I love languages which is why I minored in French and almost got my masters in linguistics instead of design. Although...design is a language, too, albeit a visual one (there’s a great paper by Ellen Lupton where she uses rhetorical writing devices as a framework for designing identity systems). But anyway...one thing I learned from spea…
I love languages which is why I minored in French and almost got my masters in linguistics instead of design. Although...design is a language, too, albeit a visual one (there’s a great paper by Ellen Lupton where she uses rhetorical writing devices as a framework for designing identity systems). But anyway...one thing I learned from speaking French: they use passive phrases to the English direct ones. You can see the results of this in shampoo bottle descriptions, for example. The French text is often twice as long as the English text. Their vocabulary is smaller, too: the English vocabulary, no doubt large because so many from most cultures contribute to it –mixing, matching, slicing, dicing, adding, subtracting– allows very nuanced descriptions that aren’t available in French.
I love languages which is why I minored in French and almost got my masters in linguistics instead of design. Although...design is a language, too, albeit a visual one (there’s a great paper by Ellen Lupton where she uses rhetorical writing devices as a framework for designing identity systems). But anyway...one thing I learned from speaking French: they use passive phrases to the English direct ones. You can see the results of this in shampoo bottle descriptions, for example. The French text is often twice as long as the English text. Their vocabulary is smaller, too: the English vocabulary, no doubt large because so many from most cultures contribute to it –mixing, matching, slicing, dicing, adding, subtracting– allows very nuanced descriptions that aren’t available in French.