X-Nico

15 unusual facts about French


Anglo-French

It may also be used erroneously to describe the Anglo-Norman language, the dialect of Old Norman used in medieval England

Anglo-French is a term used in contexts involving France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK).

Bobby Baccalieri

As a partial result of this awkward incident, Bobby was tasked with murdering the brother-in-law of one of Tony's Québécois associates, an important hit that formed part of a deal to save money on a pharmaceuticals racket.

Cariso

Cariso singers, called chantwells, sang primarily in French creole.

Chanté mas

Lyrics are almost all in French creole and are traditionally sung by women (chantwell), while the instrumental tradition are predominantly practiced by men

Dans une galaxie près de chez vous

The series chronicles the long, futuristic voyage of a team of Québécois space explorers looking for a planet capable of sustaining life, in the year 2034, after the destruction of the ozone layer through excessive human pollution, prompting the need for a new planet to welcome humankind.

French-Andrews House

In 1919 it underwent a careful restoration under the auspices of preservationist George Francis Dow.

French's

They also were a prominent sponsor of the Rochester Red Wings baseball club, often in conjunction with a local brand of hot dogs, Tobin's First Prize.

In 1970, the company purchased Widmer Wine Cellars of Naples, New York.

Gulden's

Gulden's, a brand of American mustard, is the third largest American manufacturer of mustard, after French's and Grey Poupon.

Joseph Meek

As the French trappers enjoyed good relations with most of the Indian tribes in the area, Meek seems to have hoped that the Indians would take him for a Québécois and leave him alone.

Laura l'immortelle

Laura l'immortelle ("Laura the Immortal" in French) is a novel by Marie-Pier Côté, a Québécois Canadian author.

Lyonel Trouillot

Lionel Trouillot (born Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on December 31, 1956) is a novelist and poet in French and French Creole, a journalist and a professor of French and Creole literature in Port-au-Prince.

Mira Foundation

Among supporters and spokespeople of the Mira Foundation have been Québécois actors Robert Brouillette, Roy Dupuis, Jean L'Italien, and Stéphane Rousseau.

Mirliton

Chayote or mirliton (French Creole - also mirleton), a pear-shaped vegetable or its vine


30th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS

Soldiers of the division together with an unspecified Italian unit killed 40 civilians in Étobon, France on 27 September 1944, in retaliation of the support given by villagers to the French partisans.

Al Cliver

From 1975 to 1988, he was in a relationship with French actress Annie Belle and has acted alongside her in the films Forever Emmanuelle, Blue Belle, Velluto Nero and Un Giorno alla fine di Ottobre.

Albert Spaier

Studying at the Sorbonne, he volunteered to fight for the French at the outset of World War I, and became a French citizen soon afterwards.

August von Werder

Promoted general of infantry, and assigned to command the new XIVth Army Corps, Werder defeated the French at Dijon and at Nuits, and, when Charles Denis Bourbaki's army moved forward to relieve Belfort, turned upon him and fought the desperate action of Battle of Villersexel, which enabled him to cover the Germans besieging Belfort.

Breathing Room

Kathy Justice of Indy Week called it "low on camp and high on suspense", with a plot that resembles the 2006 French cult film 13 Tzameti.

Brico Dépôt

Brico Dépôt is a French chain of DIY and Home Improvement stores, headquartered in Longpont-sur-Orge.

CAP Scientific

CAP (Computer Analysts and Programmers) merged with the French firm Sema-Metra SA in 1988 as Sema Group plc which was acquired by Schlumberger in 2001 to become SchlumbergerSema, itself acquired by Atos Origin in 2004.

Charles Eloi Demarquet

Among his notable descendants are his own oldest son, Carlos, an Ecuadorian politician who served as Quito's cantonal leader (Jefe Politico) from 1886 to 1892, and the French historian and Academician Jean-Jacques Chevallier.

Christophe Cuvillier

Christophe Cuvillier (born December 5, 1962 in Etterbeek) is a French businessman and current chief executive officer of the European real-estate group Unibail-Rodamco.

Debacq

Charles-Alexandre Debacq (1804-1863), a French historical and portrait painter.

Deweare

Deweare's music was greatly influenced by the resurgence of French punk cult bands such as Bérurier Noir and Ludwig von 88, as well as by rock musician, comedian and poet Alain Bashung and by American music artist Beck—another musician to whom Deweare's vocals have been compared.

Fashoda Incident

When one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes' dream) and another line from Dakar to French Somaliland (now Djibouti) by the Red Sea in the Horn (the French ambition), these two lines intersect in eastern South Sudan near the town of Fashoda (present-day Kodok), explaining its strategic importance.

Ghana Empire

French colonial officials, notably Maurice Delafosse, concluded that Ghana had been founded by the Berbers, a nomadic group origination from the Benu River, from Middle Africa, and linked them to North African and Middle Eastern origins.

Hillside Beach, Manitoba

During the fur trading expeditions of the Voyageurs and Coureur des bois the lagoon was part of a portage for traveling between the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg en route from French eastern Canada to the Red River Valley, avoiding the long often choppy route around Elk Island.

Jacqueline Robin

Jacqueline Robin (December 11, 1917 in Saint-Astier, Dordogne – February 3, 2007 in Taverny) was a French pianist.

Jean de Pourtales

Jean de Pourtales (born August 19, 1965) is a French racing driver from Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Jean Elichagaray

Jean Baptiste Pierre Eugène Elichagaray (September 3, 1886 – June 8, 1987) was a French rower who competed in the men's eights event at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm.

Jean Ragnotti

Jean "Jeannot" Ragnotti (born 29 August 1945 in Pernes-les-Fontaines, Vaucluse), is a French former rally driver for Renault in the World Rally Championship.

Jean-François Berdah

He is co-founder and chief-editor of the Revue d'Histoire Nordique since 2005, a bilingual French-English historical review dedicated to the history and civilisation of both Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, and director of the Centre of Excellence Jean Monnet of the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail.

Jean-Jacques Ampère

Moving to Paris, he taught at the Sorbonne, and became professor of the history of French literature at the Collège de France.

Jean-Paul Bertrand-Demanes

Jean-Paul Bertrand-Demanes (born 13 May 1952 in Casablanca, Morocco) is a former football goalkeeper from France, who earned eleven international caps for the French national team during the 1970s and was part of the French team in the 1978 FIFA World Cup.

Knud Vesterskov

Knud Vesterskov's career is the subject of Bent Staalhøj's feature-length documentary From Scratz (2002), included on the French 2xDVD release of HotMen CoolBoyz.

Kramp

Christian Kramp (1760–1826), French mathematician who worked primarily with factorials

La Jalousie

The title of its English editions is Jealousy, but this fails to capture the ambiguity of the French title: "la jalousie" can be translated as "jealousy", but also as "the jalousie window".

Laurie Zimmer

After playing the female lead opposite Darwin Joston and Austin Stoker in Assault on Precinct 13, Zimmer appeared (as Laura Fanning) in two 1977 French films: Jean Eustache's Une sale histoire ("A Dirty Story") and Charlotte Szlovak's Slow City, Moving Fast (also known by the French title D'un Jour a L'Autre).

Lewis A. Coser

In contrast, the non-coincidence of economic and political disenfranchisement among Quebecers reduces somewhat the severity of their conflict with English Canada, especially with the rising prosperity of the French Canadian new middle class operating in the public sector and corporate world.

Martine Blanc

Martine Blanc (born 16 September 1944 in Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme) is a French author and illustrator of ten books for children including The story of Timothy, the Two Hoots series in collaboration with Helen Cresswell, and All about Jesus.

Milan Crnković

He published about one-hundred research and literary papers, several translations from French (Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, François Souchal) English (Daniel Dafoe, Albert Manfred, James Michener, Shel Silverstein, Isaac Singer, and James Thurber) and Russian (Kornej Cukovski).

Montmorency, Victoria

Montmorency was named after a local farm, Montmorency Estate, which in turn was named for the town of Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, where the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived briefly.

Morry Taylor

In February 2013, Taylor met harsh criticism in France after a letter he wrote to the French minister of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg.

Najim

Re-titled "Près de toi (Suddenly)", it is a multilingual song in French, English and Persian and contains a sampling of Algerian classic "Abdel Kader" with Arash featuring Najim and Swedish-Mexican star Rebecca Zadig

Ouvéa cave hostage taking

Bernard Pons, French Minister for Overseas Territories at the time, who dealt with the matter.

Phénoménal

Phénoménal is a mixtape by French musician Lord Kossity, released in 1999 on the label Killko Records.

Punta Bagnà

Administratively the mountain is divided between the Italian comune of Bardonecchia (southern face) and the French communes of Modane (north-western face) and Avrieux (north-eastern face).

Robert Falk

During the Khrushchev Thaw Falk became popular among young painters and many considered him to be the main bridge between the traditions of the Russian and French Moderne of the beginning of 20th century and Russian avant-garde and the Russian avant-garde of the 1960s.

Ryan Max Riley

According to his Yale biography, Riley has a pet polish dwarf rabbit named Thibault after a character (Tybalt) in William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet and the pet lobster of the French poet Gérard de Nerval, a pet lobster that Nerval used to walk around Paris with a blue ribbon.

Seichō Matsumoto

In 1987, he was invited by French mystery writers to talk about his sense of mystery at Grenoble.

Serge Brussolo

In 2009, a film adaptation of his best-seller French-language novel Les Emmurés was adapted into a film, entitled Walled In.

Shandar

Shandar was a French record label specializing in avant-garde material that did seminal work during the 1970 releasing, among others, recordings by Albert Ayler, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Sunny Murray, Philip Glass, Richard Horowitz, Charlemagne Palestine, La Monte Young, Alan Silva, Pandit Pran Nath, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra.

Siege of Magdeburg

Siege of Magdeburg (1813–1814), a siege of the German city by forces of the First French Empire during the War of the Sixth Coalition, which ended with Napoleon's abdication

St Andrews Castle

This peaceful interlude came to end, however, when a French fleet arrived bringing an Italian engineer Leone Strozzi who directed a devastating artillery bombardment to dislodge the Protestant lairds.

Sydney Wayser

The Louvre Palace and the Orangerie being only a few blocks from her apartment, she quickly gleaned much of French culture from her songwriter father, leading her to musical influences that include Edith Piaf, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Jacques Brel, among many others.

Terrano

Mondeuse noire, a French wine grape that is also known as Terrano

The Mountain

The Mountain (French: La Montagne) is a political group during the French Revolution whose members, called Montagnards, sat on the highest benches in the Assembly.

The Stoning of Soraya M.

The son of a former Iranian ambassador, French-Iranian journalist and war correspondent Freidoune Sahebjam has also reported on the crimes of the Iranian government against the Bahá'í community in Iran.

Tom French Cup

Carl Hayman was awarded the Tom French Cup in both 2004 and 2006, and was instrumental in helping New Zealand Māori defeat the British and Irish Lions for the first time in 2005.

Tsering Dorjee

In 1999, he starred in the French Nepali film directed by Eric Valli, Himalaya - l'enfance d'un chef, in which he starred alongside Lhakpa Tsamchoe.

Wiedergänger

In the opinion of the French expert on legend and myth Claude Lecouteux, this clearly belongs into the range of the vampire-belief.

Yakovlev Yak-3

Marcel Albert, the official top-scoring World War II French ace, who flew the Yak in USSR with the Normandie-Niémen Group, considered it a superior aircraft to the P-51D Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire.

Yves de Creil

While the French writers, including Prentout, accepted that Yves de Criel was the father of Yves de Bellême, Geoffrey H. White was of the opinion that, while probable, it should not be stated as fact.