Ho! So many answers! I should have activated my email notifications... Now it is. :laugh:
Thank you. I'll try my best to answer you globally.
Why lys over lis?
- "Les rectifications orthographiques de 1990" advise to write "lis" instead of "lys" because nothing justify the 'y' when you talk about the flower lilium.
- However, (according to fr.wikipedia.org) "fleur de lys" is a locution and a heraldic term appeared under the rule of Louis VII (1137-1180) to designate the well-known emblem. It doesn't even look like a lilium and its origins are lost in the depths of time.
So... "lis" designates the flower, "lys" designates the emblem.
Why lys d’or and not lys or?
- "lys or" is grammaticaly correct because "or" is an adjective.
- But in heraldry, at least in French, coat of arms are described as layers and materials rather than colors. To illustrate the idea, we could say: "A layer of blue covered by a layer of lys made of gold".
Hence, colors are not (or rarely) adjectives, they are nouns.
Now you know why I think it should be "Azur semé de lys d’or". :happy:
More specific answers:
Should be "The Emperor's new clothes" ^_ ^
Yup. By the way.
Thinking of a colour, rather than being made of gold (lys d'or) makes more sense to me, but I guess one can argue about it.
Actually, French speakers tend to consider gold as a material rather than a color. As Kljunas said, "or" is rarely used as an adjective.
In fact, only basic colors (bleu, rouge, noir…) are real adjectives, altered by the qualified noun. More complex colors (azur, carmin, ébène) are indeed a reference to a material or a pigment, suggesting "couleur de" (color of). That's why those "adjectives" are invariable in French.
Furthermore, I've never heard about your "French modern rules" getting rid of accents.
I guess maljjin is talking about "les rectifications orthographiques de 1990", abovementioned. :happy:
As for the the modern rules, it might be a local thing to the French part of Canada. Our kids were/are so bad that it was easier to adapt the language to them than to actually teaching it properly. Well, that's how I view it anyways...hehe
Les rectifications affects la francophonie as a whole. L'Académie française worked on it and is part of the French law (and other French-speaking countries), but is not compulsory.
As you said, it cleans some oddities, simplifies some rules, etc. For instance:
- circumflex accents on 'i' and 'u' are dropped, except for a few words to avoid homography (mûr, sûr, jeûne…),
- compound numerals are always linked by hyphens,
- some useless duplicated letters are dropped,
- etc.
The problem is almost nobody heard of these rectifications, and many schoolbooks and newspapers don't care...
"Lily flowers are commonly represented in a stylised form, yellow on blue: Azure semé-de-lis Or, or Azure three fleurs-de-lis Or in the 'modern' version. The achievement is named using the English heraldic version, while what OP suggests is how a French-speaking person would say it today.
In my humble opinion, I think Paradox wanted to write it as a French-speaking person.
I found "Azure semé-de-lis Or" and "Azure three fleurs-de-lis Or" on en.wikipedia.org. Honestly, the guy who found that is a butcher: it doesn't mean anything, whether you're a French or an English speaker.
Sorry, but we should keep it in French or translate it in English, not create a Freakenlish version.
[EDIT: Big mistake. See SlyEcho and StephenT post.]
The french version of the game is dreadful, some sentences mean nothing at all and there are ite a few elements and tooltips actually saying the OPPOSITE of what it is supposed to say, like for example the tooltip saying the a province will defect to your country when it is going to leave your empire.
The vanilla French localization is indeed atrocious, and German version isn't any better. [...] It's a shame that users need to supplement a basic support with mods.
We go beyond this simple thread, but I totally agree with all of you! Maybe we should create another one?
I always thought that by cosmopolitan they meant "la francaise de europa, pas l'personnes de departaments de France"
"Les Français d’Europe" are metropolitans.
