There has been a French presence in the upper Great Lakes region since about 1620, long before the English showed an interest in the place. If there was going to be any French culture in the area, it would be 17th Century French culture, not modern French culture. That's not how it works, though. All the while French culture was evolving in France, it was evolving here in a different direction.
It's like when my parents visited Czechoslovakia back in the 1970s. Czech was a second language for them, while it had been a first language for their parents. When they got to the Old Country, they discovered that the Czech they spoke was an archaic dialect, and they could communicate with the locals easier by speaking English. My grandparents came over before World War I and, by the 1970s, their language had become obsolete in their home country.
Speaking of the French, we had a French guy come to the paper mill to help us learn how to operate a piece of equipment that had recently been bought from a French company. The subject of Cajun music came up in casual conversation, and one of our guys asked, "That's French, isn't it?" I explained that the Cajun language would be considered a primitive form of French today, kind of like the English used in the King James Version of the Bible. The French guy responded with a sneer, "Oh no, much more primitive than that!" ......How's that for French culture?
No comments:
Post a Comment