Many languages have "high" and "low" layers of vocabulary. But in most other languages, the two sets are drawn from the same source. By contrast, contact between Old English and French, Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, Japanese and Chinese, Persian and Arabic, and other pairings around the world have created fascinatingly hybrid languages. These mixed lexicons are, for linguistic and social historians, akin to the layers of fossils that teach paleontologists and archaeologists so much about eras gone by.
Some people even think English is descended from Latin, or Kannada from Sanskrit. That’s frustrating not only because it’s wrong, but also because the reality is far more interesting. -
The Economist, Unlikely parallels (
via)
posted by beisny
on May 15, 2013 -
31 comments
"The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated. " -
Triple Canopy magazine on why do artists' statments and press releases sound so utterly odd and confusing.
posted by The Whelk
on Apr 26, 2013 -
45 comments
Albert Dubout (1905-1976) was a highly popular and
prolific French cartoonist and illustrator, whose works were ubiquitous in France from the 1930s to the 1970s: Dubout illustrated books,
film posters (notably those of Marcel Pagnol), magazines, advertisements, postcards and some of his cartoons were eventually adapted as a
movie. Today, Dubout is best known as the creator of the
Dubout couple (
movie version;
figurine version), consisting of a very large, full-bosomed, dominating, angry-looking wife with a diminutive, hapless and mustachioed husband in tow. Dubout's work is often highly detailed, and images larger than the tiny ones available on the official website are shown under the fold.
[more inside]
posted by elgilito
on Jan 26, 2013 -
2 comments
For non-anglophones, the English names of worldwide brands, music bands and other cultural items are both ubiquitous and slightly mysterious.
Here what the English (plus some German, Spanish and Japanese) names of
52 brands/logotypes and
30 musicians/records look like when very loosely and somewhat lazily translated in French. Some extras can be found in the comments
(note: annoying pop-up at the start).
posted by elgilito
on Jan 22, 2013 -
72 comments
To say that Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jesus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) is a masterpiece is a gross understatement. Over sixty years after its composition, it has rightfully earned the recognition of being one of the most important piano works of the 20th century. ... [It] is one of the most personal and intimate pieces Messiaen ever wrote, and it gives the listener a close look at Messiaen the person. Messiaen was a deeply religious person, and although his faith influenced every single piece he wrote, the Vingt Regards is almost like his own personal spiritual diary. -
Keith Kerchoff [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 13, 2012 -
16 comments
In 1960 humorist Georges Bernier, author François Cavanna and comic artist (and artistic director) Fred Aristidès began publishing the satirical magazine
Hara Kiri, which attacked the French establishment, including politicians, the government and Catholic Church. In 1961 and 1966 it was temporarily banned by the French Government.
The magazine's covers were often tasteless, NSFW, "
famously perverted, bizarre and highly creative and at the time, and in fact even by today's standards in a league of their own."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 4, 2012 -
16 comments
The
Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute in sunny Monterey, CA, offers over
six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates.
[more inside]
posted by theodolite
on Oct 11, 2012 -
23 comments
By general consent, Jean-Siméon Chardin was one of the supreme artists of the eighteenth century and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of painting. - Robert Hughes
[more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Sep 1, 2012 -
7 comments
While Quebec’s status as the only primarily French-speaking province in Canada has resulted in a distinct cultural industry—particularly with regard to film and music—the province still enjoys many cultural products from English Canada. While movies and TV shows are often subtitled or dubbed into French, it is rare that the same is true of music. A notable exception is the music of Toronto-based
Big Sugar.
[more inside]
posted by asnider
on Aug 30, 2012 -
19 comments
A liquor store in Amsterdam. A veteran in Bagdad. A family in Rome. A WWII veterans memorial in Berlin. A house in Oxford. Edouard Levé photographed towns in the United States that shared names with famous cities. He photographed fully-clothed actors reenacting scenes from
rugby and
pornography [nsfw]. He also wrote some novels, influenced by
Oulipo.
Autoportrait, describes his life in 120 pages of unordered vignettes and brief, declarative sentences—"The girl whom I loved the most left me. [...] I am uneasy in rooms with small windows."
and so on. His fourth novel,
Suicide, is a one-sided conversation between an anonymous narrator ("I") and his friend ("you"), who committed suicide twenty years ago. It's a painfully intimate meditation on the act and its fallout on its own merits—
"Your life was hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities."—but few will read
Suicide unburdened with the knowledge that Edouard Levé killed himself several days after completing it, at the age of 47.
[more inside]
posted by spanishbombs
on Jul 7, 2012 -
7 comments
Heavily influenced by samurai films from film makers such as Akira Kurosawa, French/Burkinabe
filmmaker Cédric Ido produced a short award winning film,
Hasaki Ya Suda (The Three Black Samurai) set in the future.
Its synopsis reads:
It is 2100. In the world engulfed in chaos and war whose residents are consumed by terrible hunger, the last fertile land became the subject of fierce battles. Three warriors: noble Wurubenba (Jacky Ido), Shandaru (Cedric Ido), who wants to avenge his father’s death, and Kapkaru (Min Man Ma) craving for power, will face one another in a fight for life and death.
Watch
the full 25-minute Hasaki Ya Suda short film (available only with French subtitles at the moment) or
the 1 minute teaser. Interview
with Cedric in English.
posted by infini
on Apr 23, 2012 -
7 comments
"The Threat to Proust" by Roger Shattuck:
When Proust’s novel fell into the public domain in 1987, three Paris publishing houses were ready with new editions that had been in preparation for several years. They all carry the same basic 3,000-page text with few variations. The differences lie in packaging and presentation. Laffont-Bouquins chose to publish three fat volumes prefaced by elaborate historical and biographical materials. Garnier-Flammarion produced ten pocket-sized volumes competently edited by Jean Milly. The new Pléiade edition, published by the original copyright holder, Gallimard, made the boldest, most ambitious, and most expensive bid to claim the market. In a combination of editorial, literary, and commercial decisions, Gallimard proposed to influence the way we read Proust and, to some degree, the way we approach all great literary works. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Apr 19, 2012 -
32 comments
Both an ingeniously choreographed crime film and a moral drama influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
, Pickpocket
marks the apotheosis of Bresson's stripped-down style. There’s little or no psychological realism or conventional drama at work in Martin La Salle’s portrayal of a master thief who plies his trade at the Gare de Lyon and easily outwits the cops who seek to ensnare him. See it once to appreciate the spare elegance of the pickpocketing scenes, and then a second time to appreciate how subtly Bresson accomplishes the story of a man’s self-willed corruption, his liberation through imprisonment and his redemption through love, all in less than 80 minutes.*
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Jan 6, 2012 -
11 comments
Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 30, 2011 -
10 comments
Birdy Nam Nam is four f*cking guys, named for a reference from the 1968 movie
The Party. They are a quartet of French turntablists, consisting of
Crazy B,
DJ Pone,
DJ Need, and
Little Mike. They've spun
solo and
together at the 2002
DMC competitions, where they took the team championship title. In 2005, they released
an album made from turntable-manipulated samples, but they weren't studio-only tracks. They were
also performed live, though
some tracks featured additional live musicians. A
2007 live album followed, keeping the same over-all turntablism sound as their first album.
Their second album was largely produced by
French produceder/DJ Yunksek, and
the sound changed accordingly into an album of
delightful French dance music, but
they kept (generally) to the turntables to create their songs. The band
has released their third album, now working with
Para One, another French producer/DJ.
Their sound has gone on a slightly new path, with another
bizzare music video to accompany their sound.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 23, 2011 -
28 comments
The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
