Talk:Quebec French/Archive 1

Royal French and King's Daughters

The accuracy of the following sentence is in doubt: "Quebecois French is also partly rooted in the Royal French spoken at King Louis XIV's Court (see King's Daughters or Filles du Roi)."

It seems to say that the King's Daughers are, or at least spoke, Royal French. Which is not true at all. King's Daughters were commoners and not related to the royalty. The name is merely metaphorical.

I have relocated the "see King's Dauthers" part, but I'm still not sure about if the sentence is true at all. Would somebody confirm? --Menchi 21:17 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

The Filles du Roi spoke the French of Ile-de-France which includes Paris. Royal French was the only official French before 1789. These girls partly explain why there are very little traces of many of France's patois in Quebec. Please Read: http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/francophonie/HISTfrQC_s1_Nlle-France.htm -- Mathieugp

There are a number of phonological archaisms in Québécois French. The one that is most striking --- not apparently touched on in the article, is the pronunciation of the diphthong written "oi," which is realised as /wa/ in standard French and /we/ in Québécois. When king Louis XVIII of France was restored after the final fall of Napoleon, a possibly apocryphal anecdote has Talleyrand telling him to adopt /wa/ rather than /we/, an older pronunciation associated with the aristocracy, so as not to offend his subjects. This is not evidence that aristocrats peopled New France, but it does show that the French of Québéc keeps these older versions. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:36, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Rolled Rs

I've heard plenty of younger speakers on Quebec TV rolling their Rs. Might this not be rather a regional pronunciation? Intervocalic r seems to be rolled lightly by most Québécois. Jfitzg

Rolled r (better called thrilled r), was indeed the r used traditionaly in the French of France. Read what I wrote just above. Hardouin 18:41, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Dialect

Our language is not a dialect, for sure. Its injurious to call "dialect" our language.Please,do the correction. Un québécois.

I have tried to speak about the Québécois language and mention French-speakers in Belgium as well as France. No doubt some will say this is NPOV, but then they do not know about the history of la langue Québécoise. Alex756 06:27, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

but not only french and belgium speak french. Luxembourg and swiss as well in Europe. And also have their specificities. If you want to compare with european french, you might as well add them. If you want to compare to "original" french, mention France only ihmo. Anthère

Good point Anthère. I don't know that much about the differences. I have mostly changed the FoF term (kind of ugly looking anyway) into French, Parisian French or just French or spoken in France and in one or two places to European French and QF to Québécois. I will leave it to someone else more knowledgeable regarding the regionale differances of European French to deal with these differences. The important point is that Quebecois is a language that has a distinct 500 year history quite apart from France. I am not qualified to discuss the Euorpean francophone differences. Alex756

Move

move

The OLF propounds official standards for written and taught French in Quebec, and is considered more modern and proactive than the Académie française, having proposed, for example, the above francized technical terms which have later become common usage in Quebec, as well as accepted popular changes in usage to reduce sexism. For example, Canadian French uses many feminine job titles (la mairesse, la juge, la docteure) for which official French of France usage has long remained masculine (madame le maire) until the Jospin government decided to feminize the titles against the advice from the Académie française.

end of move

I would like to see a more precise approach of the OLF standards are considered more modern and proactive than the Académie française. Anthère

Franglais

Removed reference to 'franglais' since its Wikipedia article doesn't apply to this situation. Tremblay 00:16, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Issues

• Somehow, the page Québécois French was moved to Québécois language. It should have been moved to Quebec French. In Québec, you will find 9 out of 10 linguists to tell you that there is no Québécois language nowadays (it was different in the 60s and 70s). Maybe two more centuries of British domination would have turned Quebec French into a new Creole of a sort, but it didn't happen. The major education problems of Quebec were mostly solved. Quebec speaks more French than it ever did in the past and the knowledge of our own French and the French of France and elsewhere is higher than before in the academic/scientific world.

French sitoms

Please consider moving this to Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense

Does France have sitcoms at all? Guaka 20:25, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes. France has numerous private TV stations, a public television network and these air numerous shows, some of which would fit the description of a "sitcom". The TV station we get from France here in Quebec is TV5, which is an international French language station. It has mostly European contents, most of which is centered on France. With satelite, we also get to catch other stations. Mathieugp 05:29, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, and I may even go as far as to say, "unfortunately". David.Monniaux 21:32, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hahaha. :P --Liberlogos 00:59, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Please read on the Trésor de la langue française au Québec project here --> http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/

I found a little something on it in English here --> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/auger/aug_res.htm

• The are laws in Quebec requiring for the dubbing of movies to be done in Quebec in international French. Therefore the recently added comment about most movies being dubbed in France in innaccurate. The majority of foreign movies are dubbed locally. Mathieugp 02:40, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree: the moving of the article to Québécois language was completely misguided. As you say, it should be moved to Quebec French, and the mention of "Québécois language" in the first paragraph should be deleted. The person who moved the article also didn't update the redirects, so now there are many broken links.--Indefatigable 16:34, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't feel any of this adequately explains why this was moved to Quebec French. What was wrong with Québécois French, which is how I've usually heard this dialect referred to? And I wish whoever moved it would fix the links.- Montrealais

The English-speaking world outside of Canada is not familiar with the adjective "Québécois", and this is the audience for the English version of Wikipedia.

Yes. Outside Canada, the word Québécois, especially with the accents on, is not in use. The most accurate translation of français québécois is Quebec French. Mathieugp 23:34, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Quebec French lexicon

How about we move the huge lexicon section to its own article? Would Quebec French lexicon be a good choice? Are there examples to follow in Wikipedia or would we be pioneers? -- Mathieugp 12:27, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yes, this is an excellent idea, dont acte. Both the new and the old articles need lots of work by the way—I'll invest some in the next few weeks, promis. --Valmi 23:21, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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Unicode and API

I changed some notations to make them "true" API, but I'm afraid that it may be awful on older computers. I'm concerned specially about the diphtongue notations, they were totally wrong and had to be fixed, but this "double-short diacritic" I was said is hard to render properly. Inputs? --Valmi 02:35, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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Dubious, you say...?

Say, why is this article under the Dubious Category? --Liberlogos 00:58, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The R bit is dubious – "dubious" means one information is "contested"; I am actually marking my own edit that way, see previous subtitle and User_talk:Gilgamesh#Non-uvular_R.27s_in_Quebec. --Valmi 04:56, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

IPA vs. X-SAMPA

I just noticed that the Phonetics section is all IPA and the Grammar one all X-SAMPA. We should choose once and for all. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 01:05, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am not aware of any wikipedia-wide consensus on the question. I tend toward X-Sampa if only because I have yet to see a version of Internet Explorer Actually able to display IPA (and Unicode in general) correctly, AT LEAST in pages that specify unicode encoding!

Also, I must point out the default encoding of Wikipedia is Iso-8859-1, NOT unicode and thus in truely strict display, IPA characters would not shopw up (and cannot at all if the browser does not suppoert unicode-encoding).

Finally, if it is not easily readable by linguist, it will at least be guaranteed to show up correctly.--Circeus 15:15, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well well, I asked before on this very talk page is everybody was able to read the IPA properly, and nobody answered, and I realise just now that you are right and even I with IE am not able to read it. Bugger...

As of wikiconsensus, you are right in not being aware of one because there is none. As of what a truely strict display would do, you are wrong because HTML entities always use ISO-10646 (~= Unicode) independantly of the page encoding. But of course if Internet Explorer, still used by about 90% people out there, won't show any of it, there is little point...

So I'd tend to agree with Circeus and use X-SAMPA then, because of IE. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 16:32, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

...But I'd love to hear others' opinion. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 01:51, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why limit this to the sole Quebec French article? It is an issue that must be tackled over Wikipedia as a whole IMHO--Circeus 14:12, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, but no, but it's been tackled already quite a bit in the WPT namespace with no concesus reached. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (pronunciation) and Wikipedia talk:Pronunciation guide. A MediaWiki upgrade was even mentionned, which is an idea I'm tackling right now in my own mind...

On the other hand, different contents have different needs. Even in Quebec French, you could say that SAMPA is more appropriate than IPA for the Grammar section, but I was thinking of the conversion of Phonetics to X-SAMPA and it's a nightmare. Example: <municipalité> [mY_0nI_0sI_0palI_0te]. Le réviseur linguistique en moi s'indigue néanmoins lorsqu'il voit deux normes différentes dans un article. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 20:57, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)