One last day of vacation, one last lesson with Sofia to close out the series. The focus of our final session was code-names – not the award-winning word game by Vlaada Chvàtil, but the actual French legal code and the actual geographic names of places. We also did some grammar and some writing.
The grammar section touched on the timeline of indicatif verb tenses and how they can indicate the relationship between the action being described and the present moment (or more precisely, the moment where the narration is situating itself). So the plus que parfait comes before the passé composé. The passé récent, présent, and futur proche are all considered as “present-ish” moments. And the futur comes further along in time, with the futur antérieur sneaking in between the present and the future when one needs to talk about sequenced future events.
There’s one more commonly used indicative tense I haven’t listed, which is the imparfait. I’ve heard the distinction between the imparfait and the passé composé described in many ways: the passé composé is for one-time actions, while the imparfait is for habitual past actions; the imparfait is for descriptions while the passé composé is for events; the imparfait is for continuous action in the past; the imparfait is for background scenery while the passé composé is for the focus of a narration, the plot. But Sofia gave me a new one that I find helpful: the passé composé is a bounded tense (un temps borné), while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (non borné). If you don’t know (or don’t wish to indicate) when an action finished, use the imparfait. Note that the present is implicitly an unbounded tense, while both plus que parfait and futur antérieur are bounded tenses, as they are only used when you need to indicate an event that has finished before some other event you wish to mention (either past or future relative to now). I don’t know why borné is a more helpful concept to me than “continuous”, but it does give me a new lens for the imparfait / passé composé distinction.
Coding on a Sunday
After the grammar, we watched another montage of “man on the street” interviews (a «micro-trottoir») asking how people felt about working on Sunday. Traditionally most everything is closed on Sunday in France. Originally this was to reserve it for religious observances, but with la laïcité this historical basis has been de-emphasized. The opinions featured in the clip varied, and I expected to be asked to write several paragraphs about my views. But this day’s lesson had a twist on the timed writing exercise: instead of having 25 minutes to write at length in response to a prompt, I had 25 minutes to read a complicated document and then summarize it in under 80 words.
I have a fair amount of experience reading French fiction, and I’ve also read and listened to a decent amount of French news articles, but I haven’t done much with reading more official French documents. Digesting the opening 20 paragraphs of this government-issued review of the laws and regulations surrounding Sunday hours for salaried workers was a comparatively experience. I’ve done something similar when I opened a bank account in France eight years ago and again when I investigated traveling there this summer amid Covid, but that’s about it.
Here’s an example of the text, beginning with an excerpt from the actual Code itself:
Un salarié ne peut travailler plus de 6 jours par semaine : au moins un jour de repos (24 heures auxquelles s’ajoute un repos quotidien minimum de 11 heures) doit lui être accordé chaque semaine et, en principe, le dimanche (repos dominical). Toutefois, le principe du repos dominical connaît plusieurs types de dérogations qui peuvent, selon le cas, être permanentes ou temporaires, soumises ou non à autorisation, applicables à l’ensemble du territoire ou à certaines zones précisément délimitées, etc.
Le fait de méconnaître les dispositions du Code du travail relatives au repos hebdomadaire et au repos dominical est puni de l’amende prévue pour les contraventions de la 5e classe. Les contraventions donnent lieu à autant d’amendes qu’il y a de salariés illégalement employés. Les peines sont aggravées en cas de récidive dans le délai d’un an.
The text is not fundamentally difficult but it is definitely a different register of language than news reporting. Most of the work is in untangling the nuances that are built into the law, though there is also some specialized vocabulary whose meaning I had to deduce on the fly from context. I imagine the comparable English section of Massachusetts state law would have the same feel.
Summarizing 20 paragraphs in 80 words does not leave a lot of room for fancy constructions or even many modifiers. I ended up writing 110 or so naturally and then trimmed it back to reach the limit. We did a quick joint editing afterwards. Here are the two drafts.
Version originale
En général, la loi de travail dit que le dimanche soit un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissement qui s’occupent des besoins de public ou qui bénéficent de travail en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Autres entreprises définies peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés à volontés. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 en n’importe quelle mesure.
Version corrigée
En général, le code du travail dit que le dimanche doit être un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissements qui s’occupent des besoins du public ou qui produisent en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Les autres entreprises évoquées peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés volontaires. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 de quelque façon que ce soit.
Name That Rue
Speaking of Sunday, you might know that it is named for a prominent celestial body, as is Monday. Other days are named for the Norse gods Tyr, Wotan, Thor, or Freya. But who decided these things? Do these names represent the diversity of who we are as a society today? And what if the actions of these Norse gods are no longer acceptable to our modern mores – shouldn’t we stop honoring that one weekly?
These questions seem a bit academic in thinking about days (nobody is about to mount a serious campaign to rebrand Saturday as Parvatiday), but they are very much in play in France when it comes to street names. French streets are old, and many are named after people who did very bad things – ruthlessly slaughtered people in Africa, traded in slaves, mistreated poor workers, abused women etc. And behavior aside, the vast majority of honorees are old European white men. So there is a French movement to rename some of the streets that currently glorify some pretty bad people and a parallel movement to name newly constructed streets for people who belong to underrepresented groups. For example, among French streets named for people only 10% or so are named for women. I imagine it’s not much different in the US.
We looked at two articles discussing this: a news item on the Macron government’s release of a list of suggested names that towns and cities may wish to choose from in naming streets; and, a magazine article about the myths behind Greek place names. We also watched a television report from Belgium about renaming problematic street names. After each one we discussed various prepared question in order to check reading or oral comprehension. The hardest piece for me was the Greek mythology one, primarily because it had dozens of unfamiliar names in it, mythological or actual. I do better understanding mechanisms than I do remembering catalogs of examples, so I had to keep referring back to the text to find the answers to the questions.
I’d say it was all Greek to me, but that’s not expression. When something is incomprehensible they describe it with «c’est de l’hébreu» or else «C’est du chinois». Maybe the French already decided that honoring the Greeks in this way was problematic …