Fluff and I were sitting there sipping cups of weak coffee at an outdoor café terrasse at Mail Fleur - de -Lys ( Fleur-de-Lys Mall) in Lower Town .... gazing at the Upper Town and Old City skyline. Fluff snapped off a few pics of the overall scenario so I took a quick look at her masterpieces and noticed something familiar in the foreground.... right there near where we were seated......... that big white-on-red octagonal traffic sign written S T O P that gives us all... wherever in the world we might travel ...... that warm fuzzy feeling of being safe and understood. When I see one , I hit the brakes..... and I have a better than average feeling about others sharing the same roads with me doing the same. At least that is what laws are supposed to be all about.... making it easier for all of us to live together on this marvellous planet.....getting from Point A to Point B and then back to Point A again in one piece! Then I began thinking thoughts I'd "thunk" before......
As you can see in the title pic our " universal" S T O P signs here in French-speaking Québec are in French..... all this due to a provincewide scare back in the 1970s that la langue de Molière... Molière's tongue......French....was being overly and overtly corrupted and crushed by the English ogre in whose midst they eked out their national existence........ and I fully understand them for doing what they did back then ....... insisting on purifying the language and purging it of all the anglicisms for which a perfectly good word already existed in French. I witnessed very closely this whole process since French was our household language and prone most of the linguistic legislation passed into law by the Québec National Assembley. However , I think the Office de la Langue or Language Office went a bit too far with the road sign mentioned above.... when driving in Québec and coming to a red and white eight-sided sign reading A R R Ê T........please come to a full stop !
However , while Québec displays its unilingual S T O P signs throughout the province the native villages above..... Huron Village , a suburb of Québec City , and Mingan , an Innu ( Montagnais) village of la Basse Côte proudly exhibit their bilingual stop signs both in French and their own respective tongues... Huron on the left and Innu on the right. Unfortunately for the Huron their language died out during the first half of the last century whereas Innu is still alive and well.....spoken nowadays by 100% of the local population of Mingan ........... and happens to be the language that I taught for over 31 years as part of my workload ... the fun part....at Université Laval.
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