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Portmanteau

Portmanteau

:For other uses, see (disambiguation). A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaus or portmanteaux) is a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme that fuses two or more grammatical functions. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words. In linguistics, these false portmanteaux are called blends.

Etymology

This word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in which it is likened to the French word "porte-manteaux" for a type of travelling case or suitcase. Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice. "Portmanteau word" was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply "portmanteau" as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity. "Portmanteau" is rarely used for its original meaning in current English, that type of travelling case having fallen into disuse. In Queensland, Australia, it is shortened to 'Port', and used as slang for a schoolbag.

Portmanteau morphemes

A portmanteau morpheme is a morpheme that fuses two grammatical categories (see Fusional language). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix -s. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning:
- Singular (number)
- Third-person (person)
- Present (tense)
- Indicative (mood) Spanish verb suffixes are also exceptionally fusional, with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system.

Portmanteau words

A portmanteau word is a word that fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter.

Folk usage

Outside linguistics, the words that are called blends are popularly labeled portmanteaux. The term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer to a blending of the parts of two or more words (generally the first part of one word and the ending of a second word) to combine their meanings into a single neologism.

External links

- [http://creativityforyou.com/portman.html Portmanteau Words]
- Category:Linguistics ja:%E3%81%8B%E3%81%B0%E3%82%93%E8%AA%9E

Disambiguation

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Also see a longer list of templates at Template talk:Otheruses4#Related.

Disambiguation pages

These contain links only, like this:

Lift may refer to:
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- Space elevator (space lift)
- Elevator shoe insoles
- Hitchhiking ("lifting"), or a hitchhiker's ride (a "lift")
- In mathematics, the lift of a curve to the covering map, defined through the homotopy lifting property
- In dance partnering, an important move

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Examples

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TLAs

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Multi-stub pages

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Issues

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Redlinks

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Page naming

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Topic page naming

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Fixing links to disambiguated topics

A code of honor for creating disambiguation pages is to fix the mis-directed links that will be created when the disambiguation page is made. Before creating a disambiguation page, click on "What links here" to find all of the pages that link to the page you are about to change. Make sure that those pages are fixed or that they won't be adversely affected before you perform the split. Rather than doing this manually, there is a tool to facilitate this in the [http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/ Python Wikipedia Robot], occasionally run by e.g. User:Robbot. The bot offers to update links to choices listed on the disambiguation page. When repairing a link (for example, when renaming Topic Name to Topic Name (some qualifier), you can use empty pipe syntax so that the link does not contain the new qualifier. For example, will render as Topic Name just like the original. This is easier to edit and maintain than the more wordy Topic Name.

Links to disambiguation pages

There is rarely any need for links directly to disambiguation pages—except from the primary topic, if any. In most cases, links should point to the article that deals with the specific meaning intended, and not to a disambiguation page. Before making a page into a disambiguation page, one should first look at each page that links to it (using the "pages that link here" feature of the software) and correct the links as appropriate. Of course, the whole point of making a disambiguation page is so that accidental links made to it will make sense, so it's not a major problem if there are still links to it. The Wikipedia software has a feature that lists "orphan" pages; that is, pages that no other page links to. But for disambiguating pages, that's perfectly correct: we usually want pages to link to the more specific pages. So, in order to make the orphans list more useful by not cluttering it with intentional orphans, disambiguation pages are linked from either
- Multiple-place names for place names
- Links to disambiguating pages or Links to (disambiguation) pages for other such pages.
- People are also included on Non-unique personal name. Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Disambig (previously "Special:Whatlinkshere/MediaWiki:Disambig") could list all disambiguation pages, but the Wiki software limits the number of results listed to 500 in order to reduce technical strain on the servers. The :Category:Disambiguation provides a complete list, but it is also hard on the servers (given that we have over 7,000 of them). If you create a disambiguation page, put a link to it in one of those pages as appropriate. If you must link to a disambiguation page (instead of a specific meaning), link to a redirect to the disambiguation page that includes the text "(disambiguation)", e.g. America (disambiguation). This helps in distinguishing accidental links to the disambiguation page from intentional ones.

Interlanguage links

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Double disambiguation

A disambiguation of a disambiguation is a disambiguation that is linked from another disambiguation. This kind of disambiguation is typically more specific than one with a simplified name. These kind of disambiguations are relatively rare on Wikipedia.

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members. English example: The word "unbelievable" has three morphemes "un-", (negatory) a bound morpheme, "-believe-" a free morpheme, and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

Types of morphemes

- Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town-hall or dog-house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /-ɪz/.
- Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" ones, from the "cran" in that very word.
- Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on. (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs).
- Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy", for example, to give "happiness".

External links

- [http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/index.html University of Oregon Linguistics Course: The Structure of English Words (LING150)]
- [http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/studyaid/ Morpheme Study Aid]

Reference

- Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Category:Linguistic morphology ko:형태소 ja:形態素

Word

A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. compound]]

Difficulty in defining the term

The precise definition of what a word is depends on which language the definition is for, and the dividing line between words and phrases is not always clear. In most writing systems, a word is usually marked out in the text by interword separation such as spaces or word dividers used in some languages such as Amharic. In other languages such as Chinese and Japanese, and in many ancient languages such as Sanskrit, word boundaries are not shown. Even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear; for example, even though ice cream is written like two words, it is a single compound because it cannot be separated by another morpheme or rephrased like iced cream or cream of ice. Likewise, a proper noun is a word, however long it is. A space may not be even the main morpheme boundary in a word; the word New Yorker is a compound of New York and -er, not of New and Yorker. In English, many common words have historically progressed from being written as two separate words (e.g. to day) to hyphenated (to-day) to a single word (today), a process which is still ongoing, as in the common spelling of all right as alright.

Words in different classes of languages

In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes (such as love and -s). In polysynthetic languages, the number of morphemes per word can become so large that the word performs the same grammatical role as a phrase or clause in less synthetic languages (for example, in Yupik, angyaghllangyugtuq means "he wants to acquire a big boat"). These large-construction words are still single words, because they contain only one content word; the other morphemes are grammatical bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone. Matters seem easier for analytic languages. For these languages, a word usually consists of only a root morpheme, which is often single-syllable. However, it is common even in those languages to combine roots into a compound stem.

Complexity of word boundaries in speech

In spoken language, the distinction of individual words is even more complex: short words are often run together, and long words are often broken up. Spoken French has some of the features of a polysynthetic language: je ne le sais pas ("I do not know it") tends towards //. As the majority of the world's languages are not written, the scientific determination of word boundaries becomes important.

Determining word boundaries

There are five ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed: ;Potential pause :A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words. ;Indivisibility :A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become I and my family have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an," the verb ankommen is separated. ;Minimal free forms :This concept was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of). ;Phonetic boundaries :Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word (like Hebrew), a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. However, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions. ;Semantic units :Much like the abovementioned minimal free forms, this method breaks down a sentence into its smallest semantic units. However, language often contains words that have little semantic value (and often play a more grammatical role), or semantic units that are compound words. In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still elusive.

External links

- [http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/essay_-_what_is_a_word.pdf What Is a Word?] (PDF)
- [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=word Urban Dictionary: word], used as a slang Category:Linguistic morphology Category:Syntax ja:語 simple:Word

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the comic poem The Hunting of the Snark, and the nonsense poem Jabberwocky. His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from the most naïve to the most sophisticated. His works have remained popular since they were published and have influenced not only children's literature, but also a number of major 20th century writers such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges. There are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of Lewis Carroll's works in many parts of the world including North America, Japan, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

Upbringing

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors belonged to the two traditional English upper-middle class professions: the army and the Church. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 while his two sons were hardly more than babies. The elder of these—yet another Charles—reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Westminster School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson. Young Charles was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them—seven girls and four boys— survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11 his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years. Dodgson senior made some progress through the ranks of the church: he published some sermons, translated Tertullian, became an Archdeacon of Ripon Cathedral, and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instil such views in his children. In the early years young Charles was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. It is often said that he was naturally left-handed and suffered severe psychological trauma by being forced to counteract this tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. Charles also suffered from another disability, a stutter that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place:

I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.

The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance' will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some form of sexual molestation. Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a. more promising boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Maths master.

Academic life

He left Rugby at the end of 1850 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain"—perhaps meningitis or a stroke—at the age of forty-seven. Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been about this death, he did not allow them to distract him too much from his purpose at Oxford. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. The following year he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent of a fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey. His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. Through his own laziness, he failed an important scholarship, but still his clear brilliance as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. The income was good, but the work bored him and his stammer hampered him. Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were uninterested. They didn't want to be taught; he didn't want to teach them. Mutual apathy ruled. At Oxford he was also diagnosed as an epileptic, then a considerable social stigma to bear. However, recently John R. Hughes, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's epilepsy clinic, has argued that Carroll may have been misdiagnosed.

Photography

University of Illinois at Chicago In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography, first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey and art photography pioneer Oscar Rejlander. Dodgson soon excelled at the art, and it became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called beauty, by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. He found this divine beauty not simply in the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words, in a mathematical formula and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in the body-images that moved him. When he took up photography he sought with his own representations to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into the innocence of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be enjoyed without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a means of retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre, was to bring him into confrontation with Victorian morality and his own family's High Church beliefs. As his main biographer Morton Cohen noted... "He rejected outright the Calvinist principle of original sin and replaced it with the notion of inborn divinity." The definitive work on his photography (Roger Taylor's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002) exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. However it should be noted that less than a third of his original portfolio has survived (see below). His favourite girl model was Alexandra Kitchin ("Xie"), whom he photographed around fifty times from the age of four until the age of about 16. In 1880 he was striving to be allowed to photograph the 16 year old Xie in 'bathing dress', but was not allowed this liberty. Most of his girl subjects would write their name on the corner of the print in coloured ink. It's assumed that Dodgson either destroyed or returned the nude photographs to the families of the girls he had photographed. They were long presumed lost, but six nudes have since surfaced, four of which have been published and another two of which little is known. Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has added to speculation that he was a pedophile (see below). There is a clear difference between Dodgson's girls and depictions by other Victorian artists; in almost all of his solo portraits of girls they are depicted unburdened by the heavy weight of Victorian symbolism, and are simply and strongly themselves. pedophile with two of their children, signed by Effie. (c1860)]] He also found photography to be a useful entré into higher social circles. Once he had a studio of his own, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He also made some landscapes and anatomy studies. Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880. Over 24 years he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio at the top of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 images. Less than 1000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. He spent several hours each day creating a diary detailing the circumstances surrounding the making of each photograph, but this register was later destroyed. With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography became forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers.

Character

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. At the unusually late age of seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. The only overt defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation"—a stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout his entire life. The stammer has always been a potent part of the myth. It is part of the mythology that Dodgson only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is no evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for its own reasons, but not as a clichéd manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself was far more acutely aware of it than most people he met. Although his stammer troubled him — even obsessed him sometimes — it was never bad enough to stop him using his other qualities to do well in society. He was naturally gregarious and egoistic enough to relish attention and admiration. At a time when people devised their own amusements and singing and recitation were required social skills, the young Dodgson was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was reputedly quite good at charades. There are brief hints at a soaring sense of the spiritual and the divine; small moments that reveal a rich and intensely lived inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry, the song of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst of an analysis of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke:

I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I wonder if any one there could have entered into the spirit of Alton Locke. I think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects of real interest in life.

He was also quite socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world in some way, as a writer, or as an artist. It was perhaps the realisation that his talent as an artist was not sufficient that he eventually turned to photography. His scholastic career was seen as something of a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he desired. In the interim between his early published writing and the success of Alice, he began to move in the Pre-Raphaelite social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him. Dodgson developed a close relationship with the Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family, and also knew William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Arthur Hughes among other artists. He also knew the fairy-tale author George MacDonald well - it was the enthusiastic reception of "Alice" by the young MacDonald daughters that convinced him to submit the work for publication.

Writing career

During his writing career, Carroll wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of his output was humorous, sometimes satirical. But his standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Years before Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's books that would make money: 'Christmas book [that would] sell well... Practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a theatre'. The ideas got better as he got older, but his canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there. In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his real name, Lewis being the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles. anglicise In the same year, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years. He became close friends with the mother and the children, particularly the three sisters Lorina, Alice and Edith. It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham. It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success — the first Alice book. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually presented Alice with a hand-written, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground (now in the British Library, Add. MS 46700). Later he took the little book to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently realised that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist. With the immediate, phenomenal success of Alice, the story of the author's life becomes effectively divided in two: the continuing story of Dodgson's real life and the evolving myth surrounding "Lewis Carroll." Carroll quickly became a rich and detailed alter ego, a persona as famous and deeply embedded in the popular psyche as the story he told. To him belongs a large part of the image of little girls and strange otherworldliness that we know from the author of Alice. It is undisputed that throughout his growing wealth and fame, he continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and that he remained in residence there until his death. He published Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872; his great Joycean mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876 (inspired by and dedicated to his other great child-friend after Alice Liddell, Gertrude Chataway), and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893 respectively. He also published many mathematical papers and books under his own name.

Other selected works

- An Elementary Treatise on Determinants
- Symbolic Logic
- Euclid and his Modern Rivals
- The Alphabet Cipher
- What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.
- Hiawatha's Photographing (a parody of The Song of Hiawatha)

Allegations of drug abuse

An allegation arose at some point that Carroll used the fungus ergot, which is what LSD was eventually derived from, can induce psychoactive experiences at large enough quantities, and was used as a medical treatment during the 19th century. While some artists and poets have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs, Lewis Carroll was probably just a brilliant man with an incredible imagination—there is no factual evidence for the allegation that Carroll took psychoactive drugs. Similar allegations exist for Robert Lewis Stevenson during his writing of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), but again not based on factual evidence.

Allegations of pedophilia

Dodgson’s undeniable fondness for little girls (especially Alice Liddell, from whom it is often said he may have derived his own "Alice", a suggestion backed up by the acrostic of Alice's full name that appears at the end of Through the Looking Glass), the sheer number of his child friends, his collection of the early child photographs by Oscar Rejlander, his love of the London theatres before the child-actress reforms, and psychological readings of his work — especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls and his sketchbooks featuring his own drawings of such — have all led to speculation that he was a pedophile, albeit probably a celibate one. The issue has been contentious, with some arguing that child nudes were not uncommon during the era. (Other notable Victorian-era photographers who took images of nude children include Julia Margaret Cameron and Francis Meadow Sutcliffe.) According to the 'controversial' investigation by Karoline Leach into what she calls the 'Carroll Myth' (see below), the first hints of allegations that Dodgson was a pedophile seem to have appeared in 1932, in The Life of Lewis Carroll by Langford Reed. According to Leach, Reed was the first to claim that all of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached puberty (around 16 in 1870s England), though Reed apparently only intended to suggest that Dodgson was thereby a pure man untainted by touch of lust for adult flesh. This claim that Dodgson lost interest in girls once they reached puberty was later caught up by other biographers, who remained unaware of the evidence to the contrary since Dodgson's family refused to publish his diaries and letters. The view of Dodgson as having no adult life and being preoccupied with children persisted among his biographers, including Florence Becker Lennon (Victoria Through the Looking-Glass - UK title "Lewis Carroll"), 1945) and the highly influential Alexander Taylor (The White Knight, 1952). The debate tended to veer between those who believed Dodgson to have been asexually obsessed with children and those who believed this obsession to have been pedophilic. The issue was rekindled in 1995 with the authoritative Lewis Carroll, a Biography by Morton Cohen. Cohen writes:

"We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult present when nude prepubescents modelled for him."

Cohen further notes that the children's mothers were encouraged to be present, and asks if these precautions were the result of Dodgson "insuring himself against slip-ups." (p 228–229) Cohen concedes that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism," but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p 229). The only recorded instance of trouble associated with the nudes of children was Dodgson's experience with the Mayhew family. In 1879, Dodgson wrote what have been called by Cohen "several curious letters ... to the family of Andrew Mayhew, an Oxford colleague ... He asked permission to take nude photographs of the three Mayhew daughters, ages 6, 11, and 13, with no other adults present." The Mayhew parents, who had previously allowed Dodgson to photograph their children, refused, and Cohen notes this same period saw a "sudden break in the friendship" between Dodgson and the Mayhew family (p. 170). Leach suggests that the problem lay with his desire to study the older daughters in frontal positions and not with the younger children.

Karoline Leach's work and the 'Carroll Myth'

A new analysis of Dodgson's sexual proclivities (and indeed the evolution of the entire process of his biography) appears in Karoline Leach's 1999 book, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild. She claims that the image of Dodgson's alleged pedophilia was built out of a failure to understand Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea that Dodgson had no interest in adult women which evolved out of the minds of various biographers. She termed this simplified, often frankly fictional image 'the Carroll Myth'. According to Leach, who cites much prima facie evidence, Dodgson's real life was very different from the accepted biographical image. He was in fact keenly interested in adult women and apparently enjoyed several relationships with women, married and single. Some of these were his child friends with whom he retained good relations into adulthood (in complete refutation of the mythic idea that he 'lost interest' in any girl over the age of 14), but others — like Catherine Lloyd, Constance Burch, Edith Shute, Gertrude Thomson (to name but a few) — were women he met as adults and with whom he shared very close and meaningful friendships. Suggestions of pedophilia only evolved many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of these adult friendships in order to try to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man only interested in little girls. This serves to repudiate some of the classical evidence for the claims of pedophilia. Dodgson's problems with societal disapproval, Leach says, stemmed not from his usage of nude child models but his attempts to get slightly older models to pose in 'bathing dress' and other immodest clothing. These studies of scantily-dressed older models have all disappeared, leaving commentators only the photos of young girls to comment on. In a review of the title in Victorian Studies (Vol.43, No.4) reviewer Donald Rackin wrote, "As a piece of biographical scholarship, Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is difficult to take seriously". However, for all the emotional intensity of his attack, he visibly failed to detail any actual errors in her work. Nor have any errors been pointed out so far by any other authorities, and many now regard her work as an important step towards a better understanding of Carroll. Her work has been paralleled by that of Hugues Lebailly whose studies of Dodgson's artistic and social interests also support the idea that the image of his 'obsession' with little girls was largely simplistic or mythic in origin.

Jack the Ripper theories

Many wild theories have been woven around the life of Lewis Carroll. Perhaps the most extreme emerged in 1996 when author Richard Wallace published a book titled Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend accusing Lewis Carroll and his colleague Thomas Vere Bayne of being Jack the Ripper. It was largely based upon anagrams Wallace constructed from Carroll's writing. Carroll and Bayne have strong alibis for most of the nights of the Ripper murders, and Wallace's theory has not found support from other scholars. Carroll did show some interest in the Jack the Ripper case, but this is hardly unusual, given the profound publicity surrounding the crimes. A passage in his diary dated August 26, 1891, reports that he spoke that day with an acquaintance of his about his "very ingenious theory about 'Jack the Ripper'". No other information about this theory has been found.

Inventions

Lewis Carroll seems to have thought a lot about how to solve some common technical problems of the day. The fact that he was able to understand and use new technologies is amply demonstrated by his use of the camera, which was not as user-friendly as it is today. One such invention, as cited in his journal on September 24, 1891 and as published in, was a system of writing called Nyctography and a tool called the Nyctograph. He invented this because he would be unable to sleep at night and would want to write down his ideas to clear his head. But, wanting to go quickly back to bed, he did not want to go through all the mechanical steps involved in lighting a lamp. He designed a card with square holes in a regular grid. One would always make a dot in the upper-left corner and then make other dots and/or strokes. These symbols were designed to look somewhat like the letters or numbers they represented. This did not seem to be used for any longer writings, since no writings with these symbols survive. But it is probable that Lewis Carroll himself would use this to make short notes to jog his memory, and then he would probably write the idea out in his journal. He also invented the pencil and paper game Word Ladder.

References

- Lewis Carroll by Richard Kelly, Twayne, 1990.
- Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morten Cohen, Vintage, 1996.
- [http://shadowofthedreamchild.wild-reality.net In the Shadow of the Dreamchild] by Karoline Leach.
- [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/bioov.html Victorian Web]'s detailed biography section on Carroll.
- "[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2004.11.011 Did all those famous people really have epilepsy?]" by John R. Hughes. Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago. Epilepsy & Behavior, Volume 6, Issue 2, p.115–139. March 2005.
- The Raven and the Writing Desk by Francis Huxley, 1976. (ISBN 0060121130).
- Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschläger, (ISBN 0743228928) — also looks at Edward Lear (of the "nonsense" verses), J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), and A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh).
- Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll. Yale University Press & SFMOMA, 2004. (Places Carroll firmly in the art photography tradition).
- Roger Taylor & Edward Wakeling. Lewis Carroll, Photographer. 2002. (Has a definitive list of every Carroll photograph that is still in existence.)

External links

;Official websites :
- [http://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk/ The Lewis Carroll Society] :
- [http://www.lewiscarroll.org/ Lewis Carroll Society of North America] :
- [http://www.lookingforlewiscarroll.com/ Looking for Lewis Carroll], website of the Association for New Lewis Carroll Studies ;Additional information :
- LCSNA: [http://www.lewiscarroll.org/carroll.html Lewis Carroll Home Page] :
- Victorian Web: [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/carrollov.html Lewis Carroll] :
- [http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/LewisCarroll.shtml Lewis Carroll] - an introduction to his fiction :
- [http://www.elisanet.fi/markus.lang/lewis/carroll-music.html Musical Compositions Inspired by Lewis Carroll] :
- [http://www.heureka.clara.net/art/carroll.htm Lewis Carroll] ;The Internet Movie Database :
- :
- [http://www.imdb.com/Find?select=Characters&for=Lewis+Carroll IMDb Character name search for Lewis Carroll]

Electronic texts

;Online books :
- In the [http://www.gasl.org/as/referenz Arno Schmidt Reference Library] :
- [http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Carroll__Works.pdf The Complete Works] (PDF) :
- [http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Carroll__Wonderland.pdf Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] (PDF, coloured edition) :
- Freely downloadable e-texts from Project Gutenberg: :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12 Through the Looking-Glass] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13 The Hunting of the Snark] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/651 Phantasmagoria and Other Poems] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/620 Sylvie and Bruno] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4763 The game of logic] :
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11483 The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll] by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood :
- The complete list of :
- Other online texts :
- "[http://www.poetry-archive.com/c/the_manlet.html The Manlet]" :
- [http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html Alice's Adventures Under Ground] the complete manuscript using the British Library's Turning the Pages technology (Shockwave file) ;Audio files :
- Wired for Books: [http://wiredforbooks.org/alice/ A dramatic audio production of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] (RealAudio) Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Lewis ja:ルイス・キャロル simple:Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is a work of children's literature by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, (although it makes no reference to its events). In it, there are many mirror themes, including opposites, time running backwards, and so on.

Chess

Whereas the first book has the deck of cards as a theme, this book is loosely based on a game of chess, for which the author provides a list of moves even if the game cannot be carried out legally due to a move where white doesn't move out of check (much as might happen if a young child were playing chess). Also the sequence of moves (white and red) is not always followed which goes along with the mirror image reversal theme in Through the Looking Glass as noted by Martin Gardner.

Recycled characters

The Mad Hatter and the March Hare make an appearance as the Hatta and Haigha (pronounced as the English would have pronounced "hatter" and "hare").

Plot summary

Alice ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror, and to her surprise, is able to pass through to experience this world. She discovers a book with looking-glass poetry, Jabberwocky, which she can only read by holding it up to a mirror. Upon leaving the house, she enters a garden, where the flowers speak to her and mistake her for a flower. There, Alice also meets the Red Queen, who offers a throne to Alice if she just moves to the eighth rank in a chess match. Alice is placed as the White Queen's pawn, and begins the game by taking a train to the fourth rank, since pawns in chess can move two spaces on the first move. pawn She then meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who she knows of from the famous nursery rhyme. After reciting to her the long poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter", the two proceed to act out the events of their own poem. Alice continues on to meet the White Queen, who is very absent-minded and later transforms into a sheep. The following chapter details her meeting with Humpty Dumpty, who explains to her the meaning of "Jabberwocky", before his inevitable fall from the wall. This is followed by an encounter with the Lion and the Unicorn, who again proceed to act out a nursery rhyme. She is then rescued from the Red Knight by the White Knight, who many consider to be a representation of Lewis Carroll himself. At this point, she reaches the eight rank and becomes a queen, and by capturing the Red Queen, puts the Red King (who has remained stationary throughout the book) into checkmate. She then awakes from her dream (if it was a dream), and blames her black kitten (the white kitten was wholly innocent) for the mischief caused by the story. The two kittens are the children of Dinah, Alice's cat in the first book.

Poems and songs

- Prelude
- Jabberwocky (seen in the mirror-house)
- Tweedledum and Tweedledee
- The Walrus and the Carpenter
- Humpty Dumpty
- "In Winter when the fields are white..."
- Haddocks' Eyes / The Aged Aged Man / Ways and Means / A-sitting on a gate (see Haddocks eyes) The song is A sitting on a gate, but its other names and callings are placed above.
- Queen Alice song
- White Queen's riddle

"The Wasp in a Wig"

At the suggestion of his illustrator, John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll decided to suppress a scene involving Alice's encounter with a wasp wearing an old barrister's wig. The scene has been published in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.

Quotes

:"It's very good jam," said the Queen. :"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate." :"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day." ::(The word iam or jam in classical Latin means "now", but only in the future and the past.) :"I can't believe that!" said Alice. :"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." :Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." :"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." :"Can you do Addition?" the White Queen asked. "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?" :"I don't know," said Alice. "I lost count." :"She can't do Addition," the Red Queen interrupted. "Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight." :"Nine from eight I can't, you know," Alice replied very readily: "but—" :"She can't do Subtraction," said the White Queen. "Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what's the answer to that?" :"I suppose—" Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. "Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?" :Alice considered. "The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it—and the dog wouldn't remain: it would come to bite me—and I'm sure I shouldn't remain!" :"Then you think nothing would remain?" said the Red Queen. :"I think that's the answer." :"Wrong, as usual," said the Red Queen: "the dog's temper would remain." :"But I don't see how—" :"Why, look here!" the Red Queen cried. "The dog would lose its temper, wouldn't it?" :"Perhaps it would," Alice replied cautiously. :"Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!" the Queen exclaimed triumphantly.

External links

-
- [http://www.sabian.org/Alice/lgchap01.htm HTML version with Tenniel Illustrations]
- [http://www.sabian.org/alice.htm Text for "Through the Looking Glass"]
- [http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site] contains background info, pictures, full texts, story origins, literary analyses, Disney's movie, and more. Category:1871 books Category:Alice in Wonderland Category:Children's books ja:鏡の国のアリス

French language

French (French: français) is the third of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers, after Spanish and Portuguese, being spoken by about 67 million people as a mother tongue, and altogether by some 128 million people, which includes second-language speakers who use French for daily communication. French is thus the 18^th most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, and 9^th in terms of daily speakers. It is an official language in 29 countries. It is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the European Union, IOC, United Nations and Universal Postal Union). Before World War II, French was considered the international language, particularly in such fields as diplomacy, trade, shipping, and transportation.

History

The Roman invasion of Gaul

The French language is a Romance language, meaning that it is descended from Latin. Before the Roman invasion of what is modern-day France by Julius Cæsar (58–52 BC), France was inhabited largely by a Celtic people that the Romans referred to as Gauls, although there were also other linguistic/ethnic groups in France at this time, such as the Iberians in southern France and Spain, the Ligurians on the Mediterranean coast, Greek colonies such as Massalia (i.e. present-day Marseille), Phoenician outposts, and the Vascons on the Spanish/French border. Although in the past many Frenchmen liked to refer to their descent from Gallic ancestors (nos ancêtres les Gaulois), perhaps fewer than 200 words with a Celtic etymological origin remain in French today (largely place and plant names and words dealing with rural life and the earth). In the reverse direction, some words for Gallic objects which were new to the Romans and for which there were no words in Latin were imported into Latin – for example, clothing items such as les braies. Latin quickly became the lingua franca of the entire Gallic region for mercantile, official and educational purposes, yet it should be remembered that this was Vulgar Latin, the colloquial dialect spoken by the Roman army and its agents and not the literary dialect of Cicero.

The Franks

From the third century on, Western Europe was invaded by Germanic tribes from the east, and some of these groups settled in Gaul. For the history of the French language, the most important of these groups are the Franks in northern France, the Alemanni in the German/French border, the Burgundians in the Rhone valley and the Visigoths in the Aquitaine region and Spain. These Germanic-speaking groups had a profound effect on the Latin spoken in their respective regions, altering both the pronunciation and the syntax. They also introduced a number of new words: perhaps as much as 15% of modern French comes from Germanic words, including many terms and expressions associated with their social structure and military tactics.

Langue d'Oïl

Linguists typically divide the languages spoken in medieval France into three geographical subgroups: Langue d'oïl and Langue d'oc are the two major groups; the third group, Franco-Provençal, is considered a transitional language between the two other groups. The Oïl–Oc divide is broadly comparable to the divide illustrated by the use of "yes" in English and "aye" in Scots. Langue d'oïl, the languages which use oïl (in modern usage, oui) for "yes", is the language group in the north of France. These languages, like Picard, Walloon, Francien and Norman, were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken by the Frankish invaders. From the time period Clovis I on, the Franks extended their rule over northern Gaul. Over time, the French language developed from either the Oïl language found around Paris (the Francien theory) or from a standard administrative language based on common characteristics found in all Oïl languages (the lingua franca theory). Langue d'oc, the languages which use oc for "yes", is the language group in the south of France and northern Spain. These languages, such as Gascon and Provençal, have relatively little Frankish influence. (Modern French has two words for "yes", oui and si; the latter is used to contradict negative statements. Si derives from Latin sic "thus", and is cognate to the word for "yes" in Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Oïl/oui derive, according to Larousse, from Latin hoc ille "thus he (did)".)

Other linguistic groups

The early middle ages also saw the influence of other linguistic groups on the dialects of France: From the 5th to the 8th centuries, Celtic-speaking peoples from southwestern Britain (Wales, Cornwall, Devon) travelled across the English Channel, both for reasons of trade and as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England. They established themselves in Bretagne (Brittany). Their language was a dialect of the Brythonic languages, which has been named Breton in more recent centuries. It is part of the larger Celtic language family, though the modern dialects reflect a noticeable influence from French in their vocabulary. From the 6th to the 7th centuries, the Vascons crossed over the Pyrénées, a mountain range in the south of France. Their presence influenced the Occitan language spoken in southwestern France, resulting in the dialect called Gascon. Scandinavian vikings invaded France from the 9th century onwards and established themselves in what would come to be called Normandie (Normandy). They took up the langue d'oïl spoken there and contributed many words to French related to maritime activities, amongst other things. With their conquest of England in 1066, the Normans brought their language. The dialect that developed there as a language of administration and literature is referred to as Anglo-Norman. Anglo-Norman served as the language of the ruling classes and commerce in England from the time of the conquest until 1362, when the use of English became dominant again. Because of the Norman Conquest, the English language has borrowed a considerable amount of its vocabulary from French. The Arab peoples also supplied many words to French around this time period, including words for luxury goods, spices, trade stuffs, sciences and mathematics.

History of French

For the period up to around 1300, some linguists refer to the oïl languages collectively as Old French (ancien français). The earliest extant text in French is the Oaths of Strasbourg from 842; Old French became a literary language with the chansons de geste that told tales of the paladins of Charlemagne and the heroes of the Crusades. By the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 King Francis I made French the official language of administration and court proceedings in France, ousting the Latin that had been used before then. With the imposition of a standardised chancery dialect and the loss of the declension system, the dialect is referred to as Middle French (moyen français). Following a period of unification, regulation and purification, the French of the 17th to the 18th centuries is sometimes referred to as Classical French (français classique), although many linguists simply refer to French language from the 17th century to today as Modern French (français moderne). The foundation of the Académie française (French Academy) in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu created an official body whose goal has been the purification and preservation of the French language. This group of 40 members is known as the Immortals, not, as some erroneously believe, because they are chosen to serve for the extent of their lives (which they are), but because of the inscription engraved on the official seal given to them by their founder Richelieu—"À l'immortalité" ("to the Immortality (of the French language)"). The foundation still exists and contributes to the policing of the language and the adaptation of foreign words and expressions. Some recent modifications include the change from software to logiciel, packet-boat to paquebot, and riding-coat to redingote. The word ordinateur for computer was however not created by the Académie, but by a linguist appointed by IBM (see :fr:ordinateur). From the 17th to the 19th centuries, France was the leading power of continental Europe; thanks to this, together with the influence of the Enlightenment, French was the lingua franca of educated Europe, especially with regards to the arts, literature, and diplomacy; monarchs like Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia could both speak and write in French. Through the Académie, public education, centuries of official control and the role of media, a unified official French language has been forged, but there remains a great deal of diversity today in terms of regional accents and words. For some critics, the "best" pronunciation of the French language is considered to be the one used in Touraine (around Tours and the Loire River valley), but such value judgments are fraught with problems, and with the ever increasing loss of lifelong attachments to a specific region and the growing importance of the national media, the future of specific "regional" accents is difficult to predict.

Modern issues

There is some debate in today's France about the preservation of the French language and the influence of English (see franglais), especially with regard to international business, the sciences and popular culture. There have been laws (see Toubon law) enacted which require that all print ads and billboards with foreign expressions include a French translation and which require quotas of French-language songs (at least 40%) on the radio. There is also pressure, in differing degrees, from some regions as well as minority political or cultural groups for a measure of recognition and support for their regional languages.

Geographic distribution

regional language
French is an official language in the following countries or parts thereof: La Francophonie is an international organization of French-speaking countries and governments.

Legal status in France

Per the Constitution of France, French is the official language of the Republic since 1792 [http://www.languefrancaise.net/dossiers/dossiers.php?id_dossier=50]. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education outside of specific cases (though these dispositions are often ignored) and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words. See Toubon Law. Contrary to a misunderstanding common in the American and British media, France does not prohibit the use of foreign words in websites or any other private publication, which would anyway contradict constitutional guarantees on freedom of speech. The misunderstanding may have arisen from a similar prohibition in the Canadian province of Quebec which made strict application of the Charter of the French Language between 1977 and 1993, although these regulations addressed language used in advertising and the provision of commercial services offered within the province, not the language of private communication. There exist in addition to French a variety of languages spoken in France by minorities; see Languages of France.

Legal status in Canada

About 12% of the world's francophones are Canadian, and French is one of Canada's two official languages, with English; various provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms deal with the right of Canadians to access services in English and French all across Canada. By law, the federal government must operate and provide services in both English and French; proceedings of the Parliament of Canada must be translated into both English and French; and all Canadian products must be labelled in both English and French. Overall about 22% of Canadians speak French as a first language and 18% are bilingual. French has been the only official language of Quebec since 1974, although it is commonly (and incorrectly) believed that the designation of French as the sole official language occurred in 1977 with the adoption of the Charter of the French Language (which is popularly referred to as Bill 101). By far the provision of Bill 101 with the most significant impact has been that which mandates French-language education, unless a child's parents or siblings have received the major part of their own education in English within Canada. That provision has reversed a historical trend whereby a large number of immigrant children were being sent to English schools by their parents. In so doing, Bill 101 has greatly contributed to the "visage français" (French face) of Quebec. Other provisions of Bill 101, on the other hand, have been ruled unconstitutional over the years, including those mandating French-only commercial signs, court proceedings, and debates in the legislature. Some of those provisions have remained in effect, for a while, using the constitutional "notwithstanding" clause that permits a non-compliant law to temporarily remain. No "notwithstanding provision" is currently in effect. In 1993 the Charter was changed to allow signage in other languages so long as French is markedly "predominant". The Charter also provides for a measure of access by Anglophones to health and social services in their own language. The only province which has French as an official language is New Brunswick. In Ontario and Manitoba, French does not have full official status, although the provincial governments do provide full French-language services in all communities where significant numbers of francophones live. All of the other provinces do make some effort to accommodate the needs of their francophone citizens, although the level and quality of French-language service varies significantly from province to province.

Legal status in Switzerland

French is an official language in Switzerland. It is spoken in the part of Switzerland called Romandy.

Dialects of French

- Acadian French
- African French
- Belgian French
- Cajun French
- Canadian French
- Cambodian French
- Louisiana Creole French
- français d'Aoste
- français-germanique
- Indian French
- Levantine French
- Maghreb French
- Newfoundland French
- North American French
- Oceanic French
- Quebec French
- South East Asian French
- Swiss French
- West Indian French
- [http://www.linguasphere.org/langues_romanes.pdf linguasphere on Romance languages]

Languages derived from French

- Antillean Creole
- Haitian Creole
- Lanc-Patuá
- Mauritian Creole
- Michif
- Louisiana Creole French
- Réunionese Creole
- Seychellois Creole
- Tay Boi

Sounds

:Main article: French phonology and orthography French pronunciation follows strict rules based on spelling, but French spelling is often based more on history than phonology. The rules for pronunciation vary between dialects, but the standard rules are:
- liaison or linking: Final single consonants, in particular s, x, z, t, d, n and m, are normally silent. (The final letters 'c', 'r', 'f', and 'l' however are normally pronounced.) When the following word begins with a vowel, though, a silent consonant may once again be pronounced, to provide a "link" between the two words and avoid a glottal stop between them. Some liaisons are mandatory, for example the s in les amants or vous avez; some are optional, depending on dialect and register, for example the first s in deux cents euros or euros irlandais; and some are forbidden, for example the s in beaucoup d'hommes aiment. The t of et is never pronounced and the silent final consonant of a noun is only pronounced in the plural and in set phrases like pied-à-terre. Doubling a final consonant and adding a silent e at the end of a word (e.g. Parisien → Parisienne) makes it clearly pronounced, always.
- elision or vowel dropping: Monosyllabic words such as je or que drop their final vowel before another word beginning with a vowel. The missing vowel is replaced by an apostrophe. (e.g. je ai is instead pronounced and spelt → j'ai)
- nasal "n" and "m". When "n" or "m" follows a vowel combination, the "n" and "m" become silent and cause the preceding vowel to become nasalized (i.e. pronounced with the soft palate extended downward so as to allow part of the air to leave through the nostrils). Exceptions are when the "n" or "m" is doubled, or immediately followed by a vowel. The prefixes en- and em- are always nasalized. The rules get more complex than this but may vary between dialects.
- digraphs French does not introduce extra letters or diacritics to specify its large range of vowel sounds and diphthongs, rather it uses specific combinations of vowels, sometimes with following consonants, to show which sound is intended. (See French phonology and orthography or [http://www.languageguide.org/francais/grammar/pronunciation/ French Pronunciation Guide] for more details.)
- accents are used sometimes for pronunciation, sometimes to distinguish similar words, and sometimes for etymology alone.
- Accents that affect pronunciation:
- "é", is pronounced instead of the defaults or,
- "è" (e.g., secrète) means that the vowel is pronounced (as usual),
- dieresis (e.g. naïve, Noël) as in English, specifies that this vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding one (or following one in some cases), not combined,
- the "ç" means that the letter c is pronounced in front of A, O, or U. ("c" is otherwise hard before a hard vowel.)
- The circumflex (e.g. pâté, forêt) shows that an e is pronounced and that an o is pronounced . In some dialects it also signifies a pronunciation of for the letter a, but this differentiation is disappearing. It usually indicates a former long vowel created by the dropping of an "s" from the Latin root (as in English "paste", "forest"),
- Accents with no pronunciation effect:
- The circumflex does not affect the pronunciation of the letters i or u, and in most dialects, a as well.
- All other accents are used only to distinguish similar words or for etymological reasons, as in the case of distinguishing the adverbs là and où ("there", "where") from the article la and the conjunction ou ("the fem. sing.", "or") respectively.

Grammar

:Main article: French grammar French grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages, including:
- the loss of Latin's declensions
- only two grammatical genders
- the development of grammatical articles from Latin demonstratives
- new tenses formed from auxiliaries French word order is Subject Verb Object, except when the object is a pronoun, in which case the word order is Subject Object Verb.

Vocabulary

Word origins

The majority of French words derive from vernacular or "vulgar" Latin or were constructed from Latin or Greek roots. There are often pairs of words, one form being popular (noun) and the other one savant (adjective), both originating from Latin. Example:
- brother: frère (brother) / fraternel
- finger: doigt / digital
- faith: foi (faith) / fidèle
- cold: froid / frigide
- eye: œil / oculaire The French words which have developed from Latin are usually less recognisable than Italian words of Latin origin because as French developed into a separate language from Vulgar Latin, the unstressed final syllable of many words was dropped or elided into the following word. It is estimated that 12 percent (4,200) of common French words found in a typical dictionary such as the Petit Larousse or Micro-Robert Plus (35,000 words) are of foreign origin. About 25 percent (1,054) of these foreign words come from English and are fairly recent borrowings. The others are some 707 words from Italian, 550 from ancient Germanic languages, 481 from ancient Gallo-Romance languages, 215 from Arabic, 164 from German, 160 from Celtic languages, 159 from Spanish, 153 from Dutch, 112 from Persian and Sanskrit, 101 from Native American languages, 89 from other Asian languages, 56 from Afro-Asiatic languages, 55 from Slavic languages and Baltic languages, and 144 from other languages (3 percent of the total). Source: Henriette Walter, Gérard Walter, Dictionnaire des mots d'origine étrangère, 1998.

Levels of register

French, like many other languages, possesses a continuum of several levels of register. The colloquial register is used in almost any circumstance of life, and should not be confused with slang or rude talk. Formal French is used in writing or in formal occasions (when people make official speeches or when they are interviewed on television, for instance). Some level of formality is also normally used in classrooms in France, although colloquial French is now spoken by more and more professors with their students. Colloquial French differs from formal French in terms of grammar. For instance, the negation in formal French is "ne... pas", whereas in colloquial French it is simply "... pas", such as "I don't think so", which is "Je ne crois pas" in formal French, and "Je crois pas" in colloquial French. Another example of change in grammar is the way to ask a question: by inverting verb and subject in formal French, or also by using "est-ce que", whereas in colloquial French a question is phrased exactly as an affirmation, with the voice rising in the end. E.g.: "Is he sick?" would be "Est-il malade?" or "Est-ce qu'il est malade?" in formal French, and "Il est malade?" in colloquial French. On the other hand, questions with "est-ce que" are more colloquial than using inversion. Secondly, colloquial French differs from formal French in terms of pronunciation. Some words undergo shortening, or sound change, whereas some syllables are dropped altogether. For instance, "yes" is "oui" in formal French, and becomes "ouais" in colloquial French; "I" is "je" in formal French, but becomes "j' " in colloquial French; so a sentence like "I think he'll come" is "Je pense qu'il viendra" in formal French, and "J'pense qu'i'viendra" in colloquial French. There are many instances of shortening of words, such as "teacher", which is "professeur" in formal French, but becomes "prof'" in colloquial French.

Counting system

The French counting system is partially vigesimal: twenty () is used as a base number in the names of numbers from 70-99. So for example, means 4 times 20, i.e. is the French word for 80, and (literally "sixty-fifteen") means 75. This is comparable to archaic English use of "score", as in "fourscore and seven" (87), or "threescore and ten" (70). Belgian French and Swiss French are different in this respect.

Writing system

French is written using the Latin alphabet, plus five diacritics (the circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis, and cedilla) and two ligatures (æ, œ). French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. However, some conscious changes were also made to restore Latin ort

Portmanteau

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Word origins

Levels of register

Counting system