The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #137381   Message #3143817
Posted By: Monique
28-Apr-11 - 01:52 AM
Thread Name: Origins: L'Annee Passee (Belasco)
Subject: RE: Origins: L'Annee Passee (Belasco)
Q- Bonneton Editions released some such dictionaries concerning regional French -they specialize in local speech/dialects, but regional French isn't Creole, it's French with frenchified words coming from the local substrate -even in this specific case the local substrate is a French Créole (Nothing is lost, nothing is created...)
Dictionnaire Martiniquais-Français, Raphaël Confiant, Éditions Ibis Rouge, 2007, with a first online version up to M -they stopped there because an extended paper version was then made available and they needed the paper dictionary pay for itself.
Lexilogos has some links to online material in French concerning creoles.
You can find more material by typing "dictionnaire créole martiniquais but it'll be French stuff.
Websters online dictionary English-Martinique Creole.

I think I already said it in another thread but in mainland France we tend to avoid the word "patois" because of its historical background. The word came to mean any language that wasn't standard French on the French territory -mainland and overseas. They were supposed not to be languages at all, just some peasants' lingos. They were ruthlessly fought -and still are even if in more subtle ways whatever the official position may be.
And just for the fun of it, I'll explain what Grishka and I talked about. I told him that I already had issues with my ankles swelling physically and I didn't want them to swell any more than that: in French when we are/become big-headed, we say it more or less the same way as in English (word for word we say we "have the big head" -"a big head" would mean our physical head) but we also say that we have swelling ankles. Et voilà!