X-Nico

36 unusual facts about French Language


Ad valorem tax

The Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST) (French: Taxe sur les produits et services, TPS) is a multi-level value-added tax introduced in Canada on January 1, 1991, by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and finance minister Michael Wilson.

Maurice Lauré, joint director of the French tax authority, the Direction générale des impôts, as taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA in French) was first to introduce VAT with effect from 10 April 1954 for large businesses, and extended over time to all business sectors.

An Act of Valour

Originally, Leppäjärvi and Corduner had approached D'Amico with the idea of him playing the drag-queen Bette Noir (a pun on French expression bête noire).

Ayas, Aosta Valley

It is made up of several frazioni (locally officially called hameaux, in French), the two major ones being Antagnod which holds the town hall and the main parish, and Champoluc.

Battle of Kitcheners' Wood

The name of this oak plantation derived from the French name, Bois-de-Cuisinères, where French troops housed their field kitchens, and not in reference as is sometimes thought to the British general officer of the same name.

Beau Rivage

Beau Rivage means "Beautiful shore" in French.

Centre de Liaison et d'Information des Puissances maçonniques Signataires de l'Appel de Strasbourg

The Centre of Liaison and Information of Masonic Powers Signatories of Strasbourg Appeal (French: Centre de Liaison et d'Information des Puissances maçonniques Signataires de l'Appel de Strasbourg) or CLIPSAS is an international group of Masonic Grand Orients and Grand Lodges that adhere to Continental Freemasonry and signed the Strasbourg Appeal.

En ventre sa mere

The French phrase en ventre sa mere (literally, in his/her mother's belly) refers to a fetus in utero.

In current spoken French, the phrase would now be rendered as "dans le ventre de sa mère".

Géographica

Géographica is the French-language magazine of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), published under the Society's French name, the Société géographique royale du Canada (SGRC).

Heath mouse

Common names include heath mouse, heath rat, blunt-faced rat, Shortridge's native mouse, fausse souris de Shortridge (French), and ratón bastardo crestado (Spanish).

Hekmeh FC

Al-Hikma in classical Arabic, El-Hekmeh in Lebanese dialect stands for "wisdom", thus also the French alternative name of the club, Sagesse (meaning wisdom in French).

Hors-la-loi

Hors-la-loi means outlaw in French.

Islamic University of Technology

English, Arabic and French are the official languages of the university for all academic and admission purposes.

Jens Lieblein

In his leisure time, he studied history and languages, including German, French, Latin and Greek.

Le bonheur

Le bonheur is French for "happiness."

Les Incompétents

According to the band, in an interview with John Kennedy on XFM, their name is pronounced as it is written, with the French plural for 'the' pronounced like the English name 'Les', as if it is a British person's attempt at speaking French.

Literator

A writer, one who writes professionally, sometimes the original French term litterateur is used.

Lower Canada Rebellion

The Lower Canada Rebellion (French: La rébellion du Bas-Canada), commonly referred to as the Patriots' War (French: la Guerre des patriotes) by Quebecers, is the name given to the armed conflict between the rebels of Lower Canada (now Quebec) and the British colonial power of that province.

Milieu

Milieu is the word for environment in French, and, for hundreds of years, also in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, English, and other languages that were strongly influenced by French culture and French language, primarily during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Mohammad Vali Mirza Farman Farmaian

Mohammad Vali Mirza escaped only at the last minute because he spoke to the general in French, prompting the general to realize, as Nogales wrote in his memoirs, "that he was a prince of the lineage of Farman Farma."

Official bilingualism

In Canada English and French have special legal status over other languages in Canada’s courts, parliament and administration.

Ordre de la Santé publique

The Order of Public Health (French: Ordre de la Santé publique) was a French order of merit, created by presidential decree of President Albert Lebrun on 18 February 1938 and amended on 22 May 1954, and awarded for services to the public health and protection of children.

Parliamentary ping-pong

"Lutte a la corde" (French, meaning tug of war, lit. "struggle of the rope") is an older term for Parliamentary ping-pong.

Prince Alexander of Belgium

Prince Alexander of Belgium (French: Alexandre Emmanuel Henri Albert Marie Léopold, Dutch: Alexander Emanuel Hendrik Albert Maria Leopold; 18 July 1942 – 29 November 2009) was the eldest child from the second marriage of King Leopold III of Belgium.

Professor Palmboom

While all the books are available in Dutch, the main three albums have also been translated into French, but not into English.

Relâche

Relâche is French for "cancellation", "theater dark", or "no performance today".

Robert Naunton

It has also been printed in several collections and has been translated into French and Italian.

Rondeau Provincial Park

The name of the park comes from the French words "ronde eau" or "round water" which describes the shape of the harbour sheltered by the peninsula.

Royal Canadian Navy Monument

On the western face of the north–south orientated sail the motto "Ready Aye Ready" and its French translation, "Prêt Oui Prêt", are carved in the uppermost corner.

Snow on the Sahara

¹ "La Rose des Vents" was the first Anggun single recorded in three different languages - French, English ("A Rose in the Wind") and Indonesian ("Kembali").

St. Louis Jesuits

In addition, some hymns have even been translated into other languages such as Chinese, French, German, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Vietnamese, and have garnered wide acceptance in those areas as a result.

T. P. O'Connor

In 1870, he moved to London, and was appointed a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War.

Terra incognita

The equivalent on French maps would be terres inconnues (plural form), and some English maps may show Parts Unknown.

Tosa Kuroshio Railway

This is one of the few Japanese railway operator that provide its official website in Japanese, English, and French.

Tuplet

The most common tuplet (Schonbrun 2007, 8) is the triplet (Ger. Triole, Fr. triolet, It. terzina or tripletta, Sp. tresillo), shown at right.


Ali Abdolrezaei

Ali Abdolrezaei's poems have been translated into a variety of languages including English, German, French, Turkish, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Croatian and Urdu.

Anton Vassil

As a director fluent in French, English and German, he is often associated with international projects requiring multiligual skills and international co-productions.

Asrary school riyadh

Asrary School, Riyadh is a school that teaches English, Arabic, and French from KG1 till 12th grade.

Asturian language

::The Asturian language also received much of its lexicon, from languages as Castilian, French, Occitan or Galician.

Aufbau principle

The order in which these orbitals are filled is given by the n + ℓ rule (also known as the Madelung rule (after Erwin Madelung), or the Klechkowski rule (after Vsevolod Klechkovsky in some, mostly French and Russian-speaking, countries), or the diagonal rule.

Beidweiler

Beidweiler is the site of the 2000 kilowatt-transmitter for transmitting the French-speaking programme of RTL.

Belgian Bearded d'Anvers

Also called the Antwerp Belgian, both names refer to the breed's origin in Antwerp (the French version being Anvers).

Buskin

The word buskin, only recorded in English since 1503 meaning "half boot", is of unknown origin, perhaps from Old French brousequin (in modern French brodequin) or directly from its Middle Dutch model brosekin "small leather boot".

Canadian electoral system

Wherever possible, election officers at polling stations speak both official languages (English and French).

Catalufa

The word catalufa is also used in several Caribbean countries as the Spanish or French language common name for a number of other Priacanthidae species.

CBPD-FM

CBPD-FM is a Weatheradio Canada station which broadcasts weather information and alerts on a frequency of 103.7 FM in Port Hardy, British Columbia, Canada, in both English and French.

CBPM

CBPM is a Weatheradio Canada station which broadcasts weather information and alerts on a frequency of 1260 AM in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada, in both English and French.

China Today

It is published in Chinese language, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German and Turkish, and is intended to promote a positive view of the People's Republic of China and its government to people outside of China.

CIQA-FM

CIQA-FM is a Weatheradio Canada station which broadcasts weather information and alerts on a frequency of 93.3 FM in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, in English, French and Inuktitut.

CKRN-DT

CKRN-DT (branded on-air as Radio-Canada Télévision CKRN) is a privately owned French language television station affiliated with Télévision de Radio-Canada in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, Canada, which essentially functions as a semi-satellite of Montreal Radio-Canada flagship station CBFT-DT due to not having alternative non-network sources of programming available.

Corcyre

Corcyre (old-fashioned French for Corfu) was one of three short-lived French départements in present Greece.

Cretinism

Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Occitan and an Alpine French expression, prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and was actually a 'tick box' category on Victorian-era census forms in the UK.

David Durand

He moved to England in 1711 and served as a pastor to the Church of England French-speaking churches in London.

Éric Losfeld

Éric Losfeld (Mouscron, 1922 - Paris, 1979) was a Belgian-born French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material with his publishing imprint Éditions Le Terrain Vague.

Estoc

The French estoc or English "tuck" was a type of European sword in use from the 14th to 17th centuries.

Étoile Filante

Étoile Filante means "shooting star" in French.

Francesco Matraire

Little is known of his life; his family is believed to have been from Nice originally, and his correspondence is mostly written in French.

Helvetia

In French, Swiss people may be referred to as Helvètes.

International English

In Europe, English received a more central role particularly since 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was composed not only in French, the common language of diplomacy at the time, but, under special request from American president Woodrow Wilson, also in English - a major milestone in the globalisation of English.

ISREC

The Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC, French: Institut suisse de recherche expérimentale sur le cancer) is a not-for-profit institution founded in 1964 and located in Épalinges, Switzerland.

James Burty David

He was a journalist of Freelance, teacher and afterwards rector at Eden College and an author of many school manuals in French.

Kabika Tshilolo

Marie-Jeanne Kabika Tshilolo (born 1949 in Élisabethville, Katanga) is a French language writer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

L'Église réformée du Québec

L'Église Réformée du Québec, or "Reformed Church of Quebec", is a small conservative French-speaking Reformed Christian denomination located primarily within the Canadian province of Quebec.

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".

La Va Bon Train

The La Va Bon Train ("goes like blazes" in French) was a French automobile manufactured by Larroumet and Lagarde of Agen, Lot-et-Garonne between 1904 and 1914.

MacArthur Study Bible

Initially only available in the New King James Version, the MacArthur Study Bible is now also published using the New American Standard Bible text and the English Standard Version text, and the New International Version text as well as in Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Marathon Media Group

The shows are dubbed into French (1st official), Japanese (2nd official), English, Thai, German, Dutch, Malay, Arabic, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages dubbed and shown around the world.

Miles Kington

It was during this time, in the late 1970s, that he began writing his Franglais columns written in a comical mixture of English and French.

Public Francophone Radios

The Public Francophone Radios (French: Radios francophones publiques) is a group of French-speaking radio broadcasters comprising Radio France, Radio Canada, the Radio Télévision Suisse and RTBF.

Ramendra Kumar

Ramen's work has been published and reviewed in major newspapers and magazines and translated into several Indian languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Sinhala, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Renault Avantime

The name combines the French word "Avant" (meaning "ahead") and the English word "time", with the latter using the English (tīm) rather than French pronunciation (tēm).

Samuel Nathan Blatchford

In addition to his native Navajo and second language of English, he also learned to speak Turkish, French, German and Japanese.

Solomon the Wise

Solomon the Wise (original Yiddish title Shloime Chuchem) is a 1906 play by Jacob Gordin, based on French sources, and loosely based on actual events in 17th century France, during the reign of Louis XIII and the ascendancy of Cardinal Richelieu.

Soltorgsgymnasiet

Since 2002 Soltorgsgymnasiet have had an exchange-agreement with Lycée Léon Bourgeois in Épernay for teacher and the students reading French and an exchange with a school in Magdeburg for the students reading German.

Thé Au Harem D'Archimède

The album's French title, which translates into English as "Tea in the Harem of Archimedes," is a reference to the Mehdi Charef book Tea in the Harem (French title: Thé au Harem d'Archimède), as well as a pun on the French phrase "Théorème d'Archimède", the title of the album's fourth track.

The Birth of Corneillius

It was an English language album in contrast to earlier Corneille albums in French language.

Vin d'honneur

Vin d'honneur literally translates from French to "Wine of honour" and is akin to a prolonged social celebration after an official ceremony like a marriage.

Viscount

The word viscount, known to be used in English since 1387, comes from Old French visconte (modern French: vicomte), itself from Medieval Latin vicecomitem, accusative of vicecomes, from Late Latin vice- "deputy" + Latin comes (originally "companion"; later Roman imperial courtier or trusted appointee, ultimately count).

Williams Sassine

Williams Sassine (1944, Kankan, Guinea – February 9, 1997, Conakry, Guinea) was a Guinean novelist who wrote in French.