Freedom of speech for the mute
Today I taught for the first time my other English conversation class. This class is larger than the first; twenty to the previous lot’s eleven. It was hard work to get them talking, and that’s all my boss at in the language department wants me to do! I knew that the students of this second group were broadly from science and computing courses so I opted in the first lesson to teach from an article on Google’s recent entry in to the Chinese Internet market. Before we worked on the article itself we had a good session generating useful vocabulary for all to use. My second preparatory item however, a discussion about freedom of speech, was not so successful. Questions such as “what do you think freedom of speech means” and “do you have the right to say what you want here in France” were all met with stony silence. I had to hide the smile on face. It did seem a little ironic that we were talking in essence about a country where there isn’t the right to freedom of speech, and there I had a bunch of students in a ‘free’ country who could have said anything for all I could have cared but instead exercised their right to say nothing. A case of freedom of speech for the mute. Still, things picked up with a vocabulary quiz at the end where students had to buzz in with animal noises. That old pedagogical chestnut!
Cookie Doog
In August I went for an ice cream with my grandmother at an ice-cream parlour oft frequented by us on trips to the seaside on France’s Atlantic coast. She was giving the order, so I asked her to order me a double cornet with vanilla and cookie-dough ice cream. Not certain what I meant by cookie-dough, I pointed to the little card above the box that gave its name. There was no French translation. She wouldn’t even venture trying to say cookie-dough with a French accent so I made the order myself sticking to the English pronunciation.
The ice cream itself was unmemorable, but the question of how to say cookie-dough in French stuck. Clearly the ice-cream parlour didn’t think there was a translation. I was reminded of this question when I went to see Indégènes at the cinema the other day. There again was cookie-dough ice cream. I had by now reached the conclusion that French for cookie-dough is in fact cookie-dough which then raised another question, how do you say it with a French accent? My grandmother clearly didn’t know and Mary sidestepped the issue by plumping for vanilla (boring).
According to my dictionary, dough is pronounced “d
marystevens
Lies! All lies! We had one ice cream to share, I ordered it and it was cookie dough. And I shirked the issue by pointing and saying “that one there”. (Or was it chocolate, now I come to think about it?…oops).
Anne
I asked a Germanist colleague who confirmed that educated Germans would regard it as very uncultivated not to pronounce an imported word as in the language of origin. In Italy on the other hand, she understands, to do so would seem very snobby and stuck up!
A decade or so ago the EU set up a “know-how” fund to assist central and east European countries in transition. This caused awful problems. Nof-hof? Noo-hoo?