Tuesday, July 21, 2020

French Wikipedia has a sense of humor

Look up "chti" in French Wikipedia, and you'll end up at a Wikipedia entry that's actually—and hilariously—written in chti patois (or patoé, as they say in chti). A few of the listed chti expressions that I may have understood:

1. Inlève tin capiau!
2. Inlève t'capiau, i a un Chti qui passe!
3. V'la un Chti!


Translations (I think) into standard French:

1. Enlève ton chapeau! (Take off your hat!)
2. Enlève ton chapeau: il y a un Chti qui passe! (Take off your hat: that's a Chti passing us!)
3. Voilà un Chti! (Now, there's a Chti!)

The chti dialect and people are in the northern part of France, near Calais, but to my ear, the way the vowels and consonants of the dialect are turned and twisted sounds an awful lot like québecois to me. There are parts of Switzerland, too, where the dialect sounds vaguely chti-ish. Some French-speaking Swiss, for example, pronounce il faut que je voie (I have to see...) as y fauque je vwaé. When I was in Cherbourg in 1986—my first-ever trip to France—my French "brother" Dominique's uncle, a weatherbeaten farmer named Charles, became for me the archetype of all strange French dialects, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Oncle Charles was himself a Chti. Cherbourg isn't that far away from Calais (470-ish kilometers apart by car); both are close to England, just across the Channel. Vive les Chtis!*



*And in case you think I'm wrong to use Vive and not Vivent in front of the plural les Chtis, suck on this, which says it's permissible to use either the singular Vive or the plural Vivent in front of a plural noun phrase.



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