X-Nico

41 unusual facts about French language


Achrafieh

Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais, a French language secondary school, Les Diablotins, Universite Saint Joseph located in the neighbourhood

Ad valorem tax

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.

Ann Maire Horan

She studied French and Spanish at NUIG and became involved in DramSoc, the university's drama group.

Ænigma Mystica

It comes in a regular version exlcusively in French and a two disk deluxe edition with the French disk, English versions of chosen tracks as well as other re-recorded songs from past albums.

Beau Rivage

Beau Rivage means "Beautiful shore" in French.

Bündner Oberländerschaf

The Bündner Oberländerschaf (also known as Grisons (French), Graubünden (German)) is a domesticated breed of sheep in Switzerland.

Ça Va

Ça Va (French for "okay", literally "that goes") is an album by German/British avant-pop group Slapp Happy, recorded in London in 1997.

Canadian electoral system

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

Caput

The French language converted caput into chief, chef, and chapitre, later borrowed in English as chapter.

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.

Étoile Filante

Étoile Filante means "shooting star" in French.

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.

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.

Marmara University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences

The Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences of Marmara University has a 127 year history and provides education in 11 departments and in four languages: Turkish, English, German and French.

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.

Mistralian norm

Its aim is to make Provençal Occitan orthography more logical, relying on a mix of traditional spelling and French spelling conventions.

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.

Ottawa Fringe Festival

Because Ottawa is a bilingual city, both English and French productions are presented at the Fringe, though a small number of productions in past years have been bilingual.

Professor Palmboom

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

Quadrille Ball

One interesting thing about this ball is that even though it is a German organized ball, the Caller announces the steps entirely in French.

Rafiot

In French, the term has come to pejoratively describe a vessel in poor shape.

Relâche

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

Reticulated poison frog

The reticulated poison frog (Ranitomeya ventrimaculata), known in French as dendrobate à ventre tacheté, is a species of poison dart frog.

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.

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.

Swiss Prealps

The Swiss Prealps (Préalpes Suisses in French, Schweizerische Voralpen in German) are a mountain range in the north-western part of the Alps.

Tache noir de la sclerotique

Tache noir de la sclerotique (French for Black spot of the sclera) is one of the ocular signs of death in which a reddish brown discoloration is transversely arranged across the sclera.

Terra incognita

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

The Birth of Corneillius

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

Vous

Vous is "you" in plural in French language


Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale

Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (French for Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War), often abbreviated Actes or ADSS, is an eleven-volume collection of documents from the Vatican historical archives, related to the papacy of Pope Pius XII during World War II.

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.

Beidweiler

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

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.

Chaussée de Wavre

The Chaussée de Wavre (French) or Waversesteenweg (Dutch) in Brussels, Belgium is a major street crossing the municipalities of Ixelles, Etterbeek and Auderghem.

College of Juilly

The College of Juilly (French: Collège de Juilly) is a Catholic private teaching establishment located in the commune of Juilly, in Seine-et-Marne (France).

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.

Demographics of Suriname

Dutch (official), Sranan Tongo (Surinamese, sometimes called Taki-Taki, is native language of Creoles and much of the younger population), Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Javanese, English (widely spoken), French due to cultural influence from French Guiana, Portuguese and Spanish.

Escaladieu Abbey

Escaladieu Abbey (French: l'Abbaye de l'Escaladieu) was a Cistercian abbey located in the French commune of Bonnemazon in the Hautes-Pyrénées.

Estoc

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

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.

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 Quête de l'oiseau du temps

La Quête de l'oiseau du temps (The Quest for the Time-Bird, or Roxanna and The Quest For The Time Bird) is a French language fantasy comic series written by Serge Le Tendre and drawn by Régis Loisel (1st cycle) and others (2nd cycle), published by Dargaud since 1983.

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.

Languages of Monaco

French is the only official language in Monaco, a result of the role France has had over the microstate (see Franco-Monegasque Treaty) since the annexation of Nice and the Nizzardo (the territory surrounding Monaco), then culturally and ethnically Italian, as part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.

Le testament de la tante Caroline

The original production was in the Czech language (prepared by Julie Reisserová) and in three acts, but the work was later revised into a one act operetta in the French language.

Luis de Ávila y Zuniga

The book, first published in 1548, was very popular in its time, and was translated into French, Dutch, German, Italian, and Latin.

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.

McDougall United Church

George McDougall established a school in 1871, to teach English to the children of the Hudson's Bay Company employees, because the most used languages then were French, Gaelic, and Cree.

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.

Motion Picture Association – Canada

The Motion Picture Association – Canada (in French: Association Cinématographique – Canada) or MPA-C is a film industry trade group which speaks for and represents the major U.S. motion picture studios in Canada for films, television, videos and DVDs.

Nathan ben Moses Hannover

This work, owing to its literary value, was translated into Yiddish (1687), into German (1720), and into French by Daniel Levy (published by Benjamin II., Tlemçen, 1855).

Order of the Ship and the Mussel

The Order of the Ship (French : Ordre du Navire) was founded in 1269 by the French king Louis IX the Saint.

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.

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).

René Lussier

His best known work, Le trésor de la langue (1989), was created during this period, and album which intersperses musical material with taped recordings of Quebec residents discussing the importance of the French language.

SAHAR TV

Sahar TV is the name of two Iranian TV channels that are part of Sahar Universal Network (SUN) which is the foreign broadcasting branch of Islamic Republic Of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) that is responsible for broadcasting the programs in different languages including English, French, Arabic, Urdu, Azeri, Kurdish and many other ones.

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.

Tahar Rahim

Rahim has demonstrated multilingual skills and an ear for accents, having played in Corsican and Arabic in addition to French in A Prophet, and in Scottish Gaelic for his role as the Seal Prince in Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle.

Ts'ao Yung-ho

Ts'ao has studied a number of languages in pursuit of his understanding of early Taiwanese history, meaning he can now make use of ten languages: Taiwanese, Japanese, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin.

Under the Bridges of Paris

"Under the Bridges of Paris" is a 1914 popular song with music written by Vincent Scotto, the original French lyrics (entitled "Sous les ponts de Paris") by Jean Rodor (1914), and English lyrics by Dorcas Cochran (1952).

Williams Sassine

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

World Association of Children's Friends

The World Association of Children's Friends (or AMADE, in French: Association Mondiale des Amis de l'Enfance) was founded in 1963 by Princess Grace of Monaco.