Oh FFS.
A petition has been launched to remove “all French words” from the cover of post-Brexit British passports. The problem is that passport is itself a French word.
[This got a grand total of 513 signatures and was, I believe, eventually revealed to be a brilliant bit of satire.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-british-passports-shouldnt-have-french-words-petition-demands-but-this-has-one-fatal-flaw_uk_57a4e664e4b00be64335e5d5
I reckon swapping the Queen and Merkel for a week or two might give everyone a good laugh.
ReplyDeleteI'm half-tempted to start a petition calling for farwolaeth ir Saesneg to be emblazoned on the passports, but of course that would be silly.
ReplyDeleteSimon Barton I thought so too, but Google said no. Pretty sure it should have an apostrophe, but all my Welsh books are some distance away...
ReplyDeleteHow many of those "french" words did the French take from latin? Oh, wait.. from the google:
ReplyDeleteFrench IS Latin after 2000 years of changes to sounds and spelling and word selections. To use an analogy, think of Shakespearean English. This gives an idea how much a language can change over time (400 years). Go back another 600-700 years in English and you have Anglo-Saxon, a language that is utterly incomprehensible to a modern English speaker. The amazing thing is actually how little French has changed from Latin over 2000 years.
If you want to know what English would look like with all non-germanic words removed, look at "Uncleftish beholding"
ReplyDeletehttps://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
You'd better switch to "freedom fries" while you're at it.
ReplyDeleteTony Demetriou Minus the "fries", that is...
ReplyDeleteTony Demetriou they're Belgian, which even more EUish!
ReplyDeleteI dread to think what we're going to do about Brussels sprouts...
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean we can remove all English words from my Australian passport?
ReplyDeleteBupSahn Sunim Amen. And we should return Britain to the rightful owners. Toss out all these recent anglo-saxon immigrants.
ReplyDeleteYeah ! Bring back the woolly mammoths !
ReplyDelete..."Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."
ReplyDeleteI thought Rolls Royce had been bought by the Germans... turns out I was wrong.
ReplyDeleteStill, a Morgan would be more affordable, if less practical.