As an aside to this aside on the aside…

I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.

But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.

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antonvs 3 days ago | parent [-]

I imagine the location of the museum would have been different in the original French, but the same European colonial attitude applies.

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croisillon 3 days ago | parent [-]

* Belgian

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ascorbic 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They were written in French.

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kragen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not a thing.

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IAmBroom 2 days ago | parent [-]

You don't believe in Belgium?

Delaware, sure. But I'm pretty sure Belgium exists.

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rkomorn a day ago | parent [-]

I don't know anybody who calls the French spoken in Belgium "Belgian" (if only because it becomes ambiguous since Belgium also uses Dutch and German).

I'm pretty sure that's what the comment was implying.

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croisillon 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

no, my parent comment was about the museum location: if Hergé was from Québec he might have mentioned a museum in Montreal, if he was from Tahiti he might have mentioned Papeete... since he was from Belgium (a thing) he mentioned Brussels (the capital city of the thing)

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rkomorn 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Replacing "French" with "Belgian" in the comment you replied to is the only way to take your "* Belgian" comment.

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croisillon 17 hours ago | parent [-]

they didn't say "the original in French" but "the original French"

	▲	kragen 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Right. You're not a native English speaker, I guess, so I'll offer some advice on how you could have read this correctly. You can tell that "the original French" is a noun phrase, because it's the object of the preposition "in", and prepositional objects are always noun phrases in English. Given that, there are two possible parses: either "original" is an adjective and "French" is a noun, or "original" is a noun and "French" is an adjective. In English, adjectives nearly always precede nouns, so the second possibility is very weak. The noun "French" in English can refer either to the French language or (always with "the") the French people. But interpreting the phrase as meaning "in the original French people" is clearly incorrect, because a museum is too large to fit inside a person, and even a somehow miniaturized museum could only be inserted into one person, not many people. So the phrase unambiguously means "in the original French language", that is, "in the French-language text originally written". I hope this helps!
	▲	rkomorn 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"In the original French" means the original French language in which Tintin was written. "In the original French" does not refer to the nationality of the author or the location of the museum.

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kragen a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. Hergé wrote Tintin in French, not in "Belgian".