French
[ Kendal Butler was my step-mother, but long before that she was a teacher for my father teaching French, Spanish, and US History at a private school in Mexico. This is her recollection of a conversation she had with Frank, my father, about French. The conversation starts with Frank. ]
“Doesn’t it get old? Teaching French? You’ve been doing it for three years now. How do you stand it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s the same thing over and over again, isn’t it? And the most you can hope for is that your best students won’t mangle the language too badly. Don’t you feel like a musician teaching the tone-deaf?”
“That’s probably true. I certainly don’t expect any of them to be able to do anything right the first year. And sure, I admit I wince at most of the accents. But still …”
“What?”
“Well, with Spanish, it’s a very easy language to teach, and doing it here in Mexico I’m probably covering three years in one, particularly for the younger kids. So I do see progress, I do have some sense of accomplishment. Anyway, you and I know it’s just a sneaky way to teach English.”
This was a private joke, one shared by a hell of a lot of teachers who try to spoonfeed foreign languages into American kids who have never learned their own language properly, grammar being anathema in U.S. public schools. Another language—any old language, Latin, French, German, whatever—is a terrific vehicle for teaching kids all the stuff they should have learned about their own, their native tongue. Tenses. Direct and indirect objects. Passive vs. active. Relative pronouns. I was under strict orders from the Butlers to teach as much English grammar as I could in the course of taking my charges through French irregular verbs and Spanish prepositions.
“Sure, I can understand about Spanish. Anyway, they have to learn it; they’re in Mexico, for God’s sake! But French? Year after year? I don’t get it.”
“But French is so irrational, don’t you see? That’s the appeal! Here’s a country of pragmatists that’s made a fetish out of analytical thinking at least since Descartes, and they have the most ridiculous language in the world. I mean, what can you say about a language that has no word for eighty?”
“No word for what?” Frank really didn’t know a damn thing about French.
“Eighty. They have no word for eighty. So they say four twenties. Four twenties and one, four twenties and two, four twenties and three, all the way up to four twenties and nineteen.”
Frank was ecstatic. No word for eighty. This was the best fact to come his way in a month. “I love it. Tell me more.”
“Well, they can’t say seventy either, so they say sixty-ten. Been doing it for centuries. The Belgians, who really are practical and don’t have such a vested interest in being rationalists, very sensibly invented words to do the job, so they say septente and nonante and the hell with it. But the French have never confused rationality with practicality, God knows, so they still insist on quatre-vingt-dix-neuf for ninety-nine—that’s four twenties and a ten and a nine, actually.
“And then there’s the fact that they form a plural by adding an s, just like English or Spanish—but then they don’t pronounce it! So the only way you can tell the difference between garçon and garçons, let’s say”—by this time I’d hauled him to a blackboard and was scribbling away—“is by what comes before or comes after.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of,” Frank said. “It defies the whole purpose of written language. How the hell did it happen?”
“God knows. It’s French, that’s all I can tell you. And look at this. Here’s a word that the more of it there is, the less you hear.”
And I wrote the French word for egg on the board: oeuf.
“That’s pronounced Uf, more or less. Now here’s the plural.”
And I added the s: oeufs.
“That’s pronounced Uh.”
“Uh? O-e-u-f-s is pronounced Uh? Come on.”
“That’s right. Now that you’ve added the s, see, you don’t hear the f any more.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I know, I know, isn’t it great? That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This is what makes French such fun to teach. I tell the kids about this stuff, and they really get into it, they dig it because it’s ridiculous, and then it becomes a challenge to make sense of it, to make it work in spite of itself. All of it, the preposterous spelling and all the accents and the disappearing s that turns into a circonflexe …”
He interrupted me right there. “What’s that about the circonflexe?”
“That’s the accent that looks like a little hat, you know? Take a word like île”—and I wrote it on the board—“which means island, of course, as in île de la cité in Paris. We even have a cognate, isle, which means the same thing, right? Well, that s has dropped out and been replaced by the circonflexe over the i. You see the same thing in forêt, which means forest, and pâte, meaning paste, and pâté, meaning, well, liver paste. Or take fenêtre, which means window.”
Frank picked up on that one right away. “That’s like fenestration, when architects describe the placement of windows.”
“Right, or defenestration for tossing somebody out of one. They all come from the Latin fenestra, meaning window, so of course the French dropped the s and threw in the circonflexe.”
We were in our element now, playing with words, cooking with cognates, grooving on language. A couple of students came over to join the fun.
“Tell him about ___________________,” Fiona suggested.
“So anyway,” I concluded, “that’s how I can have fun teaching French.”