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Comment by desdiv | Hacker News Reader

>You're from Quebec and don't feel at ease using only French words? Don't worry! French Rust is fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience.

Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say "stop" due to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals linked below.

In Québec, on the other hand, most of the stop signs say "Arrêt" due to nationalism reasons. Bilingual Arrêt/Stop signs exist, but are rare.

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In Quebec we also love to take English verbs and add them to the language. If you are in front of a shop, the proper way of saying things would be: "Je vais me stationner" (I am going to park)

Here you would say something like: "J'va m' parker dan'l stationnement" (I am going to park in the parking).

The rules are somewhat simple: 1) Take the verb in English and give it a French spin (add "er" to the end)

2) Add an unnecessary second part to your sentence in French to clarify the English verb

3) Reduce the total runtime by mashing together as many syllables as you can

God I love our dialect!

Hah! Glad to hear that you folks do that out east too! I did French Immersion in SK and we usually did that when we didn't know the French verb. Our teacher would scold us for our "Franglais".

Franglais is very common here in Montreal.

In France's French, "I am going to park" is "Je vais me garer", by the way.

You sure that would not be "Je vais me garer au parking" ?

not necessarily. That would mean "I'm going to park in the parking lot". But you could also say "Je vais me garer dans la rue" - I'm going to park on the street. Anyway, in french "je vais me garer" can be translated literally in English

That means "I'm going to park in the car park.", not just "I'm going to park".

That's great. I used to do something similar in Japan when talking to Brazilian nationals. When my poor Spanish wasn't good enough to fill in with Portuguese, I'd fill in with Japanese verbs. First it was "vamos taberu" instead of "vamos comer", but then pretty soon it felt more appropriate to shorten the Japanese and say "vamos taber".

Weirdly (to me anyway), you could pretty much keep any "ne" you wanted to place after things and it worked fine, because it was a feature of both languages.

When you got _just_ the right conversation partner the little word swaps led to a lot of laughter. (We did this in English to some degree too, e.g. naru-freaking-hodo)

"Fetchez la vache!"

Indeed. In my old job, the number of times I'd hear "criss, j'ai fucké cette affaire la" or similar was beyond measure.

One interesting thing I noticed in the last few years is that the younger generation seems to have a modified version of your rule (1): they don't necessarily add the "er" part anymore (i.e. making the verb infinitive), which sounds (to me) grammatically strange and a bit confusing.

> Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say "stop", since it's a perfectly valid word in French.

Here's another interesting fact which I suspect is more of a fact than "your" fact: Almost all countries in Europe has stop signs with the word "Stop" because it was agreed upon in 1968.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Si...

Thank you. I did not know that before.

I've corrected my OP.

That is an admirably charitable response to a comment that I could not truthfully characterize the same way. Good job by you.

I mean, you weren't wrong. Stop/stopper is valid French...

Well 'stopper' is now a valid French word. No idea if it became a thing because of this or always was a thing. https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/stopper/74789

How you wrote this response is a bit dickish tbh.

Unrelated to Rouille, but I really like how the word factoid seems to be slowly inverting it's definition. Where it actually means an "Often thought fact that is actually incorrect", e.g. eating 8 spiders in your sleep per year. I am unsure if your fact is actually a factoid, but your comment reads as if you mean to use the word factoid in a reduced size of the word fact, it seems to mean something like; a small fact. In any case I see the word often "misused" in the latter sense. The appearant misuse of the factoid might make the newly acquired definition a ironic one, like an oxymoron.

I feel the latter definition of the word factoid feels more sensical: suffixing the word fact with -oid makes the text in which it is applied softer, where the word fact is rather harsh, the word factoid feels more friendly, like boba/ kiki, I speculate. In addition I think using more letters to address the subject you're about to share might make the reader hold its attention for longer and thus feels "right" to use in short sentences. I also feel as if I prefer to read the sentence in which it occurs with a slight upward inflection, which I find more positive.

Personally I hope the latter definition will stick and humanity is one more ironic definition richer.

I always thought “factoid” was meant to highlight the uncertainty of things you read or hear that are presented as facts.

Like a humanoid is human-shaped, a factoid is fact-shaped but not necessarily or even probably actual fact.

Thank you I really like that interpretation. I couldn't quite find it but this is splendid.

Interesting. I never thought of “factoid” that way, and if that is an alternative meaning, then the “new” version has been around a long time. My introduction to it was from reading the “Factoids” section in “3-2-1 Contact” magazine as a kid in the 80s.[0] It was my favorite part of the magazine. Let me feel smart without making much effort.

[0] https://archive.org/details/321contactjul88/page/n7/mode/2up

The colloquial translation for “a stop sign” in Quebec is “un arrêt stop”

A stop stop? Doesn't even mention it's a sign?

Well in France, most people just say "un stop", you don't need to precise it is a sign, because it was originally a borrowed word

préciser = to precise

I like that. :-) Or maybe 'precisify'.

On the other hand "precisar" in Portuguese is "to need", Spanish like French is "to specify" ... keeping a slew of these cognates straight between English/Spanish/Portuguese is a harder part of dealing with all three.

"préciser" in English is "specify" in case that helps. (This has been a lovely thread!)

Oups

I usually hear people say "un stop" or "un arrêt", not both.

In Quebec, there is more than just French, English & bilingual stops. As an example, there are Mohawk language stops in Kahnawake.

> Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say "stop" due to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals linked below.

While that is true, the word “stop” had been part of the French language for centuries prior to 1968. It means “halt”.

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