X-Nico

38 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.

Basil Helmore

Born at Newcastle to company secretary Ernest Arthur James Helmore and Gertrude, née Allbon, he attended local state schools and in 1913 was first in the state in French and Latin for the Leaving certificate.

Beau Rivage

Beau Rivage means "Beautiful shore" in French.

Benin Premier League

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

Bündner Oberländerschaf

The Bündner Oberländerschaf (also known as Grisons (French), Graubünden (German)) is a domesticated breed of sheep in Switzerland.

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.

Canadian electoral system

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

Caput

The French language converted caput into chief, chef, and chapitre, later borrowed in English as chapter.

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.

En ventre sa mere

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

Étoile Filante

Étoile Filante means "shooting star" in French.

Francophone nationalism

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

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).

Hors-la-loi

Hors-la-loi means outlaw in French.

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.

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.

The Lower Canada Rebellion (French: La rébellion du Bas-Canada), commonly referred to as the Patriots' War (French: la Guerre des patriotes) by Quebecers, is the name given to the armed conflict between the rebels of Lower Canada (now Quebec) and the British colonial power of that province.

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.

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.

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.

Professor Palmboom

While all the books are available in Dutch, the main three albums have also been translated into French, but not into English.

Quadrille Ball

One interesting thing about this ball is that even though it is a German organized ball, the Caller announces the steps entirely in French.

Relâche

Relâche is French for "cancellation", "theater dark", or "no performance today".

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").

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.

Swiss Prealps

The Swiss Prealps (Préalpes Suisses in French, Schweizerische Voralpen in German) are a mountain range in the north-western part of the Alps.

T. P. O'Connor

In 1870, he moved to London, and was appointed a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War.

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.

The Birth of Corneillius

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

The Popguns

Their final album, A Plus de Cent (1996) - which features the French language version of their last single, "Harley Davidson" - was released by Tall Poppy Records.

Tosa Kuroshio Railway

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


A. Ronald Walton

Working with ACTFL, the US Department of Education, the College Board, among other organizations, Walton helped to formulate nationwide standards for Japanese, French, Hebrew German, Spanish Chinese and Korean.

Abidin Dino

While his young wife Güzin Dino taught French at Adana High School, he worked for a local newspaper, producing articles and drawings that illustrated with poetic realism of the hard lives and working conditions of agricultural laborers in the region.

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.

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.

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.

Asrary school riyadh

Asrary School, Riyadh is a school that teaches English, Arabic, and French from KG1 till 12th grade.

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.

Beidweiler

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

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.

CBPM

CBPM is a Weatheradio Canada station which broadcasts weather information and alerts on a frequency of 1260 AM in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada, in both English and French.

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).

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.

Estoc

The French estoc or English "tuck" was a type of European sword in use from the 14th to 17th centuries.

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.

General Council of the Pyrénées-Orientales

The General Council of the Pyrénées-Orientales (in French: Conseil Général des Pyrénées-Orientales) is the assembly elected for 6 years by the 31 Cantons of the Pyrénées-Orientales and its executive.

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.

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.

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 Va Bon Train

The La Va Bon Train ("goes like blazes" in French) was a French automobile manufactured by Larroumet and Lagarde of Agen, Lot-et-Garonne between 1904 and 1914.

Languages of Monaco

French is the only official language in Monaco, a result of the role France has had over the microstate (see Franco-Monegasque Treaty) since the annexation of Nice and the Nizzardo (the territory surrounding Monaco), then culturally and ethnically Italian, as part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.

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.

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.

Renault Avantime

The name combines the French word "Avant" (meaning "ahead") and the English word "time", with the latter using the English (tīm) rather than French pronunciation (tēm).

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.

Richard Wilbur

Wilbur is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine.

Robert Naunton

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

Samuel Nathan Blatchford

In addition to his native Navajo and second language of English, he also learned to speak Turkish, French, German and Japanese.

Soltorgsgymnasiet

Since 2002 Soltorgsgymnasiet have had an exchange-agreement with Lycée Léon Bourgeois in Épernay for teacher and the students reading French and an exchange with a school in Magdeburg for the students reading German.

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.

Ts'ao Yung-ho

Ts'ao has studied a number of languages in pursuit of his understanding of early Taiwanese history, meaning he can now make use of ten languages: Taiwanese, Japanese, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin.

Under the Bridges of Paris

"Under the Bridges of Paris" is a 1914 popular song with music written by Vincent Scotto, the original French lyrics (entitled "Sous les ponts de Paris") by Jean Rodor (1914), and English lyrics by Dorcas Cochran (1952).