Friday foolishness: foreign words

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 10:46 AM 9/15/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>Some of these sound slightly suspect, but I can add a real one.  Driving
>through France (in the 50s), we kept seeing signs pointing out a "voie
>unique."  After a while we began to wonder why they kept alerting us to
>"unique views" in places which struck us as scenically unremarkable at
>best.  Sometimes, in fact, all there seemed to be to look at was a road
>construction site.
>

Why would "voie unique" bring up the idea of "unique views?"

Sali.


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Salikoko S. Mufwene                        s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                      773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
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