Lytton Strachey Quotes
With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.
Strachey, Lytton. Landmarks in French Literature. Henry Holt and Company, 1912, p. 7.
Dr. Berlinski speaks French fluently and lives in Paris half the year.
The king in his latter of patent establishing the French Academy quotes Richelieu.
The Canadian Province of Quebec had passed draconian language laws making French the only official language of Quebec, despite the fact that a large proportion of the Quebec Population did not speak French. The language laws not only elevated French to the official language, but made it illegal to conduct any business or public activities in English or any other language. Most of the non French speaking Quebec residents, in Montreal moved to Toronto, and then the major corporations followed them as they could not get enough executives to live in Montreal, one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world, that was now forced to be monolithically French. The Quebec language police prohibited Orthodox Jewish butchers to have their Hebrew symbols for Kosher food, and other silly things like that. The human rights logic—rather the lack thereof—caused great difficulty. The French, as a minority in Canada, demanded and got the right to have French as an official language in all of Canada. However, the Mohawk Indians, a minority of the population of Quebec, were not allowed to use their own Mohawk language on their store signs and had to have their children educated in French rather than English, despite the fact that English speaking was a major advantage in gaining employment and earning high salaries. The Commission report and this quotation illustrates the huge cultural and intellectual disconnect between the extreme French Culturists and most Americans and Canadians. The Commission observes that there are a number of American states which have English as an “official” language, but there are NONE of them which prohibit a citizen of using any language he wants on the signs in his business or his advertising, or in schools. The Human rights criticism is not that they made French the official language, but that they made illegal any one using any other language in normal activity. The minority French speakers who were the majority in the province of Quebec, then disenfrahchised and discriminated against the English speaking minority as well as other smaller minorities. However, if the majority English speakers of Canada, would do the same, they would be the first to claim discrimination against the minority.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic.
