French vs. "red" and "orange" (off-topic)

[Wilson Gray]

On Oct 6, 2004, at 10:09 PM, Paul Frank wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: French vs. "red" and "orange" (off-topic)
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>
> For what it's worth, I speak French at home with my wife, who is
> Swiss-French, and daughter, and we all make a distinction between
> "rouge" and "orange" in French. My French dictionaries also list the
> word "orange." But perhaps it was not always so. The dictionary of the
> French Acadamy (http://www.academie-francaise.fr/dictionnaire/) only
> goes to the letter N, although they started working on it in the
> Jurassic Period.
>
> Paul
> ___________________________
> Paul Frank
> English translation from Chinese,
> German, French, and Spanish
> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
> http://tinyurl.com/5av5h
>

I'm not surprised. The fact that my "informant" mentioned that her
father failed to distinguish between orange and red, though she herself
did, was an indication of language change in progress. This was
ca.1973. I'll bet that her dad still refuses to make the distinction,
just on general principles, like my grandparents' refusal to refer to a
bicycle as anything except a "wheel." I do wonder, though, whether that
French publishing house still publishes its orange-covered series of
books on linguistics that it refers to as its "serie rouge."

-Wilson Gray