Off topic: An observation with French slang Thread poster: George Trail
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George Trail 
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:36
Member (2009)
French to English
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Just yesterday I saw in my trusty bilingual dictionary the French word "nouba", being a slang word for "party" (the celebration fun-fest kind, of course). But it doesn't look like a French word, does it? Any more than "nana", meaning "bird" / "chick"; or "fada", meaning "crazy" / "nuts". I just don't get it... and I know what verlan is.
| | | | Tony M
France
Local time: 11:36
Member
French to English
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SITE LOCALIZER
I'd hardly say these were necessarily all 'slang' terms, just very colloquial.
According to my Petit Larousse, both 'nouba' and 'chouia' are of Arabic origin — just as in English, French has assimilated many words from the languages of (especially) her former colonies.
So for example, EN has many words of Indian origin (chutney, ketchup, etc.), as well as Arabic ones like 'bint' or Persian 'buckshee' (!), and FR has many from Arabic, African languages, and even uses s... See more I'd hardly say these were necessarily all 'slang' terms, just very colloquial.
According to my Petit Larousse, both 'nouba' and 'chouia' are of Arabic origin — just as in English, French has assimilated many words from the languages of (especially) her former colonies.
So for example, EN has many words of Indian origin (chutney, ketchup, etc.), as well as Arabic ones like 'bint' or Persian 'buckshee' (!), and FR has many from Arabic, African languages, and even uses some Russian! Not to mention countless others, of course!
If like me you're fascinated by the origins of words, I'd suggest investing in a decent monolingual FR dictionary that gives at least basic etymological info. Of course, there are also some excellent resources available on the Internet.
[Edited at 2010-05-15 19:52 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | | Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:36
French to English
+ ...
| On the fringe... | May 16, 2010 |
George Trail wrote:
Just yesterday I saw in my trusty bilingual dictionary the French word "nouba", being a slang word for "party" (the celebration fun-fest kind, of course). But it doesn't look like a French word, does it? Any more than "nana", meaning "bird" / "chick"; or "fada", meaning "crazy" / "nuts". I just don't get it... and I know what verlan is.
Yes, the interesting thing is that it seems that loanwords and other words formed through "marginal" processes can fill in what would otherwise be phonological gaps. For example, [da] as a final syllable in 'native' words of French is pretty rare (arguably you might count "soldat", though 500 years ago this probably felt like a loanword too), but it's perfectly possible in loanwords, diminutives and slangwords ("corrida", "dada", "soda"), and names ending in this syllable don't generally need to be changed ("Canada", "Miranda").
The word "fada" may originally have been a kind of play on words (a cross between the word "fadaise" and the equivalent form in other languages which had an [a] vowel in the final syllable). The word "nana" is sort of unusual and sort of not-- the origin was as the derivative of "Anne", and as such, it's not such an unusual way of forming the diminutive of a first name.
Note highly unusual combinations in slang forms like "chlaouame" (from "lâche-moi").
But note too that slang and other "fringe" forms do fundamentally seem to fit in with the general phonology of the language (so e.g. "keuf", "keum" can't have a schwa vowel even though they derive from "flic(e)", "mec(e)" with a final schwa; the close 'e' vowel in "(fais) chier" becomes an open 'e' in the verlanised form "(fais) yèche" as it's now in a closed syllable, just as regularly occurs in e.g. the second 'e' vowel of "préférons" vs "préfère"). And while diminutives can create some strange-sounding forms, in other respects they still fundamentally obey French phonology (preference for open syllables; preference not to have an h-aspiré other than the first syllable, hence "Henri" becomes "Riri", not "*Enen").
[Edited at 2010-05-16 04:34 GMT]
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