From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 21:08:49 MDT
Any expert French speakers here?
In my dream, I (or the viewpoint character) was in a busy room with (I
suppose) a hard bitten French woman journalist sitting behind a monitor.
She said something brusque about some news that was in LUH-cong, the `ng'
being that glottal stop thing that the French do in names like Lacan. I
didn't know what she meant (it didn't occur to me that she meant `Lacan',
elaborate game-playing psychoanalyst of dreams), and she showed me the
screen or maybe the paper: L'Econ. Shorthand for the French translation of
The Economist newspaper (I don't know if such a thing actually exists). I
was surprised, because I'd never heard anyone say it in French, and in my
monoglot ignorance would have expected it to be something like
`Leck-onee-MEEST'. When I woke up I was struck by the multi-levelled
quality of this sequence, the depths of hidden or implied processing
involved. *Would* a French speaker utter L'Econ like that?
Damien Broderick
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