Cajun French: Anita Guidry raconte
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Madame Anita Guidry de Bayou LaFourche se rappelle la première fois qu'elle a parlé avec son père d'un garçon qu'elle aimait. C'est un entretien que Kayla Herrington a réalisé en 2007 pour la classe de Français 2201 à LSU. Madame Guidry est décédée le 13 de juin 2012.
In this interview, conducted by Kayla Herrington in 2007, Mrs. Anita Guidry tells about the first time she told her father about a boy she liked, Charles Guidry, Jr. Her father, ever the practical joker, gave her a hard time before letting on that he actually knew the fellow and that he was a good guy. Mrs. Guidry passed away June 13, 2012.
For complete translation and transcription with glossary, go to sites.google.co...
Je suis français et j'ai tout compris ! c'est très touchant d'entendre du français d'Amérique, soyez fiers de cette culture et de cet héritage !
I'm french and I've understood everything ! it's so fantastic ti hear some american french, be proud of this culture and of this inheritance
salutations
I have just realised - navigating You Tube - that there are at least 3 different French-speaking accents in Louisiana. Martinique-like, Quebec-leaning and another one (above) that I can't associate with anything I know. Fantastic cultural heritage. Keep speaking the lingo people, any effort's worth it.
Three at the very least. Because communities were relatively isolated in the days when French was spoken currently by most people, differences in accent, vocabulary and even syntax have been maintained and/or heightened over the years. In some cases, it's noticeable even between people who live 20 miles from each other. Merci pour l'encouragement.
See now that reminds me of my grandma, who just passed away this March. Back when they were all in shape enough to come down, her brothers and sisters would speak just Cajun French because that's what they grew up with. Over time she taught me enough to get around. Her last day she was so out of it that she didn't speak English, just French. I was about the only one who could understand and speak to her. Now that she's gone I carry on how to speak commes les vieux. Still speak French to pictures
Wow le francais cajun est magnifique. Chapeau à ceux et à celles qui ont su préserver la langue de leurs ancetres. Vous avez conservé le francais depuis 1454. Vive la Louisiane! Bravo!
Yes, I do have more, or rather, my students do. They do interviews like this as part of the intermediate Cajun French course at LSU. To show the whole project would be a bit long, but I'm working on doing excerpts like this to post on RUclips when the informants give their permission.
merci à vous et vos étudiants pour avoir fait ces entretiens. je les apprécie beaucoup et j'espère le même pour les autres qui les regards/écoutent. franchement, c'est bien de savoir que la langue n'est pas totalement perdue. Je vous remercie encore.
It's nice to see some people keeping all this alive.
Ce n'est pas très facile de comprendre cette brave dame mais cela fait quand même plaisir de l'écouter, elle a un si bel accent !
C'est grâce à deux femmes âgées rencontrées à Golden Meadows lors d'une visite pendant mon enfance que j'ai commencé mes études de français il y a trop longtemps. Quelle merveille de tomber sur cette vidéo. Merci bien!
Merci d'avoir partagé cette histoire émouvante.
moi je suis acadien du nouveau brunswick pie je suis ben fier de voir qui a encore des cajuns qui parle francais comme nous autre
C'est intéressant d'entendre les cajuns utiliser "back" la même façon qu'on l'utilise au NB. Ça veut peut-être dire que le mot à été adopté par les acadiens très tôt dans notre histoire, avant même la déportation en 1755.
Par contre, c'est peut-être juste une coincidence et les deux peuples ont adopté "back" à différent temps de façon parallèle.
Moi itou!
I'm half Acadian (from the maritime provinces in Eastern Canada) and half Québécoise (Québec, Canada). When I listen to Madame Anita Guidry, she sounds like the Acadians from the southern part of New Brunswick and other maritime provinces. Because Cajuns are the descendants of Acadians that were deported from Canada in 1755 (like some of my ancestors were but later came back home), and because both Acadians and Cajuns had to live beside their English neighbours, they sound alike today.
My husband is a Guidry from Cut Off that she talks about, he always says "pas bon Guidry". I'm not fluent in French, however being from Texas I know a bit of Spanish and his father and aunts try to teach me when we go visit. I love to learn about his heritage and have found I have a very strong French background in the process.
That's right. Large numbers of Cajuns and Creoles were translators in France, and many went in as spies to the French countryside ahead of D-Day because they could pass as rural French speakers.
And to answer your first question, yes la jeuness is out there. Several of them have commented on this page. Whether they learned their French at school, abroad, while singing or from grandparents, they are enthusiastic and militant and give me a lot to be encouraged about.
Amanda LaFleur I was wondering if you have any information about the creole-style French language that was spoken in New Orleans up to the early 20th century. Not the black creole patois (African-French) spoken in Acadiana by Creoles of color, but the creole-style French that the white Creoles of a New Orleans spoke. Thanks.
Merci Madame Guidry! Vous m'avez fait bien sourire!
C'est comme un accent Quebecois d'une dimension alternative. lol
haha
J'adore les Cujuns et les Acadiens! De la part d'une Franco-Ontarienne au Canada! Bisous! xoxo
I love Cajuns and Acadians! From a Franco-Ontarian in Canada! Kisses! xo
@AuxaneD During the oil spill incident off the east coast; the BBC showed a documentary about how the oil spill would impact on the lives of the local people and they happened to visit a french-speaking community whose first language is actually caju french. They did speak English but with a totally different accent I had never heard before. It was pretty interesting to know the French language is still active in the USA and North America as a whole.
un salut de la france a nos cousin cajun =)
I'm in Louisiana too and there is a Spanish community here too (Canary Islands, Spain) called "Los Isleños".
Haha j'ai tout compris! Bonjour du Québec!
If you go to the Le Poitou region on the Atlantic coast of France, you would hear a dialect of French reminiscent of the Québecois accent of today. It's an accent from the late 1600s to early 1700s. The Acadians originated from other regions of France in the early 1600s. They started the first French colony in Port Royal (today Nova Scotia). In 1755-1763 the colony was deported to the American colonies. You (Cajuns)are the descendants of those who survived. Remember, & keep the culture alive!
I had to watch this for school. Gang gang
In Louisiana we don't have too many historic connections to the Tahitian islands, but we do share certain words and structures with la Réunion and l'Île Maurice. A historian explained to me that it had to do with a common language shared by French soldiers who were often posted in several colonies over the course of their careers. Exemple: peanut = pistache (de terre)
Soldiers may have play a role but I don’t think this explanation goes to the point. Peanut is an american legume.
The first name for peanuts in French was actually pistaches de terre. It is how there were called in the Antilles. Later the word cacahuètes was introduced in France from Spanish and originally from Mexico . ( Wikipedia arachide).
From this article , you deduct that peanuts were introduced in those french speaking territories before the 19th century and that the new french terminology had no influence there( which is common) or on the people who introduced the legume if it happened later.
The closest French to Cajun French is the French from the maritime provinces of French Canada. After that, Quebec French. Cajuns originally came from French Canada (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), so naturally their French is closest to where they were last. Much of the ancestry of Cajuns comes from the Poitou-Charentes area of France, but not limited to that area.
I can totally hear pronunciation similarities between Cajun and Quebec French. Then again, they both originated from the same place. :)
amazing... very different from the Pacific Island french in Tahiti.
"Bêtiser" magnifique!!
Also,(just lettting you know) I would love to be able to communicate with my grandfather this way and my other family relatives.
Le français cajoun est complètement différent de celui utilisé en France ! C'est très drôle a entendre
Cette dame est trop adorable !!
The accent clearly has many French-Canadian/Québécois elements to it
@lacadjine
This was fantastic - thanks for uploading. My grandma grew up in Avoyelles Parish in Central Louisiana, but hasn't spoken French since her own mother died in 1976. It drove me to learn French and I speak it now but would love to help preserve the cajun dialect. Do you have more such interviews or any idea on resources? Merci, Roger
Vive Les Cajun !
Mme Guidry a l'air sympa et drôle.
La grammaire acadienne est très bizarre, mais très intéressant. L'évolution du langage est fascinant.
Hello, I enjoy watching your videos because it makes me think back to grandmother(who was Creole) and my grandfather(who is Cajun.he still speaks a little bit of the broken up French at times,but his girlfriend is fluent) I was just wondering if there was anyway I could get any lessons(or if you know of anyone giving lessons at all) because my grandfather is elderly and not really able to teach me the language, but I would love to preserve my family's language.
ces Guidry de sont fous, surtout la Nouvelle-Orléans
Im glad someone else has a mamaw out there! I have never heard anyone else use that term before!
LSU offers a Cajun French course, there is also a school in Church Point, Nova Scotia that teaches Acadian French. That is where the Pine Leaf Boys went to learn. It's sad to think in certain parts you were looked down upon for speaking it because you were thought to be uneducated. We need another Coozan Dud!!!
Ta sur fait bein avec ton video, merci.
My grandfathers whole family is from cut off and bayou la fourche seems like I’m related to every last name that’s Cajun
My ancestors are from all over Cajun country, and we have lots of Cajun family names in my lineage : Blanchard, Thibodeaux, Billiot, Dugas, Guidry and several more. I personally am an Aucoin and am proud of my heritage
I wondered if we're related! Im a Guidry!!!!
I live in New Orleans.
Battez vous pour garder le français cajun vivan! !!! Parlez Cajun à vos enfants et petit enfant. Un cousin Français de Béziers.
Hi Amanda, Acadians in the south-eastern part of New Brunswick have done something similar: it's like a code that only people who speak both languages can understand. This dialect is called Chiac (look up Acadieman to get the gist of it). Chiac comes from the word Shediac: the town of Shediac, NB, Canada. Example: J'vais driver mon car su'la highway. Look up Eloge du Chiac (ONF) on google to find out more about how this dialect is sparking up controversy about keeping the acadian language alive.
Nor do we vice-versa. On our side of the Pacific Ocean the French influence was impacted after France annexed Tahiti in 1843. However, overtime there is a language development of Tahitian-French accents slangs called french-pidgin which is interestingly unique in its own right. Elsewhere, 8 different Pacific Islands have their own distinct french-pidgin, that only plain formal French can be used to communicate to one another. So if Tahitians were to visit LA, they have to use formal French.
She sounds so cute.
Not sure what you mean by bad. The only accent I consider "bad" would be if one of my students mispronounced a word to the extent that a native speaker could not understand it. Any native speaker of French from Mme Guidry's area would understand her perfectly, and with the exception of some words, French speakers from elsewhere understand her as well. In the ear of the "beholder".
@shadowkitty56 yes! I have lived in Atlanta, GA for most of my life (I'm 20), but my mother is from Baton Rouge, and we have Cajun relatives scattered all over Louisiana that speak Cajun French. I've been trying to learn since I was around 14 or 15, but it's hard when I live three states away. We visit our family in LA about once a year, so I've been able to learn little bits and phrases over the years, but not as much as I'd like. If you know how I can learn in the ATL, please let me know! :)
Je viens du Québec aussi , jusque dans les années 60 il aurait été possible de renouer avec eux mais 50 ans plus tard les derniers francophonnes sont pratiquement tous morts et leurs enfants et petits enfants sont presque completement assimilés .
If I'm not mistaken, I believe the Cajun and Québécois dialect is much closer to what was spoken in eighteenth century France than the dialect that is currently spoken in Paris.
I believe it is more of a rural French as the speakers would have been from humble backgrounds. Back then France had many regional dialects and languages, which have been largely replaced by the French spoken by the ruling classes, particularly in Paris. France was quite ardent in its desire to destroy regional linguistic variation unlike for example Italy. France is quite centralised and bureacratic. You can of course still hear regional variations in France, but not so much now.
@@StillAliveAndKicking_ I am sorry but in all european countries pupils have been tought in the official language. It was a challenge in the countryside where the children arrived at school speaking only the language used at home. The situation in big cities was different. This is not a french specificity.
France is probably the european country which has the greatest diversity of languages groups: Langue d’oil, langue d’oc ( I include catalan ), basque, celtic in Brittany, italic in Corsica, germanic ( Alsace Lorraine), flemish ( Nord)….I don’t take overseas under consideration
In Germany which is the most decentralized country in Europe , the teachers are very strict on learning and using at school what they call Hochdeutsch.
The goal is not to destroy dialects or regional languages but is to teach french, german, spanish etc…What put the regional languages under pressure was and still is : urbanization, TV, Radio, easy communications, migrations etc….So keeping them alive requires a strong will and many efforts.
If you want to give an exemple where there was a real will to destroy a language ( and a social group within a population) you should take the example of Ireland and Gaellic.
@@metphmet Not so, I listened to an interview with an elderly woman in Brittany. She spoke French with an obvious accent, not unlike Welsh, and with odd grammar. She explained how children at school were punished if they were caught speaking Breton. That is a major reason why Breton is struggling. I have listened to many Bretons speaking Breton, all the younger ones (under sixty) spoke with an obvious French accent. It was similar all over France. Dialects or languages are disappearing. Basque in France has suffered far more than in Spain due to French state policies. In Germany dialects are still widely spoken. Italy has a huge number of healthy languages. Irish in Ireland is disappearing due to the Irish preferring English. It was and is seen as the language of opportunity. It is taught in schools but that is the way to kill it. You need full immersion. Britain has woken up to minority languages. There are now TV stations in Welsh and Gallic, and Welsh language schools in Wales. The Welsh language is stable. One reason for the threat to Welsh was the huge influx of English speakers into the industrial areas, along with oppression by the British state of course, which fortunately has ended.
Racheal, where do you live? There are courses offered here and there in Louisiana. You can pick up quite a bit, too, from online offerings at wwwdotlouisianafrenchdotorg (I had to write it like this because I cannot put links in this commentary section.
@CupisHomines
Census data tell us that there are only 1000 or so monolingual French speakers left who are native to Louisiana. Mrs. Guidry is not one of them. She speaks both French and English. Since this recording is the work of my student, I do not have personal knowledge of the speaker's habits. Though she may be more comfortable speaking French than English, there is not really anything in her short anecdote that indicates what her TV-watching and reading preferences are.
Au moin il y a des sous titres...
People here commonly call it Cajun French, though that is something of a misnomer because there are people in LA who don't self-identify as genealogically Cajun (i.e. of Acadian origin) but who speak French. This includes Creoles of color, Native Americans, and people of French origin whose ancestors did not come to LA by way of Acadie. The term Louisiana French is more inclusive and accurate.
Amanda LaFleur People from Louisiana that are of colonial Louisiana French descent (not Acadian or Québécois, but French) are called “French Creoles”. Not to be confused with the mixed race “Creoles of color”, French Creoles are white Creoles. Actually your surname is a French creole surname, so you’re a French creole. Lafleur is not an Acadian surname, it’s an old Louisiana French creole surname that predates the Acadians. There are certain surnames associated with certain groups...French Creoles had mostly a different set of surnames from the Acadians, who were Creoles also as they were called Acadian Creoles before adopting the name cajun. And many of the people claim8g to be Cajuns today are actually French Creoles. Surnames like Fontenot, Soileau, Lafleur, Fuselier etc are French creole surnames of people claims to be Cajuns...go figure... but were all Creoles. Louisiana Creole = colonial Louisiana descent. And the colonial population used the word to mean born in the Louisiana colony.
With that said, there are also non-French heritage Creoles in Louisiana. Such as the Spanish Creoles like the Isleños and malagueños, the German Creoles such as those in areas like in Des Allemands, Hahnville and the parishes up river from New Orleans like St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes and also there are métis Creoles (mixed European Native American) and also afro Creoles (predominantly of colonial Louisiana African ancestry). We are all Creoles down in south Louisiana. There’s a bunch of French Creoles around greater New Orleans and also the northern parishes of Acadiana in Avoyelles, St. Landry, Evangeline and Pointe coupee.
@@IslenoGutierrez I don't disagree with your comments, and I would add that many people who identify as Creoles of Color would also consider themselves to be French Creoles. As you and I both accurately point out, many people who call themselves Cajun are not necessarily of Acadian origin. I'd even venture to say that with historical marriages among different groups, one's present-day last name is only a very small part of the picture of one's ethnic make-up. And to complicate matters even further, some people conflate the term "Creole" as an ethnic identity with "Creole" used to describe a language or a dialect. So a black man in Jeanerette who speaks "kuri-vini" would probably say that he is Creole and that he speaks Creole. A black man in Church Point who calls himself Creole may speak a French that is very similar or even identical to his white Cajun counterpart in the same community (and very distinct from the Creole speaker in Jeanerette), but because he identifies as Creole, he might call what he speaks "Creole," too. And to add to the complicated nature of the whole thing, I have heard white French speakers in Marksville (many of whom fit the historical ethnic description of French Creole you describe in your message) call what they speak "Creole," even though it has no features that are similar to the "kuri-vini" spoken in St. Martin or St. James Parishes---because of course, they are Creole. Still, that doesn't mean that any of them is incorrect. Labels like these are fluid over time and end up being determined by usage, no matter how many dictionaries or specialists may tell us different. That's why I get so frustrated when media people contact me for a 3 minute interview and want to know "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole?" It takes at least a semester to cover the main concepts of this question with students. Some people have been doing it for a professional lifetime, and because language evolves, so does the answer to the question.
c'est très charmant, cet accent!
bravo aux louisianais qui ont réussi à conserver leur langue et leur héritage (et ce, au milieu des USA en plus). ce n'est que lorsqu'on les perd qu'on se rend compte que ces choses sont vitales.
je suis québécois et son accent n'est pas si dissimilaire à celui qui se parle en gaspésie ou encore en acadie. je trouve que le français québécois "standard" est l'accent le plus laid d'amérique - bourré d'affriquées et de groupes consonantaux dignes des langues slaves à cause de l'élision omniprésente du e caduc. nos "voyelles longues" diphtonguées sonnent comme si nous avions la mâchoire relâchée en permanence, et on parle en général comme si on avait un rhume de cerveau. pas étonnant que les autres francophones ne nous comprennent qu'avec difficulté.
Excellente vidéo. Madame Guidry est-elle encore en vie en 2020 ?!
Madame Guidry est décédée le 13 de juin 2012.
@@lacadjine Merci pour votre réponse. Que Mme Guidry repose en paix.
@rere1205 Write a letter to CODOFIL, the organization that has been trying to revive the language. They should know. And be absolutely clear that you want to learn CAJUN French. I also happen to know there are courses on the dialect in universities in Louisiana (you might be able to take it during the summer and learn that way.)
Shes too sha!!! Reminds me of my mawmaw. I am one of the young generation of cajuns who only knows bits and pieces. I moved out of louisiana recently but i am learning french. I tend to pronounce everything in a cajun accent whether i try to or not. Dont care, its my heritage. I dont want to learn france french i want to learn my grandparents' french! Can i learn this from out of state?
@strawmanGR Simple answer is....a bit of both. It is not uncommon to hear an individual speaker use "alors," "ça fait" and "so" in the same discourse. Some English words, like "back," are very much integrated into French. Others are more like smatterings of English used by folks who speak both languages (code-switching.)
knowing another language makes one twice the person as they say...
It's really a pity the American government did not preserve the minority languages after Louisiana's purchase. They should have protected their language by enacting laws on language rights just like they did in Québec.
@CupisHomines obviously you have never been to cajun country.
they're in both languages hon.
évidemment tu n'est pas deja visiter cajun country.
ces sont en les deux langues député
.
Non, elle a été réalisér en 2007.
@shadowkitty56 there are fewer and fewer. the language is barely transmitted to offspring in louisiana.
as for louisianian schools teaching standard french, i'm not surprised. anglo-canadians also learn standard french pronunciation at school, despite quebec having a very distinctive accent (but the written language is the same) and being home to the biggest concentration of north american french speakers.
it's actually probably better that way. north american pronunciation, quebec's especially, is very hard, maybe even impossible, to reproduce correctly if you're not native. lots of heterorganic consonant clusters due to the dropping of the schwa and the affricates, unvoiced vowels are hard for foreigners to reproduce correctly, quick cadence (maybe even a bit quicker than european french) and long vowels (including nasals) are heavily diphthongized. combine all of that and it's a real clusterfuck. standard french pronunciation is a LOT easier to learn.
of course it makes as much sense as if we learned british instead of american english, but given that european francophones struggle with north american pronunciation while the reverse is not true (except in specific cases), it makes sense to teach people the accent that everyone can understand instead of a regional variety.
anglophones generally ruin french with the piss-easy standard accent anyway, i can't imagine what i'd hear if they were using a quebec french accent.
I heard an interview with a teacher of French as a foreign language in Quebec. She was from France. She said she taught standard French because that was the correct form. Imagine an English person teaching English English in America because it is the correct form! You might as well feed the oerson to alligators. The chauvinism of the French from France often astonished me. It was rather like that of the British 50-100 years earlier.
Don't want to be rude, but this is not a dialect, this is casual french, with an accent (depending of course on which french you're used to). I know places in France where people would speak less understandble french . The only words that differ from the french language are those taken from the english language. In Quebec people speak a quite similar language, and they're proud to call it french. Do you guys call it french or cajun?
@lacadjine I have a question: are there any young speakers trying to learn the language? Correct me if I am wrong, but I have heard of the Louisiana govt. trying to teach STANDARD French, and not the dialect already under their nose. Please tell me there are real attempts to save the language!! (To me this is fascinating: my grandpa used to tell me stories of Cajun translators in WWII.)
Cajun French does not sound like Québecois French (they were cradled in all-French colonies and heard very little English up until recently; the same goes for Acadians from the northern part of New Brunswick). But Cajuns & Acadians have kept much of the original words and accent of the French that was spoken in the 1600s and 1700s in France. And since then, the language spoken in France has evolved too.
Comment j ai trop rigolé!elle dechire la dame!^^
If this bothers you, don't go to Québec. You'll have a fucking seizure they incorporate english words as french verbs with respective -er -ir -oir endings. "Crawler", "Clasher", "jogger" (jogging), etc. In my opinion understanding Cajun isn't that hard compared to gettting used to Québecois.
❤️🇺🇸❤️🇫🇷
Mais, c'est bon.
It would be nice to save a dying language in the US. I know in the area I live in there are alot of words and traditions bieng lost. I know when my grandmother past so did "mountain speak" as she said. I think as Americans we want sometimes and are told our differences makes us enemies but I think they make us strong. Thats who we are Americans. We are a wide open pot and everyone should be represented. WHO decided that we all need to sound like some middle of nowhere boring newscaster
You didn't quite answered my question... It was a real question. I'm french, living in Alsace. There's a german dialect here : alsatian. It differs from german as the grammar, prononciation, vocabulary are different. Words are similar but rarely the same. I have the feeling this could be written in european french, and could be well understand by any French or Quebecer. See my point?
@strawmanGR American Frenglish (CAJUN French )
@Souulless From your response it's quite obvious that you don't know much about the French language as a whole. There is more to French than what's standard in France.
Linguists themselves don't agree on what constitutes a dialect, so they often prefer the more general term "variety." Certainly Mme Guidry's French is understandable to most francophones, but "casual French" implies that this speaker would speak differently in a more formal context. Not the case here. Back to your question: after years of being told "c'est pas du français, ça", some folks do simply call it Cajun, while others say Cajun or Louisiana French (see my other comments).
Variety is clearer than dialect ? I am not sure . Why change ?
Franglais... frenglish... Louisiana French ... No Apologies ... Its American southern..
and to all the french speaking snobs who claim they don't understand it ... Mange' La Merde !
je pense que ta pas compris, il visé justement les gens qui parler francais peut etre les americains qui ont appris notre francais a nous, pour leur dire justement arrété de critiquer parce que vous comprenez pas. c'est un dialecte sud americain
hahaha sa sonne comme le monde d'Abitibi...
Take them to court. French is an official language of Louisiana and they are breaking the law-if you get enough signatures, they have to listen to you, Madamoiselle Thibodeux
sounds a bit like my walloon grandmother (without the english words ofcourse)
lkj
And I don't want to be rude, but you're arguing the semantics of what is or what is not a dialect with one of the foremost experts on Louisiana French. She doesn't have time to debate you probably, as she's busy teaching students about our language.
Faut voir à quel point le francais est déterrioré par contre , ne pas oublier qu' on interdisait aux francophonnes de la Louisianne de parler francais à l'école et dans les endroits publics depuis les années 30 environs . Ce n' est plus que du folklore .
sounds like african french
Oops, réalisée.....
wwwdot af-neworleans dotorg
Je crois que notre cher défunt Richard Guidry aurait trouvé ça drôle.
c'est interresent, c'est trés mal parce que cette langue est morté. Pourquoi est-ce que le français parissien est apprendre dans l'état de louisianne, C'EST BIZZARE!??! Je crois que la "cajun" française est bonne pour apprendre
sadly they teach standard french! unfortunate for me i dont even have a french class at my school only spanish and it is mandatory for us to take two years of that CRAP!!!
We need to have a lil respect for all languages. You are aware that Spanish is in the same Romance language family as French rite? Linguist refer to them as "kissing cousins". Well ur in Louisiana im sure u know all too well about that ; ). My Parisian wife refers to cajun french as "peasant french". Leave it to the arrogant french to look down on other languages... Thats just CRAP isnt it?