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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

is that like stop signs saying arret when in france they say "stop"?

Not quite, the stop/arrêt thing is because of a law that says our official language is French so everything HAS to be in French. If a product's packaging does not have a French side it simply cannot be sold in Quebec unless it has an exception of sorts.

There's a great bit about that in the movie Canadian Bacon where a police officer in Canada (not sure if it was actually in Quebec or not) catches some Americans writing anti-Canadian graffiti. The officer informs them that they need to have French translations and helps them add it, and then moves on.

You must see the Latin correction in life of Brian then

Sounds very Pythonesque, indeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU

Thanks. It's been quite a while since I've seen it. Guess I slightly mis-remembered it, but got the gist of it right.

In Montreal, there is a flashing neon sign on top of a former flour factory [1]. This sign originally read:

    FARINE
    FIVE ROSES
    FLOUR

The first line is French for “flour”, the second line is the brand name, and third line is, well, “flour” in English.

When Bill 101 passed, they had to remove “flour” from the sign as it was an English word. However, they were allowed to keep “Five Roses”, as opposed to “Cinq Roses”, since it’a a brand name, so now it simply reads:

   FARINE
   FIVE ROSES

The owners have apparently tried to take the sign down, since the brand has since been sold to their competitors, but capitulated to public outcry. Apparently, it’s quite expensive to maintain, but I can see why locals don’t want it to go. It adds a lot of character to the skyline.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farine-five-roses-sign

Is "stopper" not a valid french verb? I was taught it was.

I'm a bit interested in why all the European countries standardized on STOP for that sign. Apparently that's mandated by the convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... which has wide support in Europe and sporadically other places.

It's impressive/weird to me that the convention got all the countries to use the english word on the stop sign, for consistency.

While I don't know the answer, I would guess it has something to do with it not just being the English word. It's also the Dutch word (spelled exactly the same) and, based on some random clicking in Google Translate, Croation, Norwegian and Czech. It's a secondary translation in a bunch of other languages. I don't know how much of that changed after the road signs, but it looks like a good international basis.

it is not norwegian, as we would write STOPP in norwegian. In that sense, it's annoying, it's a word you understand, but the sign is also "misspelled".

Same in German. I remember teachers lecturing us in school about this. "Stop" certainly has become an acceptable spelling in colloquial German for some people because of this, much to the despair of language purists. Even the Duden (German standard reference dictionary) seems to have adopted it even if with some caveats:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/stop

> Even the Duden

Good. The purpose of a dictionary is to record how language is used, not to gatekeep or social engineer what is "proper" language and what isn't.

Linguistic prescriptivism is the purview of bigots and school teachers.

I hate the extremists at the descriptivist end of the spectrum. I have no desire to return to four hundred years ago where everyone spelled words as one pleased, and comprehension suffers for it.

I'm skeptical that anyone wants to de-standardize spelling. Maybe its like the abortion debate. There isn't a pro-abortion side except in the minds of the "pro-life" people. Descriptivists by definition study/report how language is used rather than agitate for any changes so if such people do exist they would be a different kind of prescriptivist.

I think it's a common category error. The job of an academic linguist is mostly (as I understand it) to study language as-found, but I've met a few people who take that to mean "linguists -- the experts on language -- say we shouldn't try to 'correct' differences."

It comes in a few flavours. Sometimes an assumption that linguists as people are never prescriptive. Sometimes as an argument for the respectability of established dialect (not to say this conclusion is wrong, only the argument.)

There is plenty of (mostly non-professional IME) "normative descriptivism" floating around.

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