Xref: utzoo can.general:1816 can.politics:2820 Checksum: 17677 Path: utzoo!utgpu!dennis From: dennis@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Dennis Ferguson) Date: Sat, 30-Sep-89 20:29:01 EDT Message-ID: <1989Sep30.202901.13550@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> Organization: Mechanical Engineering, University of Toronto Newsgroups: can.general,can.politics Subject: Re: postings in the French language References: <25215DA9.12769@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <3301@watale.waterloo.edu> <555@fs1.ee.ubc.ca> <3305@watale.waterloo.edu> Reply-To: dennis@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Dennis Ferguson) Distribution: can I have been following the traffic on language in Quebec, and French in recent newsgroup postings, and thought I might contribute something which, while not quite to the point, might help explain why I have some sympathy for the position of the Quebec government and Francophones in Quebec. My home town is Sudbury, in northeastern Ontario. I suspect the majority of people in Ontario whose mother tongue is French live in this part of the province and I'm pretty sure at least half of the population in Sudbury when I lived there was French. You could never have told this by looking at the place in the 60's and early 70's, however. Or even by living in it. All signs were in English. Many streets had French names, but these were universally pronounced with an English twang. If you went shopping you did it in English. If you wanted a phone number from Bell information you asked in English. Your hydro bills, and tax bills, and whatever else, all were written in English. The Catholic school board was large, and perhaps half of their primary schools (a third of the total) were French. The public school board ran no French language primary schools. Since the Ontario government didn't fund the Catholic board beyond the primary school level, there were only two French language high schools out of perhaps a dozen and a half, neither of which were run by the public school board and hence had to charge quite steep tuition. If you wanted to go to high school in Sudbury you pretty much had to speak English, and indeed had to speak it as well as those whose mother tongue was English since there were no special considerations given. I don't think it is any easier for a French-speaking person to learn English as a second language than it is for an English-speaking person to learn French, so the recent postings may give you some idea of what some of those guys were up against. To do as well as an English-speaking person, a French person would have to work a whole lot harder. This is in a city where the majority was likely French. I liked French, and could usually keep up with and contribute to a conversation about last Friday's football game, or girls, or whatever people talked about. I couldn't have written (or spoken) a completely grammatically correct sentence if my life depended on it, but then again neither could a lot of those guys. In either language. It was kind of hard to get a proper, consistant education if you were French. Even at the time I could remember being conscious enough of the problem to wonder how the heck some of the old guys who lived out in the valley and maybe didn't speak a lot of English got along. How could they go to court to fight a speeding ticket, or dispute their water bill, or obtain government services, or even get a phone number that wasn't in the book? I don't think this was particularly just, yet a French person who made any noises about "rights" was likely ignored. Speak English, we don't understand you and aren't going to make an effort to try. The English in Montreal had it very, very good in comparison to the French in Sudbury. Sudbury has changed a lot since. The place looks bilingual. You can count on getting service in French if you want it, both from the government and, usually, from private business. English parents fight to get their kids into French immersion schools. There are publicly supported French language secondary schools, the number of which probably matches the linguistic distribution of the population there more reasonably. Sudbury has become more like Montreal. I guess during the same period Montreal has become more like Sudbury was. With great cries about the violation of the "rights" of the English, and the racism of the French. If the French in Quebec are Nazis I can't imagine what we were in Sudbury 20 years ago. Of course I don't believe that one corrects an injustice with another injustice, but this is not an ideal world and in the real world one often reaps what one sows. And I can't help but feel that maybe the English in Quebec are now harvesting what was planted by the English outside (and inside) Quebec 20 or 30 or more years ago. As a consequence of this I am happy to see postings in French and will make the effort to read them if I am interested in the contents, no matter how inconvenient this might be to me. Learning two languages is always more inconvenient then learning one, more time consuming. Reading, or writing, or saying something in your second language is always more inconvenient than your first language. Why, then, should people whose first language is French be asked to suffer more inconvenience than I am willing to bear myself? You can ask them to do this, and you might have all sorts of good, logical reasons why they should, but I wouldn't expect this to make a big impression. What goes around comes around. Dennis Ferguson University of Toronto