(Untitled)

Jul 01, 2012 09:37

I am currently in Canadia (=P) for the first time, and I have some questions y'all people might be able to help me with ( Read more... )

ask a [something], canadians are fucked up, canadians are awesome eh

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mofoburrell July 1 2012, 16:57:21 UTC
  1. This depends on which province you're in as there's no universal standard for blinking green. In most provinces, a blinking green light is an "advance green" which means that all cars with that light have the right of way. It's basically the same thing as a green left arrow, saying that you can turn left without yielding to anyone. I guess it was too expensive to retrofit all traffic lights to include the green left arrow, so the blinking green light accomplishes the same thing. I think in BC a blinking green has something to do with pedestrian crossings, but I can't remember exactly.
  2. In our experience it was too big a burden to place on motorists giving all prices in rubles and expecting them to convert between rubles and cents as they were driving, so prices are listed in cents now.
  3. The name has always been Danone? Even outside of Canada it's Danone. You guys are the ones that are weird :P. It's pronounced the way you'd expect in French, something along the lines of da-NON where both 'n's are hard 'n's.

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jordinothepizza July 1 2012, 20:38:03 UTC
both 'n's are hard 'n's.

If you have hard 'n's'....you have soft 'n's too?

Are you talking about the difference in pronunciation like "c'est bon" being soft but "bon ami" being hard?

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mofoburrell July 2 2012, 00:07:34 UTC
Yup! The soft 'n' is the stereotypically French nasal 'n'. The hard 'n' isn't so nasal and sounds a lot like the 'n' in other languages (like English). I don't know if I'm using the nomenclature right in calling them "soft" and "hard" but that's how I was taught, anyway.

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jordinothepizza July 2 2012, 23:32:39 UTC
I can understand why it would be taught that way. It sounds like a good way to remember the differences between them.

I'm not sure about the dialectal pronunciation where you are, but in Cajun French, what you call "soft n's" are not actually consonants, but nasalized vowels. My phoneme/phonology classes have led me to believe most French dialects use word final nasalized vowels in things like "c'est bon" but word final nasal consonants in things like "bon ami."

/rambling

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saturnfall July 2 2012, 17:33:17 UTC
"You guys are the ones that are weird"

True, but according to wikipedia it was the founder who changed it: During the German occupation of France during World War II, Daniel moved the company to New York to avoid persecution as a result of his Jewish faith. In the United States, Daniel partnered with the Swiss-born Spaniard Joe Metzger and changed the brand name to Dannon to sound more American.

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