{"id":2805,"date":"2011-10-13T16:49:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T20:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/?p=2805"},"modified":"2012-03-05T13:25:08","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T18:25:08","slug":"the-jerriais-language-norman-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/the-jerriais-language-norman-french\/","title":{"rendered":"The J\u00e8rriais Language: \u201cNorman French\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Sign_English_J%C3%A8rriais_at_La_Hougue_Bie.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-2781\" title=\"J\u00e8rriais\" src=\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/111013-J\u00e8rriais-221x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"221\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>Excerpt taken from the book <a href=\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/en\/the-story-of-french\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Story of French<\/em><\/a> (Ch. 1)<\/h3>\n<p>At the beginning of our research, Jean-Beno\u00eet travelled to the island of Jersey, a mere sixteen kilometres off the coast of Normandy in the English Channel. The island is a kind of pastoral dreamscape, with small trails criss-crossing a beautifully unassuming countryside of green vales, medieval castles and Celtic stone monuments. At low tide its surface area extends to a grand total of fourteen by ten kilometres. A dependency of the British Crown, Jersey is a tax haven that harbours five times more foreign capital than Monaco. Like Monaco, it won this role thanks to a combination of handy location, beautiful scenery and unusual historical circumstances. Amazingly, over the centuries this tiny island has managed to retain its autonomy: it\u2019s not even considered a part of the European Union. It has managed to hold on to an ancient Anglo-Norman law system that dates back a thousand years, and that financiers and the wealthy find particularly well adapted for sheltering their money.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>But Jean-Beno\u00eet was there to see\u2014actually, to hear \u2014another remarkable historical relic: the J\u00e8rriais language. The island\u2019s English-speaking majority today calls it \u201cNorman French.\u201d To an untrained ear, the language sounds like mispronounced French, but it is effectively a tongue of its own, one of the last surviving examples of the old Norman dialect\u2014one of the source languages of French\u2014that was exported to English in the eleventh century. J\u00e8rriais has its own phonetics, syntax and lexicon. One of its most striking features is its use of the <em>th<\/em> sound, which is common in English but nonexistent in standard French. For words such as <em>father<\/em>, <em>mother<\/em> and <em>brother<\/em>, J\u00e8rriais<em> <\/em>speakers say <em>paithe, maithe <\/em>and<em> fraithe<\/em>, rather than the French <em>p\u00e8re, m\u00e8re <\/em>and<em> fr\u00e8re<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, roughly three-quarters of the vocabulary and grammar of French and J\u00e8rriais overlap, which gives the two languages more in common than French and Haitian Creole, for example. For a francophone with a good ear and tolerance for variation, most of the conversation is intelligible.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 1) At the beginning of our research, Jean-Beno\u00eet travelled to the island of Jersey, a &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2805"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2820,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions\/2820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}