This, however, is the
result not of ignorance, but of a slight corruption of the correct
French pronunciations, the Americans having taken their way of
pronouncing the names from the French. The Napoleonic wars are
commemorated in the names of Napoleon Avenue, and Austerlitz and Jena
Streets, and the visit of Lafayette in the naming for him of both a
street and an avenue. But perhaps the most striking names of all the old
ones were Mystery Street, Madman's Street, Love Street (Rue de l'Amour),
Goodchildren Street (Rue des Bons Enfants), and above all those two
streets in the Faubourg Marigny which old Bernard Marigny amused himself
by naming for two games of chance at which, it is said, he had lost a
fortune--namely Bagatelle and Craps--the latter not the game played with
dice, but an old-time game of cards.
The French spoken by cultivated Creoles bears to the French of modern
France about the same relation as the current English of Virginia does
to that of England. Creole French is founded largely upon the French of
the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, just as many of the
so-called "Americanisms" of older parts of the country, including
Virginia and New England, are Elizabethan. The early English and French
colonists, coming to this country with the language of their times,
dropped, over here, into a linguistic backwater.
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