因為天天講法文的關係
英文真的退步太多
所以決定時不時來寫個小文章練習一下英文
我的新發現是
因為長大了 認識的世界更寬廣
因為長大了 認識的世界更寬廣
而且腦袋裡還多了許多法文單字(跟英文長得幾乎一樣)
比起高中 可以寫的東西更多了
廢話不多說 進入主題 :)
The
other day Elsa suggested that we go try the new Taiwanese restaurant
across the street of the post office in our neighborhood. The food
was exquisitely presented, in a fancy-highbrow-French cuisine way. We
tried the plat du jour, and of course, its specialty: Guabao. For the
Guabao, we all prefer the classic pork flavor, because without pork
fat, the steamed bread tasted a bit dry and lack of the delicate
sweetness of animal grease. As for the plat du jour, it was a bowl of
radish and pork rib soup noodle. The soup was very impressive, delicious and all. It was quite a special experience, but Elsa payed for
everything while I went to the restroom, classic Chinese courtesy.
Perhaps she was influenced by her Chinese-American husband, haha.
After
dinner we went for a walk and stopped by Amorino on Rue Mouffetard for
a medium size gelato (just me). As usual, I showed the very nice
Italian clerk my student card and got a 20% discount. And of course
as usual, he spoke in Italian with me. I was like: “Prendo un cono
medio (I'll take a medium size corn),” and he replied “Tre euro... (three euros)” so I interrupted him and
went: “Attends, t’as dit quoi? T’as dit tre euro?! (Wait, what did you say? Tre euro?!) ” and he
said: “Si. (Yeah.)” So we discussed about the plural form of “euro”
and he was very certain that it should had been invariable. I was
quite surprised because during the session, when I answered “3
euro”, it was purely unconscious. The word simply came out like
that, without a second of hesitation. I must have heard it from
somewhere else, like the radio or something. It was not at all translated
from French, but our lovely Italian teacher assumed that I did and
went on about how bizarre it was to her when she heard people in
France saying “euro” for like two minutes. She corrected all of
us and asked students to make sentences with “euri” in order to
reinforce our memory.
Hence,
out of curiosity, I googled it and it turns out that the plural form
of “euro” in Italian is rather invariable than “euri”, like
the teacher had explained. And why? There are two arguments to
justify this. The first one is that, since “euro” is actually the
abbreviation of “European currency”, according to Italian grammar
rules, shortened words like “foto” from “fotographia” or
“bici” from “bicicletta” and in this case, “euro” from
“European currency”, should inevitably remain invariable in its
plural form. The second one is that, just like all words of foreign
origin in Italian, since they don’t really know how to modify those
words, they remain in the same form for most of the situations.
However, “euri” isn’t wrong either, because according to its
classic syntactic rules, a masculine word that ends with “o”
should change its suffix to “i” when in its plural form. It’s
simply less common, but since language is diverse, there are surely
people applying this rule to “euro” and thus it should be
legitimate as well.
Reference
(from the website of Treccani, the prestigious Italian-language
encyclopedia):
