Oh? That must be a regional phenomenon. I’m not Canadian, but I spent two years (and two Canada Days) in Canada. In Hamilton, ON, French was strictly limited to bilingual labeling on groceries. In that area, knowing the lyrics to any song at all in French, or being able to say more than “Jay neh parlay pass fran-say” in French, made me feel like I had just demostrated my crazy European-ness* once again.
* Being a crazy European in Canada was fun.
“Don’t worry about not having room for me in your car, guys. I’ll go ahead on my bicycle and wait for you there.”
“My coffee is always that small. It’s called Espresso.” [It was apparently a relatively new thing in Canada when I was there]
“Why would you think that ‘Bremsstrahlung’ is hard to pronounce?” [I still don’t know how *they* pronounce it, they were afraid to try]
“Of course we use a fork and a knife for eating pizza.” [Mostly optional, in fact. But the French exchange student said it first, so I went along and backed him up]
I dunno; I grew up not far from Hamilton, and both elementary and high school alternated between playing the anthem in English, French, and the switch-back-and-forth version, and we were expected to sing along.
I can’t speak French conversationally, but I know both versions of the anthem by heart.
But that might be because I’m a freak and really enjoy memorizing songs.
the anthem here has, to the best of my knowledge, the text “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit / lalala [repeated]” - dunno where one should learn it normally, maybe football games or so
“It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose.”
-Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
Bombardier Aerospace inherited Canadair, who’s been making drones since the 60s. They could use a juicy crash contract to make drone interceptor drones.
At my school we would gather in the morning and sing the national anthem so I know three English verses and two French verses. I know that makes me sound like I am from the late 1800s.
So I know the French version of the anthem by heart from back when I didn’t even know what the words meant. I used to just make the sounds that I had learned, and only later parsed those sounds into words when I was old enough to understand them*. I think I have an eidetic memory for songs.
* Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, Il sait porter la croix. What the shit did they have us kids singing?!?
It makes me wince when people sing the national anthem correctly.
A year or so ago my daughter asked me to sing the national anthem for her and I started in.
O Canada!
Our home and [“native”, ugh, kind of mumble through this word] land
[True patriot love? “Patriot,” really?!?] mumble mumble mumble
[Here comes “In all they sons command”] mumble mumble
One of my Canadian friends told me that “no one knows the second verse”; I think they added the reason “we’re not Americans”. Of course, they might have been exaggerating. And I just extrapolated from my general impression of the results of compulsory French education at high schools in Ontario.
I’ll take your word for it .
I went to Timmy’s and ordered a coffee. I got caffeinated dishwasher sewage. The next time, I ordered tea (with milk). They dumped a tea bag into the milk. I had thought that would be a capital offence anywhere in the Commonwealth. From then on, I only ever went to Timmy’s if I wanted donuts.
Ten years ago, there was a Second Cup in Hamilton where I wrote about half of my master’s thesis, as well as a couple of Starbucks.
I had to learn the lyrics to the Austrian anthem by heart some time around age 10. The strange old-fashioned metaphors were explained to us, line by line. The anthem was never mentioned (or sung) at school again.
Post WWII, Austrian culture has become so allergic to traditional signs of patriotism that when we first heard about school kids gathering every morning to sing the anthem (in English class, while learning about school in Britain and America), we, at age 11 or so, immediately thought of the late 1930s.
Apparently, my built-in nazi detector gets triggered by some things that perfectly decent people from English-speaking countries do - other examples include celebrating Remembrance Day/Veteran’s Day, understanding Starship Troopers (the book) as anything but a cautionary tale about excessive militarism, casually referring to somebody as a “grammar nazi”, creating Mass Effect 2, asking people to fill in their “race” on a form.
My approach to things like this is, if there is one bad thing in it, I wince. If there are two or three in it, it gets painful. If there are more, then everything is fine: the text is a historical relic that is no longer to be taken seriously.
The Austrian anthem got its lyrics post WWII; the poet was a woman, but nevertheless included a reference to “große Söhne” (“great sons”) [of the country] in the first verse, as well as “Brüderchöre” (“fraternal choirs”) and “Vaterland” (“fatherland”) in the third verse which no one knows. After two years of heated debates, which included some really atrocious proposals on how to fix it, these things were officially changed in 2012. It will take a couple of decades until everyone agrees on the lyrics again, but as hardly anyone ever sings it, no one will notice.
Hyphenation doesn’t work here. Of course drone-catching drones catch drones, so they are drone-catching drone-catching-drones. We want to talk about (drone-catching drone)-catching drones. Does it work without hyphens? Drone catching drone catching drones? drone catcher catching drones?
English is just such a limited language ;-).
Drohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnen.
But it’s definitely not worth the effort to build them, as they will just be destroyed by…
Drohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnen.
That is, until someone manages to build… no, let’s stop here.
Maybe this is the real reason why drones are evil.
My Nazi-detector goes off for a lot of that stuff too, to be honest, though mine is a lot more sensitive than the average “decent” person from an English-speaking country. I think the English are just authoritarian at heart.[quote=“zathras, post:72, topic:90683”]
After two years of heated debates, which included some really atrocious proposals on how to fix it, these things were officially changed in 2012. It will take a couple of decades until everyone agrees on the lyrics again, but as hardly anyone ever sings it, no one will notice.
[/quote]
Our last government inexplicably said we should update the lyrics to O Canada (inexplicably becuase they were neoconservatives, but you never know). In particular the “In all thy sons’ command” line. I think people largely reacted by saying, “Isn’t there anything better we could be discussing?” I’d like to update it, most people don’t.
Not everyone. Plenty of partisan democrats, for sure, but there was still resistance to the obama administrations policies. Just because it got ignored by the media doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
.