LANGUAGE OF QUEBEC

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 57, 4 September 1926, Page 20

LANGUAGE OF QUEBEC

FRENCH AS SPOKEN BY

MOLIERE.

Suppose you went to a distant part of the world and heard the people speaking English as Shakespeare heard them speak at Warwick Fair (writes Colonel William Wood in the "Christian Science Monitor"). Would you think that kind of English very bad? No. Well, if. you go about among the inhabitants of. the Province of Quebec you will hear'something that occasionally reminds an educated Frenchman of what his home folks talked in the time of Moliere. Habitant (and even some French-Canadian), speech is older in pronunciation than modern Parisian by about 200 years. There, is nothing strange in this, for older' ways live longest in remote communities; there is older Portuguese and Spanish in South America than in Lisbon and Madrid, and New England still has some words that are nearer Shakespeare's than the corresponding ones are in Old England now. Another peculiarity, that strikes the modern Frenchman is' the daily use of certain nautical expressions which, after all, are natural enough in an old French colony settled from overseas, ' dependent on sea powers, and almost everywhere living beside a network of navigable waterways. You must embarquer into the deparqucr out of any kind of vehicle ashore. You must .moor your horse amarrer. The winter snow roads are marked by buoys (balises), and if you miss the channel you'll founder' (caler), and perhaps become like a regular derelict vessel (degrade). If you get your car or carriage mended, your habitant friends say you have had it refitted (radoue). A girl rigged out in her Sunday best is what our own seamen would call "fit to go foreign" (bin greyee). And when you and she have made it up after a lovers' quarrel, you. are said to be remoored (remarries).