How to say “universal” in French?
Yesterday we were rehearsing the venerable Thomas Pellard's thesis defence, on Ōgami, a Miyako Ryukyuan language. By the way, this language has a super-cool phonology with entirely voiceless fricative syllables. Semantically full words, even entire noun phrases, can be voiceless. And synchronically it's not a devoicing, 'cause after "liquider" consonants like /m/ or /r/, you still got a [s] or [f], only devoicing the liquid/nasal itself.
Thomas' favourite sample for us uninitiated. The word cognate to Japanese つくる [tsɯ̥kɯrɯ] is pronounced thus: [kfː]
After the presentation, one of the venerable mock-jury objected Thomas' use of the word ``universel", on the grounds that ``universel" is an adjective, while the noun should be "-al", and that the plural seemed to be ``des universaux", so logically when there is one universal, it should be called a "universal". After soul-searching by all the Francophone members of the mock-jury, we reached the agreement that indeed, we say ``un universel" but ``des universaux". How nice, the French language gained a new plural formation pattern.
Hey, why don't we legitimize this pattern by writing ``des universeaux"? It looks nice and Frenchy!
- minus27331, Oct, 2009
- 49 comments