Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...word like "humuhumunukunukuapuaa," you can spell it, even though nobody else can. It's the same way with German words. To us, they sound pretty hard, but to a German, words are spelled like they sound. There couldn't be a spelling bee in German, or Japanese, or French, or any other language...
English is a voracious melting pot of a language. It's basically what the Anglo-Saxons brought over from the mainland to the British Isles. Then that was overlaid with Latin, because the British Isles were conquered by the Romans and converted to Christianity. Then the French conquered the island in 1066, so French was the official language in England for 300 years. With the Renaissance came a big influx of more Latin words. You had the Scientific Revolution, so you had a big influx of Greek words. Then with colonialism, the language started taking words from everywhere...
...also about understanding the nuances. The hypermarket run by French supermarket giant Carrefour at the Mid Valley Megamall in Kuala Lumpur is overwhelmingly halal, with an elaborate system to keep halal foods separate from the haram ones. Goods that divide scholars on whether they're halal or haram because they could have trace elements of wine - Balsamic vinegar, say, or Kikkoman Marinade - get slapped with little green stickers to alert customers. More blatantly haram items are confined to La Cave, a glassed-in room at the back of the store for goods containing alcohol, pork or tobacco. Wearing special blue...
...Grand Jury Prize went to Un prophéte (A Prophet), a complex, absorbing, fairly conventional prison drama directed by Jacques Audiard. In the manner of last year's Palme d'Or winner The Class, set in a Paris junior high school, this is a documentary-style study of French minorities in an enclosed environment that sets its own rules. The main tension - and there's plenty in the schemings of rival ethnic gangs - comes from the relationship of a young Arab (Tahar Rahim) and his aged Corsican mentor (Niels Arestrup). When asked at the post-show press conference...
...Antichrist, Gainsbourg, daughter of Brit actress Jane Birkin and the late French singer-provocateur Serge Gainsbourg, played a woman so traumatized by her child's death that she goes slowly, deeply, mutilatingly mad. Accepting her award, she called the experience "intense, sad and exciting." If not the best performance of the festival, Gainsbourg's was surely of the self-punishing kind that could be appreciated by jury members Huppert, Asia Argento and Shu Qi, all of whom have played similarly extreme roles. Waltz, the suave German on Brad Pitt's tail in Inglourious Basterds, thanked the film's "unique...