Talk:List of pseudo-French words in English

Foyer

"Foyer" might be another word to put up here — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.65.139.65 (talk • contribs) 01:20, September 14, 2011 (UTC)

Good, although Wiktionary includes "lobby" as a meaning in French and CNRTL-FR foyer definitions includes Foyer des acteurs/artistes ("Greenroom"), Foyer de la danse & Foyer du public. Perhaps the English usage was borrowed back into French! D Anthony Patriarche (talk) 05:18, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

OK

"OK" as a phrase in English is likely of Choctaw or African roots, if not an original coining. The four most common theories can be found detailed well in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay while http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_of_OK lists a lot of the false etymologies that have been proposed, of which French is a thoroughly dubunked minority. Both pages provide a good set of citations for each. The word Okay has been borrowed extensively from English and has made progress from there into many other languages (-perhaps- more than any other word, but I don't have a citation for that available offhand). The French have been no exception, borrowing "OK" from English, rather than the other way around. This section really doesn't belong here at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.221.4.176 (talk) 10:23, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Rationale for Article

As constituted, this list does seem a wee bit idiosyncratic (O.R.!) and inappropriate to 'Pedia. Perhaps it is the title that is wrong, these are not pseudo-French, they are legitimate French loanwords and phrases that have each gone their own way in English and French. The article might be titled something more scholarly, e.g. "List of French loanwords, adoptions, adaptations and lexical borrowings assimilated into English with changes in meaning and pronunciation, including malapropisms and faux amis". I am being facetious, of course, but my point is, perhaps the article/list can be justified by broadening it (and of course raising the standard re cites &c.) Some of the items and potential further examples could be of scholarly interest in showing the process of etymological assimilation and evolution. D Anthony Patriarche (talk) 05:18, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

@D Anthony Patriarche and D A Patriarche:, thanks for creating this section. Actually, I think the scope of the article has to be narrowed, or else the whole article should be deleted as poorly defined or not meeting notability guidelines. As you've already pointed out, a couple of the entries are false friends and not pseudo-French borrowings at all, such as brassiere, entrée, and portemanteau (which is a false friend, but is not a "hanger", as the article would have it), all of which I'll be deleting from this article and possibly shipping over to False friends (but since there are no citations, I probably won't), and things like rendezvous (which I already deleted; see below). That doesn't leave much; bon viveur is a genuine pseudo-French word in English, but having a whole article resting on a single example is a bit weak. Currently, I'm leaning delete but let's see if there are enough real examples out there. Mathglot (talk) 08:14, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

But see also #Disputed title, below. Mathglot (talk) 09:05, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Original research

Everybody feels like an authority on their own language, so language-related articles across Wikipedia often run into all sorts of trouble with editors adding unsourced and unverified content out of their own head, often getting it wrong. This article is no exception. I've just removed "rendezvous" from the article, which formerly said:

Rendez-vous — merely means "meeting" or "appointment" in French, but in English has taken on other overtones. Connotations such as secretiveness have crept into the English version, which is sometimes used as a verb. It has also come to mean a particular place where people of a certain type, such as tourists or people who originate from a certain locality, may meet. In recent years, both the verb and the noun have taken on the additional meaning of a location where two spacecraft are brought together for a limited period, usually for docking or retrieval.

This is mostly rubbish. What's funny about it, is they linked to the wiktionary article for the word right there in the paragraph, and still managed to get it wrong. The article already has the {{Original research}} maintenance template on it (since 2009) so I added the talk= param to it, pointing to this discussion. Mathglot (talk) 07:54, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Disputed title

The current title, List of pseudo-French words adapted to English, is at best misleading, and imho, just plain wrong. The article should be called, List of pseudo-French words in English.

The current title implies that a word was somehow "pseudo-French" first, and then was "adapted" into English, leading one to imagine that there was something that existed first outside of English, before it got "adapted" into it. No. This article is (or should be) about words that never existed outside English and that were created in English first, and appearing to come from French because of the way they look, when in reality, they do not come from French at all.

The only clear example of this in the article, is "bon viveur" since viveur does not exist in French; it exists only in English, and only in the expression "bon viveur"; and voilà! we have a pseudo-French word in English.

By comparison, the term for the operation in the other direction, is pseudo-Anglicism, because English has the nice term Anglicism (also, anglicize). English has a term for loanword formation for some languages (Germanism, Hispanism, Italicism, Japanism, Latinism, Russianism); sometimes the word is there but means something else (Frenchism, Sinicism, Vietnamization) and sometimes a language just doesn't have such a noun in English (no Thaicism or Farsicism). Mathglot (talk) 09:05, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Not sure the list will ever grow big enough to warrant a whole article; probably it would do better as a section named "Pseudo-French" in an article called Pseudo-foreign words in English, along with the contents of the stub article List of pseudo-German words adapted to English merged into it as well as a new "Pseudo-German" section, along with words resembling words from other foreign languages as well. Mathglot (talk) 11:07, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Other terms, possibly useful for redirects or in the lead: "semantic false Gallicism", and "pseudo-Gallicism". Mathglot (talk) 11:32, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

References