Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Scholar, Richard

Hardcover

PhilosophyFrenchLiterary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0691190321
ISBN13: 9780691190327
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Aug 18 2020
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases--such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice--lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.

Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, turned English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn's complaint that English lacks words that do so fully express the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush's purported claim that the French don't have a word for entrepreneur, this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as creolizing keywords that both connect English speakers to--and separate them from--French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete.

At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

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