M. TRUDEAU EST EN ROGNE.

May 4, 2003 by 7 Comments

Today’s Doonesbury is a brilliant example of language as politics. I found it at Pedantry, but his permalinks are bloggered, so you can either go there and look for the top entry on Sunday, May 04 or visit the Doonesbury link and go to the same date. (If your French isn’t up to snuff, try here.)

Comments

  1. language hat says
    May 5, 2003 at 8:13 am

    My wife has pointed out that LH is less reader-friendly than Doonesbury. So: in case your French is not up to snuff, my entry title means “Mr. Trudeau is pissed off.”

  2. Jeremy Osner says
    May 5, 2003 at 9:14 am

    Wow — I surprised myself by understanding the entire strip in French. (Past experience: 2 years high school French, a year of not-really-Latin in University — a linguistics class taught by William Diver, where the case study language was Latin — and mostly self-taught vocabulary of Latin roots.)

  3. des says
    May 6, 2003 at 5:02 am

    Having weekended mightily, I had to dig back to the strip in question (which is here:
    http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm?uc_full_date=20030504&uc_comic=db&uc_daction=X
    )
    Worth it, mind.

  4. language hat says
    May 6, 2003 at 10:45 am

    Thanks, des — I changed the Doonesbury link to the one you provided. Glad you enjoyed your weekend!

  5. Songdog says
    May 15, 2003 at 9:44 am

    And here’s a more permanent link for the translation.

  6. language hat says
    May 15, 2003 at 10:01 am

    Merci, Chien Chanteur!

  7. John Cowan says
    May 16, 2019 at 4:19 pm

    A hopefully stable link. The French in it is disturbingly easy for me to read, and I wonder if that means it’s not idiomatic French.

    Though Trudeau was born in NYC, he was brought up in Saranac Lake, home of the famous tuberculosis sanitarium founded by his great-grandfather Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau (1848-1915). Edward’s ancestor Zénon Trudeau (1748-1813) was governor of Upper Louisiana with his seat in St. Louis, not-yet-Missouri. Zénon’s brother Charles (1743-1816), surveyor and mayor of New Orleans, was “dit Laveau” after their common ancestor Marie Catherine de Lavaux, who was born in Nancy in 1621 and died in Montreal in 1688, probably one of the filles du Roi. So Garry’s French, as opposed to francophone, roots, are remote indeed.

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