On Tuesday morning I memorized the eighth verse of "J'ai pas d'regret" (I've No Regrets) by Boris Vian. There are two verses left to learn.
I finished transcribing the set of chords that I found for "Babe alone in Babylone" by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for more but other sites just repeated the same one. I worked out the chords for the intro.
I was nervous this morning because I was worried about not finishing my essay by midnight. I would still have three grace days left if I don't but I really want to get on with my holiday and be free of academic assignments for a few weeks.
I weighed 84.2 kilos before breakfast.
I worked on my essay for two hours and have the first two and a half pages of six and a half pages organized. Most of it will consist of the body of my draft essay from earlier in the term, so I really don't need much more than a fine-tuned conclusion and an outline. I think that I might even have it done before dinner.
I weighed 83.7 kilos before lunch.
I tried to take a siesta but I couldn't sleep and so I only stayed in bed for half an hour.
I took an early bike ride at 14:45. I saw a dead rat on the Bloor bike lane just after Avenue Rd. I think it was on its way to shop at Tiffany's when it died. As usual when I take an early bike ride, I had to pee for most of my trip and so it was not very enjoyable.
I weighed 83.7 kilos at 16:00.
I was caught up on my journal at 16:39.
I worked on my essay for the next two and a half hours and then started proof reading it. I uploaded it at 19:45. If I'd had more time and fewer assignments I could have done better, but this one is okay considering the restraints:
Code Weaving:
How the Chiac dialect assimilates and transforms English words in shape and meaning
I hate you but it is not in English / I love you but it is not in French - Leonard Cohen
Chiac is a contact language spoken among Francophones who live in Moncton and the suburbs of Shediac, Dieppe and Memramcook, in southeastern New Brunswick, Canada. The dialect of Chiac allows into its vocabulary many elements of the dominant English language, but then takes control of those words by transforming them structurally and contextually into distinctive locutions. These reconstructions of English words have evolved and continue to do so from the organic process of spontaneously repeated speech in every day conversations between Acadians.
I will first show how the choices between French or English that a Chiac speaker makes often correspond respectively to the internal and the external. For example, the way that English is often used for swearing. Next, I will demonstrate with several examples that from which language to take a word often depends on which one provides the most comfort of pronunciation. As the ease of speaking a language goes hand in hand with the lack of fear of its expression, the subsequent stage of my paper will show how Chiac has progressed over time in literature, using examples of three generations of writers. I will conclude by analyzing the unconscious play of power that is revealed in Chiac's alterations of English words. In converting English verbs that invade the Acadian consciousness from outside, the Chiac speaker is symbolically dominating the dominant language, surgically altering English to remove some of its vestigial organs of repression.
Almost any French or English word can be knitted into Chiac, making it a very unique kind of super language. Acadian French word choices in Chiac tend to draw from history, tradition, and family, while many English adaptations come from mainstream pop culture and swearing. For example, "mere" is naturally chosen over "mother" mostly because of familial sentiment and because on a deeper emotional level Chiac speakers remain Acadian French. But "mother" might be used as the prefix in the popular vulgarism, "motherfucker". As French-English hybridity is part of the surface consciousness of Chiac speakers, English swear words can be used with less guilt than some of the French religious words like "sacrament" (Merkle 81). And so for a Chiac speaker to swear in English can be a liberating experience as the Acadian poet Raymond Guy LeBlanc expresses in his poem "Je Suis Acadian" (I Am Acadian):
"Je jure en anglais tous mes goddams de bâtard
et souvent les fuck it me remontent à la gorge
Avec des Jesus-Christ projetés contre le windshield" (Laparra 8).
This translates as,
"I swear in English all my bastardly 'goddamns'
and often cough my 'fuck its' from the back of my throat
Throwing 'Jesus Christs' against the inside of the windshield" (my translation).
The choice of which word to harvest from French or English while a Chiac speaker is communicating is often based on the one that is the easiest to say. An example of this can be found from Acadian novelist France Daigle, who points out that saying some French words like "parquigne" would feel like a pretentious performance for Chiac speakers, and so they more comfortably and simply use the English word "parking" (Cormier 12).
Chiac tends to avoid long expressions and so English words are frequently chosen over their Acadian French equivalents. English verbs like "back" and "cross" are conjugated like French verbs, as in, "J'ai backé mon car dans la driveway” or “j’ai crossé la street”. It is interesting that English nouns like "driveway" and "street" are made feminine by preceding them with the article "la". In standard French, anglicisms tend to receive the masculine gender and are articled with the more subtle sounding "le". But as "la" sounds more like "the" it becomes the easier choice. In another example, “J’ai wiré ma satellite dish avec mes own mains, "ma" is used with "satellite dish" because it is easier, while a speaker of standard French would say "mon satellite dish." This is further evidence that Chiac makes its lexical choices based on comfort.
Sometimes the easier choice of verb will come from French but with English prepositions. The Chiac speaking superhero Acadieman says, "Chu pas fou about faire de l'exercice (LeBlanc)." This means, "I'm not crazy about doing exercise" (my translation). The use of the French adjective "fou" with the English preposition "about" imitates the English expression "crazy about" but also relaxes it because it is easier to say "fou about" than "crazy about". Chiac is not only about relaxation but also enjoyment because it is “right le fun.” The English adverb "right" is used uniquely as an intensifier in Chiac to mean something like a combination of "truly very".
Marie-Jo Thério’s song “À Moncton” illustrates how Chiac uses the English word "go" as a noun but not a verb. Thério’s speaker is calling Gisèle just to talk because "... rien qui va on (Thériault 3)" meaning "there's nothing going on". She uses the French indicative present word "va" instead of "going" with the English preposition "on" to match the English phrase "going on" because "va on" is more relaxed than "going on." But later when the speaker is talking about making a change in her life she says, "Pis watch-moi ben quand j'aurai pris la go (Thériault 34)", meaning "then just watch me when I've made the go" (my translation). While a Chiac speaker would choose "va" as a verb, over "go", they would use "go" as a noun the way an English speaker might say "make a go of it". But while in English our use of "go" as a noun is usually similar to the word "try", the Chiac word "go" has more weight and implies an emphatic leap towards a goal.
Thério’s Chiac lyrics and the writing of other Acadian artists of her generation, such as Dano LeBlanc, reflect a braver approach to using Chiac in literature than previous generations. Baby Boomer France Daigle, for example, although she is said to have introduced the literary world to Chiac, seems to restrain herself from conjugating English verbs with French syntax as it is actually done in speech. This example from her 2011 novel Pour sûr illustrates her cautious approach to writing in Chiac: “Si que je switch la light back on pis que la maison explode, expect pas d’aouère ever again d’autres outils pour Father’s Day” (Cormier 12). This translates as, "If I switch the light back on and the house explodes, don't ever again expect any more tools for Father’s Day" (my translation). In this sentence, Daigle uses the three English verbs, "switch", "expect", and "explode". As her character is using the conditional tense in the first and second person singular, as a Chiac speaker they would probably conjugate an English verb with an "-ais" stem to say for example, "switchais". Regarding her use of the verb "explode" to convey "explodes", I suspect that a Chiac speaker would choose instead to simply use the French word "explose" because the voiced "z" sound of the "s" is more pleasant to pronounce.
It seems that Daigle has deliberately fallen short of having her Chiac speaking characters use French conjugations of English verbs, out of fear of alienating her Francophone readers. She admits in an interview that she is conflicted about the use of Chiac: "I’m faced with a dilemma I haven’t necessarily resolved. I was raised … to think that … Chiac … was laziness or failure" (Cabajsky 19). It is clear that she struggles between disapproval and grudging acceptance of Chiac.
The Silent Generation non-Chiac poems of Raymond Guy LeBlanc, through the timid expressions of Chiac in the novels of Baby Boomer France Daigle, to the unabashed use of Chiac by Gen-Xer Marie-Jo Thério, shows a progressive generational opening up of the dialect. This same progression can be seen as well outside of the world of art. In 1991, Chiac speaking students being interviewed for a documentary film, listed their spoken languages as French and English. But ten years later, when another group of the same age was asked what language they spoke, they answered “Chiac” (LeClerc 7).
To be unafraid of speaking Chiac is a newfound defiant freedom that emerged with the beginning of the 21st Century. It is very appropriate then that Marie-Jo Thério's contemporary Dano LeBlanc would consider the courage to speak Chiac as being a super power, and create a matching hero to wield that force. Three of LeBlanc's comic strips from his Acadieman website (with the Chiac text translated by me), will give examples of English borrowings that have been transformed by this Acadian vernacular. Each humorous interaction also offers a metaphor of how Chiac stands in relation to the dominant French and English languages that surround it.
In the Acadieman cartoon strip "La piscine" (The Swimming Pool) by Daniel LeBlanc, Acadieman is told at a public pool that he has to stop urinating in the pool. His surprised response is that everyone pisses in the pool. But he is told, "Yes, but not off the diving board (LeBlanc)." "Pissing in the pool" is a metaphor for using English in French, which every Francophone does to some degree, but mostly with English nouns such as "weekend". However, unlike most forms of Franglais, the Acadian vernacular of Chiac goes deeper than the usual code-switching. It also threads English verbs into the structure of French grammar and conjugates them as if they were French verbs. This can be understood as urinating off the diving board because it splashes and mixes English into the pool of French from an elevation. It raises both French and English to a new language that is neither. When an English word like "walk" is used as "walker", "walké", or "walkont" it is no longer merely a visitor in French but has taken up residence in the language and been made into an element of a creole.
In the first panel of an Acadieman cartoon entitled "La peur" (The Fear), Acadieman's friend Coquille talks in French about the common occurrence of the fear of heights. Then in the second panel we see Acadieman squatting in front of Coquille's open refrigerator with the crack of his wide buttocks shown to the viewer above his pants, and saying to Coquille, "As-tu d'la "grub"? Chu starvé. (LeBlanc) ", meaning "You got any grub? I'm starving." The English verb "to starve" is conjugated here as if it were a French verb. In the punchline, Coquille tells the viewer in French that what he is afraid of is widths. This has a double meaning, the most obvious being that the widths feared by Coquille are those of the wide buttocks of moochers like Acadieman, which are getting wider from eating his food. But the deeper sense is that Acadieman is feeding from a fridge full of Anglicisms. His incorporation of such words into the verb structure of French is feared to be widening the English influence on the dialect of Chiac.
In the first panel of a strip entitled "La skirt", Acadieman calls to a strange woman on the street, "Hey mademoiselle, j'aime ta skirt. J'aime la way qu'a hang (LeBlanc)." This translates as, "Hey miss, I like your skirt. I like the way it hangs." The English verb "hang" is changed here into something that is uniquely Chiac. In English one would not say, "I like the way it hang" because in the third person singular present tense there is always an "s" on the end of a verb. "Hang" in this case is treated like a French verb, most of which would not end with an "s" in the third person present tense, and even if it did, the "s" would not be pronounced. Also, the meaning of the English verb "hang" is changed here into a synonym for "fit", which has become common in Chiac but is rare in English.
In panel two, in response to the words he spoke in panel one, Acadieman is hit hard in the face by a swung purse. In panel three he is on his back and in pain as he says, "J'ai notice que rien que j'ai jamais dit m'a ever fait mal", which translates as, "I notice that nothing I ever say ever hurts me." Again, there is one meaning of this cartoon on the basic level and another as a metaphor about Chiac. Acadieman has committed what is considered to be a faux pas in approaching a strange woman on the street and singling out her appearance as the subject of initial communication, and he is punished for that. But in the Chiac related metaphor, Acadieman is being punished by a Francophone purist for speaking a language that is promiscuous with English. He tells us that what he says does not hurt him because Chiac is harmless among its speakers. But it is also a careless and natural speech that does not worry about propriety or grammatical correctness.
Acadieman is an irreverent representative of a vernacular that has a punk sensibility or rebelliousness that comes from being a language of the young. A creole formed from casual speech between consumers of media who live on the threshold between the French and English worlds cannot help but be somewhat irreverent. Acadieman is a superhero because he fearlessly or carelessly speaks Chiac. His vernacular is relaxed and one might even say that it is as lazy as Acadieman, because it is developed while spoken and while letting go of grammatical propriety.
Chiac's conjugation of English verbs with the kinbaku of French inflections, takes this interaction of languages beyond code-switching. It can be seen as a type of code weaving. In altering and fashioning words into a vocabulary that does not exist in English or French, Chiac effectively takes the language that is on top, and puts it on the bottom in the neighbourhood setting. "Chiac inscribes the linguistic conflict inside the dominated language, inversing in its very form the relationship between the two languages” (LeClerc 3).
The kind of code weaving that gives Chiac its power requires that the speaker be fluent in both French and English. It is also necessary that English be the outside language and Acadian French be the internal. That is how English words can be rendered more emotional by the conjugation factory of the Acadian mind, and be made to laugh and cry in new ways.
Works Cited
Cabajsky, Andrea. “The Vivid Feeling of Creating: An Interview with France Daigle." Journals: Centre for Digital Scholarship, UNB Libraries,
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/23054/26757
Cormier, Matthew. "Complicating World Literature in the “Minor” Context: Translation and the
Acadian Literary Ecosphere." Journals: Centre for Digital Scholarship, UNB Libraries,
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/31528/1882526751
Laparra, Manon. "Parole Manifeste: le Cas de la Littérature Acadienne Moderne."
Revue de littérature
comparée, Klincksieck, 2006, https://www.cairn.info/revue-de- litterature- comparee-2006-1-
page-71.html
LeBlanc, Daniel Omer (Dano). “Acadieman.” Acadieman.com, Productions Mudworld, 2011, pdf, p8,
https://acadieman.com/les-bd.
LeClerc, Catherine. "Between French and English, Between Ethnography and Assimilation: Strategies
for Translating Moncton’s Acadian Vernacular." Érudit, 2004,
file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/Leclerc-2005-TTR___traduction,_terminologie,_r- daction.pdf
Merkle, Denise. Francophone Dynamics in a Translated Canada: From the Margins to the Centre and
Back, chrome-
extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ntm.org.in/download/ttvol/Volume 7/Arti
cles/03%20-
%20Francophone%20Dynamics%20in%20a%20Translated%20Canada%20From%20the
%20M argins%20to%20the%20Centre%20and%20Back%20-%20Denise%20Merkle.pdf
Thériault, Marie Josée. "À Moncton." Edited by Champs de Bacon les Editions du and Gestion son
Image Ed, La Boîte aux paroles, https://laboiteauxparoles.com/titre/8624/a- moncton, lines 3, 34.
It's nice to finally be free. Tomorrow I'll make my trip to St Lawrence Market to get some candy for my daughter. I'll see if I can get a haircut on Thursday and afterward maybe buy a new backpack. Mine's getting worn out. I'm hoping that maybe on Friday I can get an appointment with Parkdale Community Legal Services to discuss my landlord and the bedbug situation. I suspect however that I won't be able to get an appointment until after Christmas.
I grilled nine chicken drumsticks and had two with a potato and gravy and a beer while watching season 3, episode 9 of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Granny has secretly sent the plane fare to the widow Poke to come out to LA and see her son Johnny. But Granny's extra secret agenda is to matchmake between Jed and the widow. But Jed figures out her plan. He also has a great line: "A widow knows all about men, but the only man who knows about her is dead."
Mr. Drysdale, Jane and Elly May go to pick up the widow at the airport. The widow Poke is obsessed with her son Johnny. He makes $1 million a year but he only sends her $5 a month, which she uses to pay off the life size picture she has of him. Whenever he puts out a record she sells a pig so she can buy it.
Later Jed has a talk with Emma and it's actually the same talk she wanted to have with him. She doesn't want to marry him. But Granny's been trying to matchmake Emma for twenty years and Jed for fifteen. So Jed and Emma agree on a plan to put a stop to it. They begin to behave like surfers and it upsets Granny terribly. Making her regret matching them up.
I searched for bedbugs and found none for the second night in a row.
I started going through my journal from June 7, 2020, on to pull out references to bedbugs and create a timeline for legal purposes to demonstrate my landlord's neglect.
No comments:
Post a Comment