Yesterday we attended church. That sentence makes perfect sense in English, yet attend comes from a French verb meaning wait. We did not go to church to wait. In French we would use the verb assister to tell you that we were present at church during the worship service. Assister also went through a change of meaning when English speaking people got hold of it.

There is a leafy green vegetable that the French call laitues, meaning milky, because when one cuts the stem a white liquid that looks like milk flows out. The English pronunciation is much the same as in French, yet for some reason it is spelled lettuce. The u in the French word is not pronounced, it is just there to make sure one pronounces the t correctly. So why is there still a u in the English word where it is unnecessary and not pronounced as a u?

These are the little gremlins that can trip one up when learning a second language. English is closely related to French. Almost 40% of our words come from French, yet many of those words have not had smooth traveling. All the terms of English grammar are of French origin, including the word grammar, but the relationship is often obscured by changes in spelling. Take verb tenses for example. Did learning them make you feel tense back in your school days? Would it have made things easier to know that tense is a mispronunciation and misspelling of temps, the French word for time? But the mps in temps is not pronounced and the vowel sound is foreign to English. Just translating the word to time would have been too simple. So we are stuck with learning verb tenses.

Our daughter and her husband were in Brazil earlier this year and one store they visited was called Coqueluche Casa. Coqueluche is a word of French origin and has the same primary meaning in Portuguese as in French. However, I was sure that there would not be a store anywhere calling itself Whooping Cough House. The secondary meaning of coqueluche in French is darling or heartthrob. Here is another mystery of language: what possible connection could there be between those two meanings? It appears that in Portuguese this secondary meaning has been extended to include things. So this was a store selling knick-knacks, or souvenirs. In French coqueluche is pronounced something like coke-loosh, two syllables. I wonder how many syllables it has in Portuguese?