talos_

Just want to comment that Litestar is awesome. Docs are great and the built-in caching feature is very convenient!

I find it infuriating that navigation apps throw ads when I'm stopped at a red light. This is THE moment where I should glance away from the road and plan my routing

This analogy doesn't map to the actual problem here.

Perplexity is not visiting a website everytime a user asks about it. It's frequently crawling and indexing the web, thus redirecting traffic away from websites.

This crawling reduces costs and improves latency for Perplexity and its users. But it's a major threat to crawled websites

You should checkout the Python framework Litestar. It's an alternative to FastAPI that implements these ideas via their "Data Transfer Object" concept

> That seems unavoidable given almost all English words related to government/law/administration (including "state") derive from French!

Interesting. I always thought that Britain adopted parliamentary system earlier than France. I'm guessing this has to do with the period Normandie (i.e., the French king) ruled over England

I like to joke that "Dominion of Canada" is actually a railroad company

From the link you shared:

> The English word province is attested since about 1330 and derives from the 13th-century Old French province, which itself comes from the Latin word provincia, which referred to the sphere of authority of a magistrate, in particular, to a foreign territory.

The fact that British authorities picked a French word that the conquered would understand is significant.

> I wonder if the word choice was influenced by the US civil war ending only a couple of years previously

Interesting interpretation! I would agree given Canadians were given the opportunity to ally with the 13 colonies at the time (but didn't). British loyalists also fled the United States. "Province" made allegiance to the crown oversea clear

The original post was focused on history and language, and I added some political spice. Not discussing the politics of language (as in OP) is a bit outrageous.

You're right that French-Canadians are not guilt-free from discrimination et al. Québec only ever had French as an official language, but the last decades we've seen a series of dubious policies

Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF) promotes the french language and adapt new English words (whereas France typically integrate English words in their vocab).

The website Banque de dépannage linguistique (BDL) will have a lot of useful resources if you're interested! For instance, how to write a professional sounding email, names of official documents, invoice templates.

Highlights (good and bad):

* emails -> courriels (courrier + iels; mail + similar sounding syllable)*

* spam mail -> pourriels (pourri + iels; rotten + similar lexem as courriels)

* to spoil (as in spoilers) -> divulgâcher (divulguer + gâcher; to reveal + to ruin)

* to mansplain -> mecspliquer (mec + expliquer; man + to explain); This one is outrageous (and uncommon) because it's an homonym to "m'expliquer" (explain to me)

* to browse (the web) -> naviguer (as in "to navigate"; browser -> "navigateur")

déjeuner is a literal translation though. "Breaking fast" -> "dé-jeuner" (undo fasting).

French people typically say: - breakfast - petit-déjeuner (small breakfast) - lunch - déjeuner (breakfast) - diner - diner

Québecois people say: - breakfast - déjeuner - lunch - diner - diner - souper (eating soup; probably historical roots like "getting your big meal of the day" which is likely broth + potatoes)

This is a remnant of British colonization. French-speaking population didn't know any English, so you have a lot of these literal translations.

I've heard "flour" uttered with the French pronounciation (fl-oo-r, instead of homonym of "flower") in New-Brunswick. I was floored. Took me a while to figure out what they meant.

Clearly, this originates from non-English speakers reading "flour" on a sign and just running with it.

Also, consider that the British conquest happened before watermelon was highly prevalent in France or North-America. It's unsurprising to see terminology diverge in this case.

Well, why not include the word "Canadian", which significantly predates the country, as the prime example?

It's derived from Iroquois Nation words and used by French settlers to refer to Indigenous people. The word "Canada" was used by explorer Jacques Cartier to refer to the city now called "Québec". It broadly refered to the territory of a specific Indigenous tribe. (could be derogatory, but seemingly accurate / matter-of-fact)

After the British invasion, the British start using "Canadian" to describe both First Nations and French settlers (derogatory, "non-British)

Over time, "Canadian" generally refers to habitants of Canada.

Related: the hockey team "Les Canadiens" is from Montréal in the province of Québec in Canada. It's the oldest hockey team (1909, pre-NHL). The name is a reappropriation of the word Canadian at a time where it was used derogatively against "French-Canadians" (term that didn't exist at the time). Their chant "go, habs, go" refers to the "habitants", i.e., French settlers.

Related: "province" originates from latin used by Romans to described conquered territory. This is the term founders of Canada in 1867 decided to use instead of "state"

For anyone interested in Canadian history, always check-out the French version of a wikipedia page (and translate it). English pages have a lot of hand-waving and start history with their conquest. Also, ChatGPT makes outrageous historical mistakes all the time, such as suggesting that French-Canadians were a minority group in the 19th century

edit: format, typos

In French, the river and the animal are both "tigre"

You're getting an arbirary string back though...