Wood’s Tea

I do some read­ing on French web­sites occasionally—especially during the Tour de France and Roland Garros (the French Open)—and one thing I’ve noticed in these arti­cles is the fre­quent use of a place-of-origin noun to refer to a par­tic­u­lar person: le Parisien, la Stras­bour­geoise. So, for exam­ple, I found this about Ara­vane Rezaï, one of two French women remain­ing in the sin­gles draw at Roland Garros:

Heureuse­ment pour la Stéphanoise, tout n’allait pas se jouer unique­ment sur cette his­toire de cris, mais sur le plan mental.

This would be like read­ing an arti­cle about Andy Rod­dick with a line that started:

For­tu­nately for the Austinite…

…which would be unusual in the Amer­i­can press, at least out­side of Texas. The Texan? More likely, but still you don’t see this on any­thing like a daily basis. People move around here, for one thing. Rod­dick is a Nebraska native, and lived in Florida during the first part of his tennis career. I’m not sure whether Mis­sourian or Kansan describes me better (cer­tainly not Ore­gon­ian…yet at least). Do we have an Eng­lish word for this kind of name? Yes: demonym. I’ve never heard it used though.

In French the use of demonyms appears to be common, and the word for them is gentilés. I looked this up and it turns out that Stéphanois (adding a ter­mi­nal “e” for the fem­i­nine) refers to a native of Saint-Étienne, a French city in the same region as Lyon.

Now as far as tennis goes—and in fact in most any sport—I’m for finesse over power. Ide­ally I’ll take them both together (LeBron!) but I love to see a less pow­er­ful player skill­fully drop a shot over the net and watch some base­line smasher clum­sily, fruit­lessly rush­ing after it, per­haps slip­ping on the terre battue and adding a nice patch of red clay to her designer Nike ensem­ble. I’ve fol­lowed the young French player Alizé Cornet (who had a fine clay season in ‘08) for a couple of years, think­ing she might even­tu­ally be the sort of Jus­tine Henin type player that could embar­rass the heavy hit­ters. I fol­lowed her progress through a number of tour­na­ments and read about her on news sites and in a fan forum. In addi­tion to being fre­quently referred to as la Niçoise, I noticed that a major­ity of French arti­cles I read about her would use the exact same phrase la protégée de Pierre Bouteyre (Bouteyre is Cornet’s coach). Again, this is the sort of con­struc­tion you’d see much less fre­quently in Amer­i­can media: the con­tin­ual link­ing of a sports star’s name to her mentor or coach. I posted a com­ment about this in the forum, as well as about the use of place-of-origin names, which received sev­eral responses. I won­dered if

…in France or in Europe, the coach, the pro­fes­sor, etc., has more impor­tance than in Amer­ica. No one calls Shara­pova “the pro­tegee of Robert Lans­dorp”. Maybe it’s more impor­tant for us to think that people are inde­pen­dent, that they create their own des­tinies (or fame), whether that’s true or not.

Ulti­mately this is what inter­ests me, not just the specifics of lan­guage use, but the way they’re related to how people in dif­fer­ent places think and what they value. The more fre­quent use of gentilés by French writ­ers sug­gests that place of origin has a greater sig­nif­i­cance in one’s sense of iden­tity there. Again, con­sid­er­ing the greater mobil­ity of Americans—as well as our shorter history—there’s noth­ing too sur­pris­ing about this conclusion.

I wonder though if the reverse is true: that because the French speaker is accus­tomed to hear­ing and using these terms, this con­di­tions the mind to place more value on local­ity, on place of origin, and to make judg­ments accord­ingly: vous autres Parisiens—all you Paris-types—we know how you are. Is the young French stu­dent quizzed on lists of regions or cities and their cor­re­spond­ing gentilés? I wonder.

The last com­ment I received claimed that it wasn’t about the rel­a­tive impor­tance of the coach, but rather just that writ­ers used these phrases for vari­ety: one can’t just keep repeat­ing “she” or “Cornet” in an arti­cle. This I don’t buy at all. It’s far more ridicu­lous to con­tin­u­ally vary the word­ing if that’s all you’re trying to achieve.

Asserted the Portlander.