X-Nico

40 unusual facts about French language


Achrafieh

Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais, a French language secondary school, Les Diablotins, Universite Saint Joseph located in the neighbourhood

Ad valorem tax

The Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST) (French: Taxe sur les produits et services, TPS) is a multi-level value-added tax introduced in Canada on January 1, 1991, by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and finance minister Michael Wilson.

Ali Murad Davudi

He then travelled to France, where he stayed for one year, to improve his French, which he later used to translate many French philosophical texts.

Aufbau principle

The order in which these orbitals are filled is given by the n + ℓ rule (also known as the Madelung rule (after Erwin Madelung), or the Klechkowski rule (after Vsevolod Klechkovsky in some, mostly French and Russian-speaking, countries), or the diagonal rule.

Ayas, Aosta Valley

It is made up of several frazioni (locally officially called hameaux, in French), the two major ones being Antagnod which holds the town hall and the main parish, and Champoluc.

Battle of Kitcheners' Wood

The name of this oak plantation derived from the French name, Bois-de-Cuisinères, where French troops housed their field kitchens, and not in reference as is sometimes thought to the British general officer of the same name.

Benin Premier League

The Benin Premier League, also called Championnat National du Bénin in French, is the highest football division in Benin.

Ça Va

Ça Va (French for "okay", literally "that goes") is an album by German/British avant-pop group Slapp Happy, recorded in London in 1997.

Catalufa

The word catalufa is also used in several Caribbean countries as the Spanish or French language common name for a number of other Priacanthidae species.

Centre de Liaison et d'Information des Puissances maçonniques Signataires de l'Appel de Strasbourg

The Centre of Liaison and Information of Masonic Powers Signatories of Strasbourg Appeal (French: Centre de Liaison et d'Information des Puissances maçonniques Signataires de l'Appel de Strasbourg) or CLIPSAS is an international group of Masonic Grand Orients and Grand Lodges that adhere to Continental Freemasonry and signed the Strasbourg Appeal.

Demarest Hall

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a number of language studies sections were among the officially funded special interest sections of the dormitory including: French; Spanish; and Italian.

En ventre sa mere

In current spoken French, the phrase would now be rendered as "dans le ventre de sa mère".

Francophone nationalism

Francophone nationalism refers to nationalism of Francophone peoples and societies involving a theme of the French language as a component of it.

Géographica

Géographica is the French-language magazine of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), published under the Society's French name, the Société géographique royale du Canada (SGRC).

Heath mouse

Common names include heath mouse, heath rat, blunt-faced rat, Shortridge's native mouse, fausse souris de Shortridge (French), and ratón bastardo crestado (Spanish).

Hekmeh FC

Al-Hikma in classical Arabic, El-Hekmeh in Lebanese dialect stands for "wisdom", thus also the French alternative name of the club, Sagesse (meaning wisdom in French).

Islamic University of Technology

English, Arabic and French are the official languages of the university for all academic and admission purposes.

Jens Lieblein

In his leisure time, he studied history and languages, including German, French, Latin and Greek.

Les Incompétents

According to the band, in an interview with John Kennedy on XFM, their name is pronounced as it is written, with the French plural for 'the' pronounced like the English name 'Les', as if it is a British person's attempt at speaking French.

Literator

A writer, one who writes professionally, sometimes the original French term litterateur is used.

Lower Canada Rebellion

The movement for reform took shape in a period of economic disfranchisement of the French-speaking majority and working-class English-speaking citizens.

Marco Valerio Editore

The company has a particular interest in producing texts for visually impaired people, including large print books in Italian, English and French.

Marmara University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences

The Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences of Marmara University has a 127 year history and provides education in 11 departments and in four languages: Turkish, English, German and French.

Milieu

Milieu is the word for environment in French, and, for hundreds of years, also in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, English, and other languages that were strongly influenced by French culture and French language, primarily during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Mistralian norm

Its aim is to make Provençal Occitan orthography more logical, relying on a mix of traditional spelling and French spelling conventions.

Mohammad Vali Mirza Farman Farmaian

Mohammad Vali Mirza escaped only at the last minute because he spoke to the general in French, prompting the general to realize, as Nogales wrote in his memoirs, "that he was a prince of the lineage of Farman Farma."

Official bilingualism

In Canada English and French have special legal status over other languages in Canada’s courts, parliament and administration.

Parliamentary ping-pong

"Lutte a la corde" (French, meaning tug of war, lit. "struggle of the rope") is an older term for Parliamentary ping-pong.

Peacekeeping Monument

My own government would be glad to recommend Canadian participation in such a United Nations force, a truly international peace and police force, as well as the French translation.

Prince Alexander of Belgium

Prince Alexander of Belgium (French: Alexandre Emmanuel Henri Albert Marie Léopold, Dutch: Alexander Emanuel Hendrik Albert Maria Leopold; 18 July 1942 – 29 November 2009) was the eldest child from the second marriage of King Leopold III of Belgium.

Rafiot

In French, the term has come to pejoratively describe a vessel in poor shape.

Reticulated poison frog

The reticulated poison frog (Ranitomeya ventrimaculata), known in French as dendrobate à ventre tacheté, is a species of poison dart frog.

Robert Naunton

It has also been printed in several collections and has been translated into French and Italian.

Rondeau Provincial Park

The name of the park comes from the French words "ronde eau" or "round water" which describes the shape of the harbour sheltered by the peninsula.

Snow on the Sahara

¹ "La Rose des Vents" was the first Anggun single recorded in three different languages - French, English ("A Rose in the Wind") and Indonesian ("Kembali").

Tache noir de la sclerotique

Tache noir de la sclerotique (French for Black spot of the sclera) is one of the ocular signs of death in which a reddish brown discoloration is transversely arranged across the sclera.

Terra incognita

The equivalent on French maps would be terres inconnues (plural form), and some English maps may show Parts Unknown.

The Birth of Corneillius

It was an English language album in contrast to earlier Corneille albums in French language.

Theodore Wells Pietsch I

Fluent in the French language, he served in 1917–1918 as an instructor in French to officers of the 316th regiment at Camp Meade, Maryland.

Tosa Kuroshio Railway

This is one of the few Japanese railway operator that provide its official website in Japanese, English, and French.


Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale

Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (French for Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War), often abbreviated Actes or ADSS, is an eleven-volume collection of documents from the Vatican historical archives, related to the papacy of Pope Pius XII during World War II.

Aharon Amir

Amir translated over 300 books into Hebrew, including English and French classics by Melville, Charles Dickens, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë and O. Henry.

Ali Abdolrezaei

Ali Abdolrezaei's poems have been translated into a variety of languages including English, German, French, Turkish, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Croatian and Urdu.

Andronikashvili

His son, Constantin Andronikof (1916–1997) became a French diplomat, the Dean of St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, and translator of Sergei Bulgakov's theological writings into French.

Arpan Sharma

Arpan Sharma (born 1997) is a British polyglot who at the age of 10 could speak 11 languages: English, Hindi, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Tamil, Swahili, Polish, Thai, Welsh and Sanskrit.

Asturian language

::The Asturian language also received much of its lexicon, from languages as Castilian, French, Occitan or Galician.

Beidweiler

Beidweiler is the site of the 2000 kilowatt-transmitter for transmitting the French-speaking programme of RTL.

Canadian electoral system

Wherever possible, election officers at polling stations speak both official languages (English and French).

Chaussée de Wavre

The Chaussée de Wavre (French) or Waversesteenweg (Dutch) in Brussels, Belgium is a major street crossing the municipalities of Ixelles, Etterbeek and Auderghem.

CIQA-FM

CIQA-FM is a Weatheradio Canada station which broadcasts weather information and alerts on a frequency of 93.3 FM in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, in English, French and Inuktitut.

CKRN-DT

CKRN-DT (branded on-air as Radio-Canada Télévision CKRN) is a privately owned French language television station affiliated with Télévision de Radio-Canada in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, Canada, which essentially functions as a semi-satellite of Montreal Radio-Canada flagship station CBFT-DT due to not having alternative non-network sources of programming available.

College of Juilly

The College of Juilly (French: Collège de Juilly) is a Catholic private teaching establishment located in the commune of Juilly, in Seine-et-Marne (France).

Cretinism

Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Occitan and an Alpine French expression, prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and was actually a 'tick box' category on Victorian-era census forms in the UK.

Demographics of Suriname

Dutch (official), Sranan Tongo (Surinamese, sometimes called Taki-Taki, is native language of Creoles and much of the younger population), Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Javanese, English (widely spoken), French due to cultural influence from French Guiana, Portuguese and Spanish.

Éric Losfeld

Éric Losfeld (Mouscron, 1922 - Paris, 1979) was a Belgian-born French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material with his publishing imprint Éditions Le Terrain Vague.

Francesco Matraire

Little is known of his life; his family is believed to have been from Nice originally, and his correspondence is mostly written in French.

Helvetia

In French, Swiss people may be referred to as Helvètes.

Hors-la-loi

Hors-la-loi means outlaw in French.

ISREC

The Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC, French: Institut suisse de recherche expérimentale sur le cancer) is a not-for-profit institution founded in 1964 and located in Épalinges, Switzerland.

James Burty David

He was a journalist of Freelance, teacher and afterwards rector at Eden College and an author of many school manuals in French.

Julius Grey

Grey defended La servante écarlate by Margaret Atwood, the French version of The Handmaid's Tale, in the French version of Canada Reads, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2004.

Khadja Nin

Her breakthrough, however, came in 1996 with her widely popular album Sambolera, which was sung in Swahili, Kirundi, and French.

King Henry VIII School Abergavenny

The school at this time was supposed to be a grammar school taking pupils from all over North Monmouthshire with a curriculum of Latin, English, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry and Chemistry.

L'Église réformée du Québec

L'Église Réformée du Québec, or "Reformed Church of Quebec", is a small conservative French-speaking Reformed Christian denomination located primarily within the Canadian province of Quebec.

La Jalousie

The title of its English editions is Jealousy, but this fails to capture the ambiguity of the French title: "la jalousie" can be translated as "jealousy", but also as "the jalousie window".

La Périchole

Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy wrote the French-language libretto based on the 1829 one act play Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée, which was revived on 13 March 1850 at the Théâtre-Français.

La Quête de l'oiseau du temps

La Quête de l'oiseau du temps (The Quest for the Time-Bird, or Roxanna and The Quest For The Time Bird) is a French language fantasy comic series written by Serge Le Tendre and drawn by Régis Loisel (1st cycle) and others (2nd cycle), published by Dargaud since 1983.

Linguatec

:The Voice Reader text-to-speech program reads in twelve languages: German, British English, American English, French, Quebec French, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Chinese.

Luis de Ávila y Zuniga

The book, first published in 1548, was very popular in its time, and was translated into French, Dutch, German, Italian, and Latin.

MacArthur Study Bible

Initially only available in the New King James Version, the MacArthur Study Bible is now also published using the New American Standard Bible text and the English Standard Version text, and the New International Version text as well as in Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Marathon Media Group

The shows are dubbed into French (1st official), Japanese (2nd official), English, Thai, German, Dutch, Malay, Arabic, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages dubbed and shown around the world.

McDougall United Church

George McDougall established a school in 1871, to teach English to the children of the Hudson's Bay Company employees, because the most used languages then were French, Gaelic, and Cree.

Miles Kington

It was during this time, in the late 1970s, that he began writing his Franglais columns written in a comical mixture of English and French.

Ottawa Fringe Festival

Because Ottawa is a bilingual city, both English and French productions are presented at the Fringe, though a small number of productions in past years have been bilingual.

Outline of Comoros

It has three official languages—Comorian (Shikomor), Arabic, and French, and it is the only state to be a member of each of the African Union, Francophonie, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League, and Indian Ocean Commission, among other international organizations.

Public Francophone Radios

The Public Francophone Radios (French: Radios francophones publiques) is a group of French-speaking radio broadcasters comprising Radio France, Radio Canada, the Radio Télévision Suisse and RTBF.

Ramendra Kumar

Ramen's work has been published and reviewed in major newspapers and magazines and translated into several Indian languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Sinhala, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

René Lussier

His best known work, Le trésor de la langue (1989), was created during this period, and album which intersperses musical material with taped recordings of Quebec residents discussing the importance of the French language.

Solomon the Wise

Solomon the Wise (original Yiddish title Shloime Chuchem) is a 1906 play by Jacob Gordin, based on French sources, and loosely based on actual events in 17th century France, during the reign of Louis XIII and the ascendancy of Cardinal Richelieu.

St. Louis Jesuits

In addition, some hymns have even been translated into other languages such as Chinese, French, German, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Vietnamese, and have garnered wide acceptance in those areas as a result.

Tahar Rahim

Rahim has demonstrated multilingual skills and an ear for accents, having played in Corsican and Arabic in addition to French in A Prophet, and in Scottish Gaelic for his role as the Seal Prince in Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle.