Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Comments

Re: French pronunciation

[selenak]

My measly three years of French at school and I are very impressed and salute you. (It was my last foreign language to learn, after Latin and English, and I never was more than rusty in it and have forgotten a lot, not least because unlike my English, I hardly practiced.) Thank you for coming through with the linguistic expertise!

Re: French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

My pleasure! The nice thing about historical linguistics is that you can know stuff without needing to know the language in question.

Your measly three years of French in a German (I assume) school probably far surpass my measlier two years of French in a not only American, but academically poor even by American standards, high school. That plus my one semester of French historical linguistics in college is about it for me and French.

My German background is even weirder: one semester of proper German in college, one semester on German syntax from a linguistic perspective (so a lot of diagramming sentences and reading up on different theories that account for where verbs go), one semester on reading academic German in grad school, two semesters of Middle High German, and a few semesters of even more remotely removed long dead Germanic languages: Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Gothic. ;) All of these give me a slight edge in reading German over an English speaker who had only that one semester of German 101, but leave me with a total German reading proficiency that is actually worse than my two years of high school French. Largely due to English having a far greater overlap in vocabulary with French, notwithstanding that it's a Germanic language.

I will never cease to complain that my graduate program:
- required nominal reading proficiency in French and German,
- failed to provide us with resources to acquire academic reading proficiency without taking years and years of irrelevant "When is the train coming?" undergraduate courses on spoken French/German that no one actually had time for,
- held the bar so low we could pass without actually being able to read French or German, thus giving us no incentive to prioritize reading proficiency over all the other things we were trying to cram into our years there.

And then we'd get random lectures like, "You know, you should also learn to read academic Russian," and we'd blink and stare at our advisors like..."I don't disagree. In principle."

Re: French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm convinced I have the least knowledge of modern French and the most knowledge of older French of the three of us. :D

Re: French pronunciation

[cahn]

Hey, I had three and a half years of French in school! (One year I couldn't fit it in my schedule and it was with a tutor -- the lovely French teacher I'd mentioned before, who had retired at that point -- but because I wasn't taking it for credit we probably got through about half the curriculum.) I'm feeling very learned right now, having had the most French of the three of us! ;) :P

Of course I didn't keep it up, so it's not like I can read any better than either of you at this point :P And my pronunciation was always execrable.