Monday, November 7, 2011

French: Ici l'on parle anglais?

Well, as I understand it, anytime you vary the standard word order, you change the emphasis. So the resulting sentence doesn't mean precisely the same thing as the original, you see. You are emphasizing the fact that it is HERE that English is spoken. As far as I know, you are correct about sticking that little false pronoun in there "l" so as to separate the two vowels, the -i at the end of "ici" and the o- at the beginning of "on." That's like as putting -n on the end of "an" when we say "an apple" instead of "a apple" (although "a banana" is perfectly acceptable). But why you would want to emphasize speaking English HERE, as opposed to somewhere else, I'm a bit in the dark about. Normally it's the speaking ENGLISH you're emphasizing, since you're saying it in French, you see.

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