{"id":1049,"date":"2011-02-25T09:16:32","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T09:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2011-02-24T21:20:14","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T21:20:14","slug":"french-language-a-hoax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/25\/french-language-a-hoax\/","title":{"rendered":"French language &#8220;a hoax&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Nicolas-Sarkozy.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Nicolas-Sarkozy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Nicolas Sarkozy\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-1050\" \/><\/a>An amusing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsbiscuit.com\/2011\/02\/16\/sarkozy-admits-french-language-a-hoax-after-wikileaks-expose\/ \">article<\/a> from NewsBiscuit (\u201cthe news before it happens\u201d) has French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitting that the French language is \u201ca one thousand year old hoax\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently French is complete gibberish and all French people really speak English, except in front of British people of course.  From the article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>During a speech given in received pronunciation, the French President came clean, stating that it all started off as a joke during William the Conquerer\u2019s invasion to make the aggressors seem a bit more exotic. \u201cWhat was initially a prank snowballed and after a few years we realised we\u2019d look silly revealing the truth, so we had to keep up the fa\u00e7ade,\u201d said the Premier. \u201cIn the company of any Brits we would try to make convincingly \u201cFrench\u201d sounds, a mixture of guttural grunts and rapid-fire syllables. <\/p>\n<p>But as soon as we were on our own we\u2019d all heave a huge sigh of relief and revert to English. We developed a heavy reliance on hand gestures to cover up when we ran out of likely noises, and the shrug was a particular boon if inspiration dried up. In the end we became quite the raconteurs, with an impressive array of supposed vocabulary. So what began as a game for the \u00e9lites, became a hobby across all levels of society, and it shocked us that the Brits were so na\u00efve as to not see through the charade.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It\u2019s certainly nice to poke some fun at languages for a change!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An amusing article from NewsBiscuit (\u201cthe news before it happens\u201d) has French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitting that the French language is \u201ca one thousand year old hoax\u201d. Apparently French is complete gibberish and all French people really speak English, except in front of British people of course. From the article: During a speech given in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4,310,25],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french","tag-french","tag-french-language","tag-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}