Tokyo governor sued for insulting French language

[DFWdem]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050713/ap_on_fe_st/japan_insulting_french

A group of teachers and translators in Japan on Wednesday sued Tokyo's outspoken nationalist governor for allegedly calling French a "failed international language," a news report said.

In their suit, the plaintiffs accused Ishihara of saying: "French is a failed international language because it cannot be used to count numbers."

"It's natural for different languages to have different names for numbers and different ways of counting them, so it's unacceptable for him to insult French in this way," Malik Berkane, who heads a French-language school in Tokyo, told reporters at a news conference.


Are these people serious? They have entirely too much time on their hands.

[MsTryska]

1. what the hell does he mean french cannot be used to

count numbers?


un
deux
trois
quatre
cinq
six
sept
huit
neuf
dix


there - i just counted to ten.

[DFWdem]

3. Here's the example used in the article

In French, some numbers can be unwieldy to say, such as 90, which translates as "four-twenty-ten."

Japan's counting system can also be tricky. Adopted from Chinese, the Japanese numeric system ignores the western system of classifying large numbers every three digits. Though one thousand is the same, 30,000 would translate as "three-10,000," 4 million would be "400-10,000" and 4 billion would be "40-100 million."

Sounds to me as if they both suck. Oh crap. I hope I don't get sued now!

[MsTryska]

6. who needs to count past 16 anyway?

i suppose they ahve a point - but i agree...japanese doesn't sound much better.

[tocqueville]

7. the number is used as a morpheme

a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation

which means that when you say "quatre-vingt-dix" it sounds like a word that means "ninety". Nobody counts 4 * 20 + 10 !!!!

BTW other European languages such as Danish and Norwegian
use multiples of twenty !

50 halvtreds ("the half of a third")

60 tres (sounds like three in other nordic languages)

70 halvfjerds ("the half of a fourth")

80 firs ("fourth" of twenty)

90 halvfems ("the half of a fifth")

but it goes as the same here "halvfems" means "ninety"

to that I'll add that japanese is not likely to become an international language EVER...

and that the metric system is easier than the imperial, and is gaining more and more terrain. Even the British have gone metric now...

and :

The English language has been shaped by a number of other languages over the centuries, and many English speakers know that Latin and German were two of the most important. What many people don't realize is how much the French language has influenced English.

Without going into too much detail, I want to give a little bit of background about the other languages which shaped English. It was born out of the dialects of three German tribes (Angles, Jutes, and Saxons) who settled in Britain in about 450 A.D. This group of dialects forms what linguists refer to as Anglo-Saxon, and at some point this language developed into what we know as Old English. This Germanic base was influenced in varying degrees by Celtic, Latin, and Scandinavian (Old Norse) - the languages spoken by invading armies.

Bill Bryson calls the Norman conquest of 1066 the "final cataclysm awaited the English language." (1) When William the Conqueror became king of England, French took over as the language of the court, administration, and culture - and stayed there for 300 years. Meanwhile, English was "demoted" to everyday, unprestigious uses. These two languages existed side by side in England with no noticeable difficulties; in fact, since English was essentially ignored by grammarians during this time, it took advantage of its lowly status to become a grammatically simpler language and, after only 70 or 80 years existing side-by-side with French, Old English segued into Middle English.

During the Norman occupation, about 10,000 French words were adopted into English, some three-fourths of which are still in use today. This French vocabulary is found in every domain, from government and law to art and literature - learn some.

More than a third of all English words are derived directly or indirectly from French, and it's estimated that English speakers who have never studied French already know 15,000 French words.

http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish.htm

so as Bart Simpson said once :

"but I do speak French"

[formerrepuke]

2. He's entitled to his opinion.. Yes, they have too much free time..

[spinbaby]

4. He should talk

Counting in Japanese is a surreal nightmare that has different kinds of numbers depending on what it is you're counting.

On edit--had to give examples:

One = ichi
One person = hitori
One cat = ipiki
One glass of water = ippai
One beer= ippon
One pretzel to go with that beer = hitotsu, unless it's a pretzel rod, in which case it's also ippon

[JHB]

5. Japanese are ragging the FRENCH for their numbers?

Suuure. No wonder Pascal, Fermat, Coulomb, Ampere, Carnot, Coriolis, and Fourier couldn't count.

I'm normally a Nihonophile, but .... Geeez!

[jim3775]

8. Which one is easier?

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