Posted on Monday 28 April 2003 to Story So Far

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!!

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.