please help with some translations

1. Il y a des comportements plus dissuasifs encore et beaucoup plus intimes, qui vont de la bouderie à l'insulte....... jusqu'a certaines mesures, dont quelque unes font référence au titre livre américan assez répute.

2. il a dû se dire, que la Thailande était le jardin d'Eden.

3. Une ville dont juste le nom suffit à me faire rêver.

4. C'est un itinéraire qui sera bien sûr amené à évoluer au gré de nos rencontres et de nos envies.

( énorme de merci d'avance )

A friend of mine said to me you should have studied Spanish instead of french. And I said 'why'?

Then he said, ' when you know Spanish you get fifty percent Italian for free, when the Italians speak to you, you could understand Italian but with french you don't get the 50 percent free Italian.

Is that true?

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on May 4, 2011 at 6:45pm

There some truth in this statement, though as it stands I think it's an exaggeration of the situation.

French, Spanish, Italian, Portguguese, Catalan, Romanian and a few other languages are essentially Latin evolved in different ways. In that eveolutionary process, they've diverged from one another, but not to such an extent that there's isn't some degree of mutual intelligibility between them, particularly when written down. It's a bit like an English speaker (who doesn't speak German) hearing the German phrase "dass ist gut": they might well guess that it means "that is good", even though they consider it to be a different language. (An alien visiting our planet might actually think that "that is good" and "dass ist gut" are so similar that they are variants of 'the same language', but we consider them to be 'different languages', if not for linguistic reasons, then partly because politically we consider them to 'belong to different countries' and England and Germany have different armies and navies.)

Returning to the languages derived from Latin (or "Romance languages" as they're technically termed), it turns out that of these languages, French has undergone certain sound changes (e.g. syllable-final consonants not being pronounced, nasalisation and other vowel changes...) that arguably reduce the degree of intelligibility between at least spoken French and the other languages compared to, say, between spoken Spanish and spoken Italian or spoken Spanish and spoken Portuguese.

So, a Spaniard visiting Italy may well find that if they speak Spanish "carefully", Italians can understand them sufficiently for the purposes of, say, buying an ice cream or ordering a taxi. However, that doesn't then mean that the Spaniard will then understand an Italian news report or that the communication with the taxi driver will be perfect and fluent without misunderstandings.

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Permalink Reply by Jackie Cann on May 4, 2011 at 6:47pm

Yes, I learned Spanish and then Italian which does indeed make Italian much easier! But I still like French the best! So you could do both, or even all three.... I think 'quelque unes' should probably be 'quelques unes' but I'm sure that French friends on the forum will be able to confirm that (or otherwise). When you say 'au titre livre american' did you mean 'to the title of an American book'? If so it would be au titre d'un livre américain. 'American' has got an extra letter i in it in French.

Jackie

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Permalink Reply by Benoît on May 5, 2011 at 1:43pm

"Une ville dont juste le nom suffit à me faire rêver." is correct.
But personnaly I would say:
"Une ville dont le simple nom (me) fait rêver"
Or even better:
"Une ville dont la simple évocation (me) fait rêver"