Posted on 07/13/2005 12:40:59 PM PDT by saquin
TOKYO - A group of teachers and translators in Japan on Wednesday sued Tokyo's outspoken nationalist governor for allegedly calling French a "failed international language," a news report said.
Twenty-one people filed the lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court, demanding that Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara pay a total of 10.5 million yen ($94,600) compensation for insulting the French language in remarks last October, national broadcaster NHK said.
In their suit, the plaintiffs accused Ishihara of saying: "French is a failed international language because it cannot be used to count numbers."
"It's natural for different languages to have different names for numbers and different ways of counting them, so it's unacceptable for him to insult French in this way," Malik Berkane, who heads a French-language school in Tokyo, told reporters at a news conference.
The Tokyo metropolitan government refused to comment, saying it hadn't received word of the lawsuit.
French is the official language in about three dozen countries and territories worldwide and is one of the official working languages for international organizations such as the United Nations. In French, some numbers can be unwieldy to say, such as 90, which translates as "four-twenty-ten."
Japan's counting system can also be tricky. Adopted from Chinese, the Japanese numeric system ignores the western system of classifying large numbers every three digits. Though one thousand is the same, 30,000 would translate as "three-10,000," 4 million would be "400-10,000" and 4 billion would be "40-100 million."
Counting one pencil or one bottle of beer ("ippon") in Japanese differs from counting one sheet of paper ("ichimai") or one book ("issatsu").
Ishihara, one of Japan's most popular politicians, is known for his blunt nationalist talk, criticism of illegal immigrants and unapologetic view of the Japanese wartime military's atrocities in Asia. His remarks often rile Chinese and Korean residents in Japan.
That could be their national industry.
Someone in St. John's should make a t-shirt with an 'I'm a soixante-newfy' theme. ;^)
Pass it on
Tokyo Governor Sued for Insulting French!
What did he do????
Tell the Truth???
Nutty.
All of my correspondence with my Japanese customers is in English and I know for a fact that when they communicate with a French supplier it is also entirely in English. I do have to occasionally translate incoming messages from French or Quebecois customers whose English isn't up to snuff, but that's rare. French hasn't been the "Lingua Franca" for generations and therefore is indeed a "failure", idiot law suit or not.
(Just kidding. Everybody knows English is the world's lingua franca nowadays.)
Imagine, somehow English is now the new French. Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
bttt
I was going to quip that you could understand it in two ways:
1. The Ministers french was insulting! As if he spoke french abominably.
2. The Minister was insulting the French People.
So it turns out that the Minister was insulting the French language! LOL
You don't even need to make this stuff up!
They'd be the #1 world power within a month. :-)
It's ridicuous that you can be sued for insulting someone!!!
Actually it gets worse. 91 is quatre-vingt-onze (four ten eleven), but there are two different ways to say ninety-first: nonante et unième or quatre-vingt-onzième.
The word "billion" is ambiguous. Americans think a billion is a thousand million. Brits think a billion is a million million.
SD
Honest, when I read this I thought it said:
French is the official language in about three dozen countries and terrorists worldwide.
Leftists everywhere think billions of dollars in aid still isn't enough.
Not quite. The restrictions surround signage, specifically on a bi-lingual (English/French) sign the French lettering must be no less than twice the size of the English (idiotic, but there you go).
What language you actually conduct your business in is your business. A non-French speaker would have no problem doing business in Quebec, with the possible exception of some of the rural and remote areas.
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