A couple of decades ago, commenter Godfrey mentioned Familiar Dialogues (1586), by Jacques Bellot, “a treatise written to teach Frenchmen to pronounce English,” and now I present Simon Roper’s video (11:43) about it. It has various points of interest: there are almost no occurrences of “thou” (was it seen as rural and quaint? grandfatherly? religious?); there are very few contractions (but a striking form is “God be wy,” now even further condensed to “goodbye”); and pronouns can be omitted in now-surprising ways (“I will pay no more for [sc. them]”). Roper even provides citations to works of linguistics onscreen. It’s well worth your while — thanks, Ransom!
By the way, speaking of pronouns — I’ve noticed in French movies I’ve watched recently that couples who are in love, live together, and have sex use vous rather than tu. In Portrait de la jeune fille en feu [Portrait of a Lady on Fire] you could say “Well, it was prerevolutionary France, usage must have been different,” but La maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] is set in 1972 Paris, and yet Alexandre and his lover Marie se vouvoient. Anybody know what’s up with that? They’re not haughty aristocrats like Boëldieu in La Grande Illusion, who says “Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme”!
I recently watched a couple of movies by Claude Chabrol from the early 70s, and the lovers in both movies used tu.
Simon Roper says “when he was first refugeed” (not in a quotation) early in the video. Does anyone else find that odd?
@Keith Ivey: That’s definitely odd, but I have nonetheless heard the locution before.
He also pronounces “Huguenot” with a /ʒ/.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but the Familiar Dialogues are on Project Gutenberg and I just started reading them.
Am struck by the good sense of the author in laying out the English, the French and the English in French orthography… but also the first dialogue, which is a classic mother getting her sluggard sons to get ready for school, complete with banter. It is such a familiar dialogue, even now.
I believe Barbara is the servant/nursemaid, not the mother. The latter appears only briefly, blessing her children as they (finally) leave for school (here.)
From what I (vaguely) remember of La Maman et la putain, I think the use of vous was intentionally strange. And I’m sure that some people find it erotic in real life… people find a lot of things erotic!
Googling* “La maman et la putain”+”vouvoient” shows this point has been noted by others, according (vaguely) with Biscia.
A user-submitted review of “Faustine et le bel été” (also 1972; 16yo protagonist) laments “les jeunes gens qui se vouvoient est ridicule et ne peuvent pas atteindre le vouvoiement comme dans la maman et la putain d’Eustache.”
*Googling “La maman et la putain”+”vousvoient” returns nothing😬
I recently watched a couple of movies by Claude Chabrol from the early 70s, and the lovers in both movies used tu.
Sure, that’s what I’m used to, which is why I was surprised by these. But Biscia’s explanation makes sense — thanks to you and mollymooly!
In another country and chapter of my life I was friends with a Chilean couple who, in spite of being married (to each other) addressed one another by their family name as well as by “usted”, if I remember correctly. They swore to me that it was an affectionate form of address, and it seemed to be a very natural practice for them — though I did suspect that it may have originated from their being together since high school, where that kind of thing would have certainly been the norm among the students, rather than it being the norm among couples in general. Does anyone know whether that it is indeed common among Chilean couples?
What, like in an English “public school” like Eton or Hogwarts?
“Scared, Potter?”
“Yyyyyyyou wwwwwish.”
It was normal at my school (which was not an English public school.)
(My children find this so exotic that I don’t think they actually believe me.)
It was normal at my school …
I’m confused. You addressed your class-mates with “usted”? Oh, you mean you used family/surnames.
Yes that was the norm at my state-funded Grammar School. Masters certainly used family name to students. Students would use family name at first, switch to personal names over time. (I well remember using the family name to distinguish amongst several ‘Peter’s, and causing upset because we were supposed to be on first-name terms.)
@Eduardo: that’s never been the case of any of the Chilean couples I’ve encountered, but my data skew heavily GenX/Millennial and working class, so for all i know that could be standard among posh Boomers
When I went to school in 70s / early 80s Germany, many, especially older teachers addressed students by last name only and using informal pronouns. But I never observed that between students; we were always on a first-name basis.
One functional reason for the address-by-surname approach in Anglophone societies is that surname distribution was historically less heavily concentrated than given-name distribution, especially for boys. So it would be more common for a single classroom to have multiple students named e.g. Peter (example from upthread)* with different surnames than to have multiple students with the same surname but different given names. So address-by-surname disambiguates better than address-by-given-name as a default. But Hispanophone societies like Chile generally have significantly more concentrated surname distribution than Anglophone societies, so the optimal strategy might differ.
*Anecdote: My father was born when his given name (Donald) was peaking in popularity in the U.S. in the late 1930’s. When he was in 3d or 4th grade he was one of three boys with that name in his class, and the teacher decided to disambiguate them as “Donald,” “Don,” and “Donnie,” and then unilaterally decided which should be addressed as which, with my father being so unfortunate as to be designated “Donnie,” which was the one of the three he actively disliked.
The “bare last name” approach is traditional in Germany in other hierarchical settings, too – the army, companies and government institutions (in the latter two generally only used by decidedly old-fashioned bosses). In those cases, it normally goes with polite pronouns.
On frequency, I am not sure if at a typical work place a last name like Müller or a first name like Christian would be less ambiguous.
I recall a Sherlock Holmes story where a cad addresses Holmes as bare “Holmes” and the reply is something tantamount to “that’s Mr Holmes to you” but expressed more genteelly
@JWB I don’t recall given-name distribution being particularly concentrated in high-school. Teachers used family names to address students because it would have been more than weird and seen as extremely inappropriate if they’d have done otherwise, so that’s how we knew each other since first day of school and how we addressed each other thereafter on most occasions. In the rare case that I remember a face and the name corresponding to it it’s always their family name. “Che Forte, me das un pucho?” is what I would say before entering school a minute before the bell rang. In the case of the Chilean couple I mentioned in my comment above it was the use of “usted” rather than “tu” that was jarring to my ears (to be clear, formal vs informal use). One telling the other “mi amor, hágame un favor” sounded, I don’t know, just weird
@Alon: thanks, it never occurred to me that it could have been a class thing, but it certainly could have, they were somewhat posh (and boomers, like myself)
“Donald,” “Don,” and “Donnie”
i was in a summer camp cabin of (if memory serves) 16, among whom i was one of four with the same first name. the other three were all known by its standard diminutive plus the initial of their surname; i refused to be called by the diminutive, so of course was known as “not-[diminutive]”.
in most of my 1980s/90s u.s. primary and secondary education, firstname+initial was the usual way of distinguishing people with the same first name, unless there were already different diminutives in play (sarahs were always a problem, but most elizabeths were already eliza or liz (though often there were a lot of lizes)). it was striking when one of two jessicas decided instead to go by lue.
In elementary school our teachers would have us line up alphabetically by first name, and another “Adam” always beat me to the front because his surname came before mine – even though he was Christian Adam and merely went by his middle name. I resent the bastard to this day.
I recall a Sherlock Holmes story
The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
I’ve actually experienced one teacher who did this. That’s the extremely grumpy one who learned the whole biology (and physics) curriculum by heart in what must have been the 1950s and regurgitated it ever after without the slightest thought – she tried to teach my (younger) brother in the late 90s that fishing for sponges was an important branch of the economy in Mediterranean countries. In other words, among so much concentrated weirdness the form of address she used didn’t stand out particularly.
Students with the same first name do sometimes get disambiguated by their last names, but much more often by the students than by the teachers, and as far as I’ve noticed only temporarily (perhaps a year or two).
See also: Other Rachel.
who learned the whole biology (and physics) curriculum by heart in what must have been the 1950s and regurgitated it ever after without the slightest thought
One of the chemistry teachers at our school was supposedly like that – he had a script for each grade that he repeated every year. I only know this from hearsay, as I never had chemistry with him.
A milder version of this is what a teacher friend of my parents once said. The talk was about the good life of teachers (back then, most were civil servants with a good salary), having lots of vacation and the afternoons off; when someone brought up the argument that teachers need the afternoons to prepare lessons, he said “if you still need to prepare lessons after ten years of teaching, you’ve got the wrong job.”