gozzterLeave a Comment on Talk Pidgin, eh?

Talk Pidgin, eh?

Why do I think I can speak French? I mean, I only learned the basics when I was a child in Winnipeg, and apart from a large Francophone community in St. Boniface across the river from where I lived, nobody seemed to know how to pronounce stuff, let alone carry on a useable French conversation. I suppose I would have been young enough to try to speak it if my public school had thought it was sufficiently important, but it was the early 1950ies, and we had yet to experience the worry of les deux solitudes, the Parti Québecois, or the two referenda for Québec independence from the rest of Canada. It was an innocent time -a naïve time, perhaps. Still, I knew nothing of this, and assumed what little French I had at my command was more than enough to get me through to a rich polyglottal adulthood.

Malheureusement, Québec was merely a peninsula of French clinging to a mainland of English and I had little occasion to visit the few Gallic islands scattered here and there in the ever-rising waters of Anglo-Canada. In short, my language skills never developed much beyond grade-school level with its attendant long-outdated vocabulary. But I still clung to the culturally pervasive Canadian conceit that I was bilingual -especially if only tested on the street for directions or whatever.

A few days ago I was hiking along a trail through the woods whose flanks occasionally touched an often busy road, and noticed two women on its edge going in my direction. They were dodging traffic and trying to tiptoe along the road’s narrow shoulder, so I shouted out to them that they would probably enjoy their walk more if they transferred to the trail.

The two of them smiled, huddled their heads while they thought about it and then shook their heads in unison. “Snakes,” said one of them, pointing to a cardboard sign tacked to a nearby telephone post.

I have to admit I hadn’t noticed the sign, but I’ve since seen them fastened to telephone poles all along the road where it abuts any undeveloped fields, or woods; I assume some nature conservancy was practicing due diligence to prevent reptiles from being run over by cars. At any rate, there was something about the way the woman pronounced the word ‘snakes’ that made me think that English was not her first language, so I smiled. “Êtes vous Québecoise?” I asked her, proud that I had remembered to use the feminine form for a woman from Québec. The circumflex over the ‘Ê’ was a pretty impressive Winnipeg touch, too.

She glanced at her friend and then showered me with a bouquet of French words rattled off so quickly that I only caught one or two of them -the rest just glanced off me like gravel thrown from the edge of the road by a passing car. I was pretty sure she used the word ‘serpent’ and I managed to snag something like “Nous avons peur des serpents,” but that’s maybe because I think that’s how I would have said it.

Then, she proceeded to point at the trail I was on and wagged her finger at me. In English, that kind of wag would have meant there was no way she would set foot on the trail, but in French, it may have meant something like she didn’t trust me because I was just an randy Anglo male who was trying to trick her.

I searched my vocabulary file for a moment. “Il n’y a pas des serpents içi,” I tried, but it only made her smile. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used an apostrophe after the ‘n’, or maybe the ‘y’ should have been an ‘i’ -but it had been a long time since I’d used one. For that matter I was a little shaky on the cedilla under the ‘c’ in the ‘içi’, too.

The two of them giggled at my attempts at linguistic comradery, but nonetheless seemed happy to meet me half way in stilted conversation, by and large shouted from road to trail as cars whizzed by.

“You ‘ave see no ser…” her friend elbowed her at this point, and she corrected the word to ‘snakes’.

“Pas de tout,” I replied, as if we were finally getting somewhere, although I wondered whether it was actually ‘tous’  not ‘tout’. The woman didn’t seem to mind however, and she decided to risk another question.

“Les ser…nakes” she quickly corrected herself, “They are veni…?” She turned to her friend who shrugged and suggested ‘moose’ or something.

I smiled to let her know that I understood her perfectly, and shook my head while shivering at the thought. “Pas de tous,” I replied, still pretty confident of the pronunciation, if not the spelling. “Pas venimus,” I added and shook my head reassuringly. The ‘venimus’ sounded a bit Latin, for my liking, though.

Her friend suddenly issued a squeak and jumped back, pointing at something I could see slithering in the bushes at their feet near the road. They both took a few steps away from it and the translator glared at me angrily. “You sayd no ser… snakes!”

“On the trail, I meant,” and quickly riffled through my grade 5 vocabulary again for ‘trail’ en français and the word ‘sentier’ popped out. “Je n’avais pas… vue un serpent sur le sentier, …” I was pretty proud of that translation. Emboldened, I decided to add to my wisdom: “Sur la rue, oui;” -damn, was it ‘chemin’, not ‘rue’?- “mais pas sur un sentier dans le bois,” I added with a big grin, certain I was beginning to master ‘le langue’… or was it ‘la langue’ -feminine? But with all the confidence of one who had so far managed to carry out a meaningful conversation in a different language, I began to realize that context, not gender, was what the hearer and speaker relied on. Where there’s a question, an answer is expected. After all if you surrender all dignity and swallow your national pride, anybody can speak pidgin.

I may try vacationing in Montréal next year.

, , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close