troglodyte_mignon

“Bless you”, I guess? I just wasn’t expecting a German loan word in that circumstance. And people even seem to pronounce it correctly!

I didn’t know that you could say Gesundheit in English.

Caillou was created by a Quebecer illustrator, so not French, but still French-speaking. The publisher for Caillou claims that he was named after a practice of Françoise Dolto of making her child patients give her a little stone as payment, but I’m not 100% convinced, ha ha.

And apparently, the editor for the Caillou books is called “Éditions Chouette”, which is too big of coincidence, so I guess there really is a great international owl conspiracy.

Je les copie-colle, ils ne sont pas présents dans ma disposition de clavier (pour autant que je sache). Ça s’appelle un obèle, tu peux les retrouver rapidement en cherchant l’article Obèle ou Note de bas de page sur Wikipédia. Personnellement, j’utilise plutôt une table de caractères, Gucharmap sur mon ordinateur et UnicodePad sur mon téléphone portable, où je les cherche avec un de leurs noms anglais (dagger ou obelisk).

Sinon, tu peux les entrer manuellement avec Unicode (U+2020 et U+2021), mais personnellement je ne les utilise pas suffisamment souvent pour m’en souvenir.

Wow, I had completely forgotten about Caillou. Apparently, the cartoon was imported in France when I was still a child, but already too old to be watching it. I have no idea if it’s reviled here too. I always assumed he got his name from his lack of hair, but I might be wrong.

Funnily enough, the wiktionary page about the weird mnemonic sentence bears a note (with a ⚠️ warning sign!) saying that it is not to be taken as an invitation to throw stones at an owl, whether or not it has lice.

I came for the cute animal pictures, and stayed for the knowledge. Thank you for taking the time to write all that.

all our lyrics were about asses

The animal, the body part or both?

I’m French and I’ve actually learned a few things by reading this post! C’est chouette. :-)

I would take that as Duo should be a hibou (it seems the -x makes it plural).

I just googled the Duolingo mascot, and yes, I would definitely it a hibou, it’s very weird that they call it a chouette.

…Fun fact (that is, fun unless you’re a French-speaking second-grader?): French nouns ending in -ou take -s as their plural mark, like the vast majority of words, with the exception of seven^† words that take -x as their plural mark: bijou (jewel), caillou (stone), chou (cabbage — can also be a term of endearment), genou (knee), hibou, joujou (a childish word for “toy”, diminutive from jouet), and pou (louse).

There is no rational or historical^‡ reason, no justification for why these specific words have to end in -oux instead of -ous, it doesn’t change the pronunciation in any way, we could all decide to write hibous tomorrow and it would break nothing whatsoever in the French language… yet we must all learn this list in primary school, often with the aid of sentences such as “viens mon chou, mon bijou, mon joujou, sur mes genoux, et jette des cailloux à ce hibou plein de poux” (Come, my sweetheart, my jewel, my little toy (?), on my knees, and throw stones to this owl full of lice).

†: It could be more than seven, but that’s up to debate. The plural for some words in -ou isn’t entirely fixed. One example of such a word is ripou (dirty cop), whose plural is sometimes written ripoux, sometimes ripous. Thankfully, since schools don’t teach that word to seven year old kids, teachers don’t have to worry about whether to include it in The List.

‡: There is a general historical reason for plurals in -x, they come from medieval copists who used a cross symbol as an abbreviation for an ending in -us, and a non-negligible minority of French words have a plural in -x, but there is no reason why these seven words should work this way, it’s just a weird tradition as far as I know.

I swear I didn’t make all that up.

If it’s the 6th Republic and new constitution stuff that make you think of populism, it’s not really the case. The current French constitution was more or less imposed by De Gaulle in very specific circumstances (the political crisis caused by the Algerian independance war). A number of people (among which Mélenchon) think it gives way too much power to the president and that we should go back to a more parliamentary system.

Thanks for translating all the owl names. I’m bookmarking that comment!