Number in series 26; Year of publication 1932 - Fell and Rock ...

i6oSOME PYRENEAN WORDSBY W. P. HASKETT SMITHThe chief difficulty for strangers when picking up a foreignlanguage by word of mouth is to decide how much of what theyhear is national, how much provincial and how much individual.Picture to yourself a Frenchman in Yorkshire. He would heara great deal of everyday English, some expressions which wouldpuzzle a South of England man, and possibly a phrase or twopeculiar to the man to whom he happened to be talking. InFrance, language is much more uniform than it is here; butin the provinces you will often come across expressions orpronunciations not in accordance with normal French.In the S.W. the chief peculiarity is one which rather helpsan Englishman ; for the final letters of each word are clearlygiven, as they are to some extent in reading French poetry, andit is curious to recall that Count Henri Russell, the great walkerand climber, though he spent part of every year in Paris, andwrote admirable French, told another Frenchman in my presencethat he had never noticed any difference of this kind in thetreatment of prose and verse. He was so much accustomedto hearing the final letters in the South, that they passed unnoticedwhen he heard them in the North. More strangely still, he wasso familiar with the Pyrenean use of the word colline for a ' littlecol,' that, when other Frenchmen gave it the usual meaning of' hill,' he was quite puzzled. To a stranger asking his way itis certainly bewildering when he sees scores of collincs all aroundhim to be told to continue up the valley until he sees a colline ;yet in a surprising number of cases the two senses come to verymuch the same thing.The nearness of Spain often influences a word. In Spanish,passive participles often have an active force. Thus, divertidomeans not only ' amused,' but also ' amusing' and cansadonot only ' tired ' but also ' tiring,' and this affords a possibleexplanation of an odd use of the word connu to express " wellacquainted with." It is a sort of inversion of the commonFrench il s'y connait.A stranger who, by previous poring over the map, has madeone or two good guesses at the names of surrounding peaks,