Posted on Monday 28 April 2003
The foreignness of the French
Timeliness, as may been seen from this and the previous post, is not
exactly Laputan Logic's strong suit. Nevertheless, I think this one is
still topical.
Long after the acrimoniousness of the "debates" in the UN Security
Council pre the Iraq invasion, there still seems to be quite a bit of
enduring resentment in the United States against the French nation and
its people. "Freedom Fries" remain defiantly on sale at the Capitol Hill cafeteria
and the word "french" has entered the American punditocracy's lexicon
as an epithet for the lowest kind of untrustworthiness, a bit like that
English word welsh (see also my entry on Welsh and Walloon).
It wasn't always this way. Let's face it, without France's friendship
during the American War of Independence (declaring war on Britain in
1778 and committing so much in the way of resources that they
effectively bankrupted their economy in the process), Americans would
be speaking English
right now. Then, of course, there was the Statue of Liberty, a gift of
international friendship from the people of France to the people of the
United States and in celebration of the centenary of that independence.
And what Great American Novelist worth his salt would have missed the
opportunity to waste his youth and brain cells in the cafes and bars of
Paris in the early 20th century? American and French mutual mistrust of
the British virtually guaranteed that the two great nations were to
maintain a warm regard for each other, one that was to last for the
good part of two centuries.
But those days are long gone now. America is now in the process of
de-Frenchifying (de-frenchfrying?) itself and its language although the
latter may be a little harder to pull off than some would like.
Being myself of a nation which also has a long and proud history of
friendship with the United States (but one with the distinction of
having thoughtlessly thrown itself into every major war and/or quagmire
that the US has found itself in since WWII), I thought I'd best do my
bit in the cause of this new and very just linguistic war against the
hateful Gauls.
The first point I'd like to make is that the French are foreigners.
Using this obvious fact as a starting point, I wondered whether perhaps
the English word "foreign" might even be derived from the word "french"
by some route. Alas, this was far too naive, the word "foreign",
unsurprisingly in retrospect, actually pertains to the concept of the
"outside world". It comes to us from Late Latin via Old French and is
closely related to the word "forest", i.e. "somewhere out there, out in
the wilderness".
But while the word for foreigner itself didn't yield anything promising, I did discover that the word French or rather its precursor Frank turns out to be the
quintessential word for foreigner in many of the world's languages.
This coinage dates back to the Crusades, a time when floods of
ideologically-crazed young Europeans washed up on the shores of the
Levant egged on by popes, ambitious princes, mad monks and Venetian
merchants. The bemused locals, when confronted by these Christian
liberators, lumped them all under the name of the biggest group, "the
Franks" and the name stuck good. Centuries later when the Western
hoards once again swarmed out Europe, this time into the Orient, Arab
and Persian traders had already introduced this useful term to Africa,
India and South-East Asia (where, in the latter case, Islam was seen as
a very welcome antidote to Christian missionary zeal).
So here then without any further adieu, is a survey of "the French as foreigners" in a number of the world's languages1.
| Arabic | faranj |
| Aramaic | frang |
| Cambodian | farang |
| Ethiopian | fa'ra'nj |
| Greek | frangos |
| Hindi | firangi |
| Malay | barang (foreign goods) |
| Malayalam | farangi |
| Persian | farangg |
| Samoan | palangi |
| Tamil | pirangi |
| Thai | farang |
| Turkish | ifrangi |
| Vietnamese | pha-rang |
So take that, you primates capitulards et toujours en quete de fromages!!
This table was collated from information from this article from the LINGUIST mailing list. While the conclusion is reached that the Samoan word palangi is not really connected to farang, this article claims a connection to the Malay word barang or "foreign goods" but then denies a link to farang from there (by the way, the title of this piece is "lingua franca"). 1 - This word does have one teensy weensy disadvantage of being a collective term which refers to all Westerners, which includes, unfortunately, Americans
Another thing I found out from the LINGUIST article: Greek text written in Latin characters is called frangovlakhika (the spelling of this term has been rendered for your reading convenience into frangovlakhika). See the Welsh post for more information about the meaning of Vlak.
