X-Nico

38 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.

Ali Murad Davudi

He then travelled to France, where he stayed for one year, to improve his French, which he later used to translate many French philosophical texts.

Ann Maire Horan

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

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.

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.

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.

Benin Premier League

The Benin Premier League, also called Championnat National du Bénin in French, is the highest football division in Benin.

Bündner Oberländerschaf

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

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.

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.

Demarest Hall

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a number of language studies sections were among the officially funded special interest sections of the dormitory including: French; Spanish; and Italian.

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".

Étoile Filante

Étoile Filante means "shooting star" in French.

Francophone nationalism

Francophone nationalism refers to nationalism of Francophone peoples and societies involving a theme of the French language as a component of it.

Jens Lieblein

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

Literator

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

Lower Canada Rebellion

The movement for reform took shape in a period of economic disfranchisement of the French-speaking majority and working-class English-speaking citizens.

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.

Official bilingualism

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

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.

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.

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").

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.

Theodore Wells Pietsch I

Fluent in the French language, he served in 1917–1918 as an instructor in French to officers of the 316th regiment at Camp Meade, Maryland.

Vous

Vous is "you" in plural in French language


Abidin Dino

While his young wife Güzin Dino taught French at Adana High School, he worked for a local newspaper, producing articles and drawings that illustrated with poetic realism of the hard lives and working conditions of agricultural laborers in the region.

Aharon Amir

Amir translated over 300 books into Hebrew, including English and French classics by Melville, Charles Dickens, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë and O. Henry.

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.

Andronikashvili

His son, Constantin Andronikof (1916–1997) became a French diplomat, the Dean of St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, and translator of Sergei Bulgakov's theological writings into French.

Arpan Sharma

Arpan Sharma (born 1997) is a British polyglot who at the age of 10 could speak 11 languages: English, Hindi, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Tamil, Swahili, Polish, Thai, Welsh and Sanskrit.

Beidweiler

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

Binalbal Festival

The similarity of Binalbal Festival with "Mardi Gras" of French merrymaking with parades, masked balls, street dancing and Halloween parties, leads to Binalbal's imitation of witches, ghosts, all kinds and shapes of animals, and the so-called fallen angels.

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.

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.

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.

Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer

His books have been translated into many languages (English language, French language, Portuguese language, Dutch language and Polish language, among others).

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.

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).

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.

Julius Grey

Grey defended La servante écarlate by Margaret Atwood, the French version of The Handmaid's Tale, in the French version of Canada Reads, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2004.

King Henry VIII School Abergavenny

The school at this time was supposed to be a grammar school taking pupils from all over North Monmouthshire with a curriculum of Latin, English, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry and Chemistry.

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 Périchole

Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy wrote the French-language libretto based on the 1829 one act play Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée, which was revived on 13 March 1850 at the Théâtre-Français.

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.

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.

Linguatec

:The Voice Reader text-to-speech program reads in twelve languages: German, British English, American English, French, Quebec French, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Chinese.

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.

Outline of Comoros

It has three official languages—Comorian (Shikomor), Arabic, and French, and it is the only state to be a member of each of the African Union, Francophonie, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League, and Indian Ocean Commission, among other international organizations.

Paris-Sorbonne University

Undergraduate students in their first and second years of study in French literature, French language, Latin, Ancient Greek and Musicology take their classes at the Malesherbes center.

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.

Party for Liberty and Development

The Party for Liberty and Development (in French Parti pour les Libertés et le Développement or PLD) is a Chadian political party led by Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh.

Port-Louis, Morbihan

They later built additional warehouses across the bay in 1628, at the location which became known as "L'Orient" (the Orient in French).

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.

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.

Shahan Shahnour

Shahnour Kerestejian better known as Shahan Shahnour (in Armenian Շահան Շահնուր, French transliteration Chahan Chahnour) also known in his French language writings as Armen Lubin (in Armenian Արմեն Լյուբեն Western Armenian Արմէն Լիւպեն) (August 3, 1903, Istanbul - August 20, 1974, Saint-Raphaël) was a French-Armenian writer and poet.

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.

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.

Treaty on the Creation of the USSR

In the cover sheet the title Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was typed in Russian, French, English and German, as well as the actual words Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics also in those four languages.

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).

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).

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.