More on words and language

Our house with its tall conifer - a landmark for those lost around the neighbourhood!

I love maps, but not always on the internet - atlases and other printed maps often seem more satisfactory although less searchable.   You can see from these two maps from the Petit Larousse (too heavy to hold for long, so useful transferred to a screen) that Lunel is right at the eastern edge of the Hérault département.  So many places in the Hérault are actually a long way from us, and many of our contacts and meeting places when we can travel are in the Gard which wraps itself round the right hand side of the Hérault.  Most départements in France are named for rivers - the Gard is unusual in modifying the river name (Gardon), but in any case many rivers spend a lot of their lengths in other départements.  The river closest to us is the Vidourle which is notorious for its floods, every 25 years or so, which forms the eastern border of the Hérault with the Gard.

A scene in our garden some years ago for a lunch after our Tuesday French conversation group. The garden has not changed much but even before the pandemic the personnel has, several of these people have departed from our group in various ways, and there's little chance of gatherings like this again in the near future.

Our life here revolves round the non-stop process of learning French.  After nearly 15 years we've made a lot of progress, but it is still a minefield and equally a source of constant fascination.  There are two dimensions - one, the many-faceted business of written French (easier because you can usually go away and look it up) and spoken French which can vary both in speed (you discover that English people too seem to rattle away too fast) and regional accent, to say nothing of the difference between slang, jargon, technical vocabulary and formal statements.  We have found the Government press conferences models of clarity (even when the news is unwelcome) as are magazine tv shows like the excellent travel magazine programme  Des racines et des ailes, but catching chatter among friends is often difficult, as if speaking and hearing on the phone, especially when you don't know in advance the topic of the call.  Sadly we have all too little friendly chatter at the moment.

The first poppies a week or two ago

The issue of sexist language is very topical here now.  France is some way behind the English-speaking world in this, partly because of the additional complexity that all nouns have gender, and historically because of the Académie française which has for centuries laid down the law about what is correct and incorrect.  Now inclusive names of the 'man includes woman' kind are much less common - names of professions (professeuse as well as professeur, for instance) have increasingly been feminised since the 1980s and mor recently there have been official circulars defining how inclusive pronouns like 'he or she' should be written - I have always tended to use / , but one hotly debated method here is the use of the point médian, a kind of decimal point when for instance masculine and feminine endings are indicated, for example professeu·r·se.  As with much to do with language in French, this gets rather complicated (just typing the thing is complicated enough!)

Such cultural debates are often long and heated - a supplement in Midi Libre was headed to "cette écriture qui divise tant" and referred to a veritable (ardente) battle of Hernani - what on earth is that?  Well, it's a reference to a play Hernani by Victor Hugo (the name is from a Spanish town).  It became notorious for the demonstrations at its first performance between the romantics (Hugo had Berlioz and Théophile Gautier, poet of Les nuits d'été' among his champions) and classicists who saw the play as a direct attack on their values.  Verdi also wrote an opera, Ernani, apparently.  So passions were roused then, and people today recognise the reference nowadays well enough for it to be used in a local newspaper.

Clearly understanding culture, popular or not, is a complicated process.  Meanwhile, we listen to frequen official press conferences on Covid as much to hear the very clear language ministers and officials use as to keep up with the latest information.  Restrictions in movement are to be eased, and in any case we have now both been vaccinated, but our lives are quiet and the chance of travelling to England is very small just now, so sadly our family and friends there remain at the end of phones and video calls.  This week the physiotherapist, Emma, who has helped me through over 3 months' healing of broken arm is leaving for her next placement, working with children in the hills somewhere.  I'll miss her, but of course the team practice she works in will provide me with a replacement.  And April continues to bring mostly beautiful weather.

Roses starting to show in the front yard