Yesterday afternoon, I had a heating technician come to our place in Montpellier to do an annual inspection and cleaning, part of a maintenance contract we have. The same technician had been out before, and I remembered him by the curious grooming of his white beard and by the fact that he drove a very nice station wagon rather than the company utility van driven by his colleagues.
Nothing was wrong with the system, for once, so that was good. All that was left was to settle the bill for the contract renewal.
We sat down at the dining room table where he filled out his paperwork. His younger colleagues do everything electronically, but this old-timer still uses hand-written carbonless forms that look like they haven’t been revised in 20 years. Meanwhile, I wrote out a check.
There are some nuances in spelling French numbers that still present a challenge to me. He looked over the check, and the only thing he corrected was the lack of a euro symbol. I guess that would matter to someone who was writing checks back in the day when they switched from French francs to euros, but nowadays there is a euro symbol already printed on the checks.
He also noticed the address printed on the check was in the United States. Seated across from an American, he took the opportunity to tell me about a wine he bought from the United States. I asked him which state it was from. He said Wisconsin.
Here we were, sitting in one of the great wine countries of the world, and he was proud of the wine he bought from … Wisconsin? I wanted to chuckle, but I recognized there was probably a misunderstanding on my part.
French, like many Romance languages, leans on its vowels more than English, whereas we English speakers tend to lean more on the consonants. In addition to the vowels we use, French has nasal vowels, which are vowels that are pushed through the nose — the bane of all anglophone students of the language. Forty years of studying French, and I’ve only recently programmed myself to recognize that the French words non (no) and nom (name) are pronounced exactly the same because on and om are the same nasal.
When the heating technician pulled out his phone to show me his wine, my misunderstanding became clear. It was a classic van — a GMC, if I remember correctly — that was converted to a camper. He had even kept the Wisconsin front license plate, which reminded me of the opening credits of That 70’s Show.
The word for wine in French is vin. Phonetically, that’s /vɛ̃/. Van is a loanword from English, but in French it’s pronounced /vɑ̃/. A subtle difference, but a total fail when it came to comprehension.
