Sainquiou

14, 15. . .Saint-Cloud.

A Frenchman who has never heard English spoken before, and does not know the language at all, trying to pronounce "thank you" for the first time, naturally reproduces Englirh

th, hard and voiceless, by using his customary s: thank you — sainquiou ; qu=k; the semi- vowel i in the second syllable = English y; the accent or stress, in satnqutou, is shifted towards the end of the word in accordance with a law of French accentuation. Thus, satnqutou happens to resemble Saint-Cloud very much in French pronunciation. The only different sound is /, instead of i in the second syllable. But French / is less different from i than English /. The place of articulation, in pronouncing French /, is near the place where the vowel i and, also, the semivowel i = English y are formed. Cf. note, 18, 2 and 11-12.

21. — 24. Garçon, ne laissez pas le fiou sortir. The Englishman ought to have said: Garçon, ne laissez pas le feu s'éteindre. Cf. 22, 18. — Le feu s éteint, "The fire goes out." Le fou sort, "The madman goes out." — Ben apparently either overlooked the other (derivative) meanings of the verb "to go out," or found only one meaning, the principal one, sortir, in his pocket dictionary. Besides, he pronounced eu in feu, "fire," like eu in the English word feud, that is French feu like English few. This pronunciation, in connection with the verb sortir, suggested to the French waiter the word fou, which means "madman."

23. — 3. ..écoutez un peu le vacarme qu'il nous fait là-haut! The conj. pers. pron. nous is ethical dative, "for us," that is "so that we can hear it" (to be left out in translation) .

23. — 6-15. Poitrine de caleçon is the literal translation of "chest of drawers," rendering "chest" by poitrine (instead of caisse, f., or coffre, m.) and "drawers " by caleçon (instead of tiroirs). Commode, 1, is the French equivalent of English "chest of drawers." "Bureau," in this sense, is not used in England. Pocket dictionaries, which foreigners like to use, in order to satisfy the ordinary needs of daily intercourse, necessarily omit the translation of many compound nouns. This defect, quite pardonable, considering the size of such works, is, nevertheless, a very serious one. It often causes misunderstandings and awkward mistakes of the kind illustrated in the anecdote, if the English compound nouns, left out in those small dictionaries, corre-

spond to simple words in French, or to compound nouns of entirely different formation.