From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-10-25T21:38:59+09:00
Subject: Re: downcase part of a string

On 10/25/06, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/25/06, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:
> > I wouldn't be surprised if the French sometimes sneered a little at
> > the French spoken in Quebec, the way (sometimes) Brits make fun of
> > Americans, or Spanish (or Colombians) make fun of Mexicans.
> And, I understand that there are some Qu�be�ois who maintain that they

This spelling is incorrect. It's Qu�becois (kay-beh-kwah), not
Qu�be�ois (kay-beh-swah).

> speak a purer form of French than the European French do.  It's kind
> of like the theory that Elizabethan English is still spoken on some of
> the islands off the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina.

"Purer" isn't the right term; "older" is. Said belief is mostly true;
Qu�bec was isolated from the linguistic shifts that France experienced
in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century. And
there probably wouldn't be any Elizabethan English speakers, but some
American English dialects are closer to Georgian (18th century)
English than they are to modern British English; I suspect that
American English dialects in general are closer to 18th century
English than either Canadian or modern British English. I haven't
studied linguistics in a long time, but it is apparently possible to
measure linguistic drift in dialects.

> Actually both French and Canadian French have evolved in different
> ways, much as have British and American English.

Certainly

> Some Qu�be�ois think of themselves as French, hence the "European
> French" above.  I have a good friend, a native ni�oise, who was quite
> amused when she was in Canada and some one said to her, "so you're
> French, from France!"  to which her unspoken reaction was "Where
> else?"

Yes, the French  (from France) are famous for being short-sighted that
way, only remembering the rest of La Francophonie when it's
convenient. Even in Europe, France isn't the only source of native
French speakers (Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Romania[?!]),
and then you've got a lot of different former French colonies:
Mauritius (officially English, but *everyone* speaks French regardless
of what the Government says), Qu�bec, New Brunswick (and in Canada,
the M�tis of Manitoba matter, too), Togo, Haiti, Rwanda, and various
other places, too.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin@zieglers.ca