To the contrary. "Au pair" is now an accepted English language term for a young lady serving as a domestic helper especially with the caretaking of young children, with a status higher than a servant, but possibly not as high as actual relative by blood or marriage, and Pointe au pere, if not English, is an actual place in Canada, so if you get really picky about French Canada -- Quebec, or Engish speaking Canada, you might have a point, but the English speakers spell and pronounce it the same way, and one of the basic tenets of English is that proper names in modern usage transliterate directly rather than being modified as in antiquity.Rick Denney wrote:Yabbut, two of yours don't even pretend to be in English.iiipopes wrote:Indeed. Homophones. Such as:
He went to pare a pear for a pair who were au pair in Pointe au pere.
And yes, I know all about the history of the English language. I've read the preface of Webster's Collegiate; I've taken etimology in school; I've studied it privately in conjunction with both English Literature in college from Beowulf on down, and the influence of Latin and Norman Middle French on the legal system. Do you remember the chapter about the "great vowel shift" of the late middle ages which the result is that for most English dialects, whether UK, USA, or other variants, we pronounce vowels completely differently than either the Romance (i.e. Latin and those languages derived therefrom, as French, Spanish & Italian) or the Germanic languages?
My biggest peeve with English is that there is no gender neutral second person pronoun.
