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | ||
There's a lot to comment here, so I'll take things in order and try to be brief. First of all, the main reason the two dictionaries mentioned were not successful at the time was not the fact that they did not meet the expectations of the market. One very important and fundamental reason was that the Ministère de l'éducation at the time refused to authorize ("agréer") them for the school system. This deprived them of the most important market, the school system. The other reason for their limited commercial success was the total dominance of the two main dictionary firms, Larousse and Robert that have a stranglehold on the market with their wide range of products. As for madame Cajolet-Laganière's contention that " that Quebecker do not want a dictionary that tells them what their own words mean. They already know them. They want a dictionary that tells them the meaning of all the thousands of other words they don't already know," she is dead wrong. As one of the co-authors of the dictionary project. le Franqus, she has a viewpoint to defend. Let me first point out that the most successful dictionary in the history of Quebec lexicography is Léandre Bergeron's Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise. It has been continuously in print, unchanged, since 1980. That's 32 years. In my opinion, it's not a very good dictionary but it met and continues to meet a need. What is this need? Very simply put, everybody needs a reference work that a) gives meanings of unknown words and b) guides usage of known words. I should also point out that before Bergeron's dictionary there was the wonderful Dictionnaire nord-américain de la langue française by Louis-Alexandre Bélisle and first published in 1957. Actually I think that this work may have been more successful than Bergeron's work. Why are there dictionaries of American, Canadian, Australian and British English, among others? It is because publishers feel that there is a market for a reference work that reflects the particularities of a national variety of the language. The problem of dictionary makers in Quebec is two-fold. First, there is a large part of the population and the Office québécois de la langue française that believe that Québécois French must look to the French of France (or some sort of "international" standard) for the norms of proper French usage. The key argument here is that Quebec represents only a small part of the francophonie. Therefore it is only normal that Quebec linguistic standards should defer to the European or so-called metropolitan standard. This is precisely why the reference of Marie-Ève De Villers are so successful. They are prescriptive works that aim to show people how to use the language properly. The other major problem of dictionary makers in Quebec is the stranglehold that European publishers have on the Quebec dictionary market. Over 100,000 dictionaries are sold in Quebec every year. On a per capita basis, Quebec is the most lucrative market for French dictionaries. The European publishing houses Robert and Larousse (I think they are owned by the same company) dominate about 90% of the market with their wide range of products. Given this situation, no Quebec publishing house dares to attempt anything as major as a dictionary. What we do have is a university-based project since 1997 called Franqus which has spent something like 11 million dollars (I may be wrong) and has not produced anything beyond a beta website that has not been updated in a few years. Who know what will come of the project? I think the Franqus is actually not bad although I still think it suffers from some of that disdain for popular usage. The problem of the Franqus, I think, is that it is trying to be all things to all people. It claims to want to respect a Québécois norm of proper usage like that of the Office québécois de la langue française and at the same time give Quebec a dictionary that it can call its own. It can't be too colloquial or popular. And it can't be too prescriptive or Euro-centric. So, what will this dictionary have that the others don't? That remains to be seen. But it doesn't look good. Who is going to publish it? Is there really a market for it? I doubt that the people at Robert and Larousse are losing any sleep over it. Edited by s_allard on 19 September 2012 at 2:31pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 75 of 82 21 September 2012 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I hope the Franqus dictionary comes to terms and gets published. I would certainly like to buy and use it. A french
dictionary made in Quebec doesn't have to be the perfect one. There is no such thing anyway. Larousse has many drawbacks and Robert has some too (although in my opinion it is vastly superior to Larousse in every way). The point, to me, is that there is no reason why language dictionaries could not be produced in Quebec. I mean, we can produce everything else, so why not dictionaries? And why not, even, dictionaries of other languages (french- english, french-spanish, and so on)? I'm glad the Multi did and does well (although I don't like it myself), but why stop there? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 76 of 82 24 September 2012 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you went to a medium-sized town in Quebec which didn't feature on the tourist map and wasn't on the English-speaking border, what level of English would be spoken among the general population? Would a typical blue-collar worker who was raised as a French speaker and who didn't have an outstanding academic record find it challenging to converse in English?
I remember meeting a young lady from Quebec who was working as a language assistant in a British school. While her English was good, I got the feeling it was very much a second language and something that didn't come naturally to her. Edited by beano on 24 September 2012 at 2:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 77 of 82 24 September 2012 at 3:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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beano : you wouldn't be able to converse at all in English. Most people here in that situation, unless they have a
special interest in learning English and some of them do, have as much knowledge of it, or maybe just slightly more, than English Canadians have of french. I remember than during the last year of my high school education, the english teacher was still asking S-L-O-W-L-Y basic questions like "can you tell me something in the classroom that is red?" to test our abilities (and many sadly had poor abilities when it came to English conversation). And that was after 6 years of classes. So... Edited by Homogenik on 24 September 2012 at 3:27pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 78 of 82 26 September 2012 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would just like to let people know that I just published a course on Québec French.
Le québécois en 10 leçons Please note that the course is in French and requires an intermediate reading level. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 79 of 82 26 October 2012 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to revive this thread as a place where people can come ask questions about
Québec French. For starters, this article gives a bit of an overview. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| overscore Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4565 days ago 23 posts - 38 votes Speaks: French*, English, German | Message 80 of 82 26 October 2012 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to interject by bringing to attention the fact that Quebec does have a great dictionary, comprising both standard and colloquial language. Has anyone heard of Antidote, from the software company "Druide informatique"?
It is only available in digital format, but there you go.. :-) If someone were to provide the trees, hard copies would be a possibility too.. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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