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From: aawest@CritPath.Org (Anthony West)
Subject: Re: French Street Names Officially Declared Illegal
Message-ID: <DnnM18.22D@CritPath.Org>
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 18:58:19 GMT
Distribution: na
References: <4h5b5r$9tt@omnifest.uwm.edu> <DnMDCw.FtG@world.std.com>
Organization: Critical Path Project
Lines: 27

In article <DnMDCw.FtG@world.std.com> jcf@world.std.com (Joseph C Fineman) writes:
>mark@omnifest.uwm.edu (Mark Hopkins) writes:
>
>>   Due to the on-going restriction on the use of foreign-derived words
>>in official usage in France, all municipalities making use of street
>>names with the subtitle "Chemin" have been requested by the government
>>to cease and desist their wanton disregard for the ban.  (Chemin is
>>Celtic in origin meaning cobblestone path or walkway).
>
>Those Celts sure got around.  Spanish "camino" is an obvious cognate,
>suggesting that the word must have meant "road" in late Latin & so in
>French from the beginning.  In classical Latin, tho, it turns out to
>mean "forge" -- possibly not the same word.
>
There are about 200 words of Celtic origin in French, many of them
very common and fundamental, like "chemin." Many of them pop up in
other Romance languages (Gaulish influenced Latin heavily in the period
300 B.C. - 1 A.D., prior to the dispersion of Latin throughout the
empire), thus *cammi:nos > chemin, camino. It's inconceivable that
anyone this side of lunacy would campaign to remove a word like
"chemin" from the French lexicon.

Could somebody please post a note explaining to me that this is just
a joke, because I'm already laughing.

-Tony West

