"If you know it's called 'Brittany', why didn't you just say that?"

Edit: I started this post on Monday, but am finishing it up on Friday.  So it was ridiculously hot when I started it, but it has been absolutely gorgeous the rest of the week.

Hoooo-eee it is a hot one in Paris today!  98 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this, and no air conditioning, bien sûr.  Now that I checked the temperature, I feel a little more justified in starting to feel kind of gross.  I mean, I am sitting here in a small pool of my own sweat, and I was starting to think, "Jeez, I'm a gross little piggy, just sitting here sweating for no reason."  But if it's 98 degrees out (and in), it is completely acceptable that I'm sweating for no reason.

Anyway.  I had a great weekend in Brittany visiting the French-American family I used to babysit for in the U.S.!  Brittany is a long, long way from Paris, it turns out.  You kind of realize that when you look at the map, and I already knew it would take about 4.5 hours by train to get there, but Brest is actually nearly 400 miles directly west of Paris.  I was waaaay out in the "arm" part of France, where I had never been before.  It was a really lovely train ride, and fun to watch the French countryside shift from very Midwestern looking to very Irish looking over the course of my journey.  The west coast of France is so beautiful (well, most of France is pretty beautiful...), and the friends I was visiting were kind enough to take me out and about a bit to get a good look at it.  We drove out the Pointe St. Mathieu to a really cool lighthouse, and I was able to get some nice pictures of the coast and the countryside.

The lighthouse we went up into.

Shadow from the lighthouse and an old church on the same grounds.

The very western edge of the French coastline, looking north towards Le Conquet.

Cutie pies!

The kids were every bit as sweet as I remember - just really nice, fun boys, and it was great to catch up with A and S too.  A was a grad student in linguistics at the U of I when I was an undergrad, which is sort of how we made a connection, and then I wound up babysitting the boys for about a year while she worked on her dissertation.  It's crazy how much they've grown up, of course - the youngest one is now older than the oldest one was when I used to watch them, but they still look and act so much like I remember.  It's cool that their personalities haven't changed much, and it was really neat to see how much they've grown and matured.

Oh, the title for this post comes from a conversation I had with the older of the boys, who is now 8 (8!).  One thing I found myself thinking a lot about during and after my stay with them was the amount and type of code switching going on.  You can look at the Wikipedia link for more info if you're interested, but basically it's pretty normal for people in an environment who share multiple languages to switch in and out of those languages during the course of conversation.  I find code switching really fascinating from a linguistic point of view and also just really fun to do.  The thing is, as an English-dominant person living in an English-dominant environment, my opportunities for code switching are normally extremely limited.  I did it a lot more when I was living in France with a bunch of bilingual Americans, naturally, but what was interesting to me over the weekend was how different this family's code switching is from how mine is, and how my group of friends' was.  The rules were just different, and I couldn't get a handle on how much of it was competence driven, in the case of the boys, and how much of it was conscious vs. below the level of consciousness.  For example, they pretty much never switched languages in the middle of sentences, which is something I find myself inclined to do, given the opportunity; the switching was more on the level of the whole conversation, meaning there were many cases where one person asked a question in one language and it was responded to in the other language, and no one really seemed to notice or care, whereas for me, switching languages is more of a stylistic choice, I think.  Sometimes there are certain things that happen to sound better or are more readily expressed in one language or another.

Anyway, I was talking to the older boy in the car, and I had a whole sentence in English but inserted the word Bretagne in French.  He kind of paused and then said, trying to be helpful, "The word for that in English is Brittany."  So I replied cheerfully, "Oh, I know, but thank you."  He looked bothered by this, and said, "If you know the word in English, why did you say it in French?"  I had to think about it for a minute.  Why did I do that?  I often don't actually know why certain things want to come out in one language or another, but it is fascinating to me.  In this case, I was able to come up with a plausible explanation: "I think I did that because usually when I talk about Brittany, it's in French."  And I think that's true; I'm nearly certain I've heard and used the word Bretagne more times than I've heard and used the word Brittany.  Also, Brittany is French, so it feels like its name should be French.  Just like it feels a little weird saying "Shee-cah-go" for Chicago or how I really didn't like people calling me "May-leen-dah" when I first moved here.  It's just silly to say things in the "wrong" accent if you know how to do it in the "right" one.

That made me wonder if the boys were only switching languages when they couldn't come up with the right way to say things in one or the other language, which is what P's comment would suggest.  And it made me wonder if they always notice when someone switches languages, and what they understand the rules for switching to be, if any.

Well, that will be enough discussion of that, for now.  I've been doing a fair amount of reading this week, and I think I might turn back to that now before my friend Emily gets here.  It's made me a little sad, turning back to my reading this week; it's easy to forget I'm in Paris when I'm trying to concentrate on my reading (but I need to keep slogging away at it, with the whole "dissertation" thing coming up).  I feel like I should be out walking around and enjoying being here more, but it's good to get some work done, too.  I have 2 1/2 weeks left before I leave, and I've gone running every morning this week, and I'll be out and about all weekend with Emily visiting, so I'm getting out and seeing things plenty.  I just somehow feel a little guilty sitting inside reading when I love being here so much and I know I have to leave in not too, too long!