or: A New Language

Flaneur is a fantastic French word.

One word which perfectly describes what I have been doing in Paris this past week.

If I was to create my own language, I would take a good dose of the French. I would also take the Swiss-German method and use phonetic spelling for every word regardless of its origin. This will also allow for dialect adaptions to my language in the same way that Swiss-German does. With some words, there are multiple ways of spelling due to each region’s chosen pronunciation.

Some words are best expressed in one language as they don’t seem to have a suitable equivalent in another or the equivalent is a sentence rather than a single word. I would take all these words and use it as part of this new language.

It would also allow for the greater description of some things such as the way some Inuit languages have between 40-50 words for the various types of snow. This allows for greater clarity and understanding.

I may then add the English way of adding -ing, -ed (and so on) to words. The creating would be English with a twist and a massive fusion of various other languages.

The first word to be in this new language is flaneur.

Paris is perfect for this activity. It can be taken to mean “to leisurely stroll while observing every day life.” It is not wandering around aimlessly though to flaneur properly is to not have a particular focus on the destination. It is about the journey, the observation and the act of walking itself that are important.

The English twist I would add to this would be to add “ing“. As an example, the sentence would read “I have spent the past week flaneuring around Paris.”

I suspect the purest French language people would be offended by this however I’m all for the evolution of language over time and since English is already the bastardisation / adaption / evolution of several other languages, doing this kind of thing to a French word should be expected albeit with an apology to the language purists.

There are equivalent examples of English words which have had this treatment by the Japanese e.g. pikunikku (English – picnic), however the French tend to invent a whole new word for a concept that has come up in English e.g. the word for computer is often the same (or remarkably similar) regardless of language yet in French, it is ordinateur.

Contributions welcome. Please include definitions and an example of the word in a sentence.

Au revoir.

* Thanks to Madonna for the title to this post.