My mother is a fluent speaker in English but sometimes she lapses into French. Multiplication and cursing come to mind. Interestingly, if she is switching back and forth, she will sometimes struggle to find the word in the language she means to use and will just slip the other language's word in.
On a recent visit, she got off the phone from talking with her brother in French and, while talking to me she said, "In France, Covid is on the rise again and they are thinking of re-instating a couvrefeu". As my mind was translating this phrase into "cover fire"and thinking maybe she meant "ceasefire", I realized the French 'courvefeu' sounded like "curfew" in English. Then the lightbulb went off and I realized all at once that that was what she meant and that was where we got the word from in English. I tried to relate this origin of 'Curfew' to lights out policies for cities during bombing raids in WWII, but Mom said that was too contemporary. The original French meaning was to literally cover your fire so you don't burn the house down when you go to bed. (the more cumbersome cessez-le-feu is ceasefire in French. Even worse, proving cover fire for your allies is feu de couverture)
"Be home before it's time for us to cover the fire for the night!" - sounds like a reasonable request.
Bonus pleasure: This two syllable evolution of a word from a phrase reminds me a lot of Mandarin phrases. (for the record, Curfew = 宵禁 which seems to be literally "to spend time closely" when I googled the words xiāo and jìn separately.
No comments:
Post a Comment