Foreign words

Every now and again someone will rail against the number of French words (or Italian or German) in the English language, and suggest they be banned and replaced by good old English words.

Well, they're onto a losing battle there, because 29% to 45% of English words are of French origin, with something like 7,000 to 10,000 words borrowed from French. French words are so well-established in fact, you're looking at a fait accompli.

I can't see why this should be objectionable. It's very healthy for a language to absorb all sorts of foreign words as well as new English words.

I'm much more concerned about words that are over-used, like fucking and awesome, or words that are insulting or demeaning. I'm more concerned about the use of baffling jargon and lawyer-speak.

France has a history of fighting to keep English words out of the French language, but it's like Canute trying to resist the waves. Fleur Pellerin, France's minister of culture, declared in 2015 that trying to ban foreign words was doing more harm than good.

Personally I'm happy to ask for a croissant or an hors d'oeuvre. Bon appetit!

The Canadian Maritimes

And now all can be revealed. Jenny and I have been on a 10 day guided tour of the Canadian Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island). After that we spent a few days in Montreal, as Jenny wanted me to see what she thinks is a wonderful city.

One defining feature of the Maritimes is seafood - muscles, oysters, scallops and lobster in particular. Vegetarians are still unusual and Bernadette, our tour manager, worked hard to provide adequate veggie meals wherever we went.

There's pretty spectacular scenery too, especially on the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton Island and on the Fundy Trail in New Brunswick. The trees were sporting their amazing autumn colours - yellow, brown, red, orange.

The Maritimes are still thickly forested, with little sign of the commercial interests like mining and fracking that are threatening much of Northern Ireland's natural beauty. And there are lots of unspoilt little fishing villages.

We learnt about some of the indigenous communities that fought for their survival against invading English and French forces - such as the Acadians, the Mikmaq, the Inuits and the Glooscap. They refused to be cowed into submission.

At the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, we discovered that Bell not only invented the first practical telephone, but invented many other things like metal detectors, the hydrofoil, the audiometer and the wheat husker.

We learnt that New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and many of the inhabitants speak both French and English. Jenny and I soon realised that our pathetic grasp of French hardly mattered as English is spoken everywhere.

The residents of the Maritimes are keen on lighthouses, with over 160 in Nova Scotia alone. They also like model lighthouses, which pop up in people's front gardens and other unlikely spots.

Like our guided tour of New Zealand in January, this tour gave us a great overview of the area and what makes it distinctive. We more than satisfied our nagging curiosity.
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We were hoping to meet up with Wise Web Woman. But like most people, I confused St John's Newfoundland (where www actually lives) with Saint John, New Brunswick. So we never met up. Maybe some other time....