Book review: Le Petit Prince (+ bonus linguistics!)

Finally did it! Reading Le Petit Prince has been on my to-do list for so many years, it's slightly embarrassing. I began it, but just couldn't get through it - my french wasn't good enough, I couldn't keep up with the thread of the story (I know, I know, it's a children's book with pictures, but it's in another language, dangit!), and I just got discouraged. 

And then a few days ago, for reasons known only to the random plotting of the universe, I picked it up again, and had a quite different experience, one which I can only attribute to the fact that I spend my work days speaking a creole, since I surely haven't improved or practiced my French much. 

Let me explain. I do linguistic work at a university, which right now involves translating stories with a native speaker from the village vernacular to the lingua franca [1] of the region, which happens to be an English-heavy creole. I've been exposed to both these language through text for many years now, but haven't had the opportunity to hear or speak them much. So when our visiting scholar came, I was nervous - what if I can't understand them? What if they can't understand me? What if I can't follow the creole well enough to transcribe it?

But then, it was fine. More than fine, actually. To quote the Lego movie, "Everything is awesome!" What constitutes "awesome" for a linguist and word nerd? Well, many things, but today, it's "we mostly understand each other." Notice it's not "we understand each other perfectly," or "there are no communication errors," but "mostly." Speaking this creole has taught me that getting the sense of the words, cadence, and structure is enough. You don't have to understand the exact meaning of each individual utterance in order to understand the whole. And that if you wait just a bit, context may well make clear what was fuzzy with your myopic view of one word at a time. 

Maybe I should have realized this sooner, what with the years of linguistic study. But I didn't. It took a creole immersion job and a children's book in French to teach me this. 

Onward, to Le Petit Prince! This was a sweet and sad little book, and I don't know that I have anything new to say about it; it is quite well-known. The pictures were very helpful for keeping up with the context of the story, for this non-native French speaker [2]. 

The little prince himself is earnest and curious, without being cloying or overly-sweet. Once he has a question, he'll not rest until he gets an answer. One of his recurring question-types is for precise definitions of a specific word used by whatever planet's inhabitant, whether it be "éphémère" or "appriovoiser." This particular trait of the prince's was quite nice for me - I didn't have to go to a dictionary, because the story gave me its own definition, specific to its world. Even when I had a sense of the word (as in "ephemeral"), it was really interesting to get a nuanced and precise definition that applied to this book.

Wouldn't be a book review without a quote, so here's one to get the flavor of Saint-Exupéry writing, complete with my somewhat-halting translation. 

- Où sont les hommes? reprit enfin le petit prince. On est un peu seul dans le désert...
- On est seul aussi chez les hommes, dit le serpent. 

- Where are the people? the little prince said again. One is rather alone in the desert...

- One is also alone in the houses of men, said the serpent.

And finally, a picture of the tiny dictionaries I was using when I just desperately needed to know some key noun (I resisted using them as much as I could, trying to go with the context-flow instead). 

xo, 

Devo

[1] Really, blogger? You don't know "lingua franca"? Now I'm really starting to worry.

[2] Sort-of like soap operas - you don't have to understand every word in order to know what's going on. The emotions are writ large across their faces.