NWTI Offers Wallon Course (1978)

NWTI Offers Wallon Course
Wed, Mat 1 1978
Algoma Record Herald

A beginners and intermediate class in the Wallon Belgian dialect will be offered as a NWTI course in the spring session to begin soon.

Classes will be at Algoma High school on Tuesday evenings from 7 to 9. Josie Wautlet, who has taught previous courses in this language, will be the instructor.

Those interested are asked to call Mary Ann Delveaux, NWTI coordinator, at 487-2580, or Mrs. Wautlet at 487-5636.

Dictionaries of the Wallon words with their English and French equivalents will be available.

The purpose of the course is to teach the understanding of the spoken Wallon language and the pronunciation of words and sentences in this language.

"We may even learn to sing some Wallon ditties." Mrs. Wautlet added. Classes will be: limited to the first 15 registants.

Kermiss

For as long as I have been alive we have spelled it Kermiss. But the tradition here in Wisconsin dates back to the first being held in Rosiere in September of 1858. As you can see by the late 1930's Wisconsin Belgian's had a couple spelling varieties (I've also seen; Kermiss, Kermis, Kermess, Kirmess) :

The proper French/Walloon spelling is Kermesse, and it sounds much like how we say it in English (Pronunciation by Pat91). The Flemish spell it Kermis.

And in case you need to review the history:

Couillon - Cooyah/cuyoo

From: Li walon po tertos

Cooyah/cuyoo is definitely "coyon/couyon" in Walloon and it is also a card game here. The original meaning is "ball, testicle".
Apparently it was used to refer to the circle used in the calculation of the scores.
You can find more information in French here for instance:
https://reglesdejeux.github.io/regles-du-jeu-couillon/index.html

(If you use "couillon" in French, it actually means "idiot")

Here in Wisconsin the popular Belgian card game has been spelled a couple different ways. Pronounced "koo yo" here, sometimes with almost a Q sound at the beginning.

Roadside Chapel - Arlene (DeChamps) Jadin

Tatoeba: Collection of sentences and translations

It might be good to review Tatoeba:

It has Walloon entries and could be used to find more Walloon natives and potentially reach out to them for info/resources

This person is apparently native Walloon? https://tatoeba.org/en/user/profile/yanagi

But sadly there are no recorded samples presently. I think this would be another good thing for a Walloon speaker to submit recordings too. I pointed out Omniglot previously.

Outside of Tatoeba, Lucyin Mahin maintains a Wallon version of Wikipedia and has contribued heavily to wikimedia.

José Schoovaerts is another person from Belgium, who is heavily interested in documenting the language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a phonetic notation that is really what we need to get a number Walloon words documented in. For the few words I have heard, I usually recognize them in the non-standard phonetic written formats that various people have tried to write the lanugage in. The problem is everyone who has tried to write it has each done so a little differently. And then there are words written by various people that I have likely never heard and so I cannot really determine how one would say what they wrote.

The IPA is just as confusing and sadly really only benefits lingusitic people in my opinion. The realistic way we learn how words sound is from hearing them. So for the average person, that is what needs to be developed, a sampling of recorded words with their English and French spellings.

The is another somewhat interesting Facebook group called "Walloon lexicon." The about info says "Because I love the Walloon language, I share with you the history of its vocabulary."

Here is a recent post:

Walloon word of the day : cabasson \kabasɔ̃\
Dialectal form : (?)
Origin :
From Spanish "cabezón" (big-headed, stubborn), cabeza (head) + the suffix -ón.
From Old Spanish cabeça, from Vulgar Latin capitia, from a feminine singular of Latin capitium, diminutive of caput (head).
From Proto-Italic * kaput (head), from Proto-Indo-European * káput- (head), from * kap- (sixteen, hold), possibly of substrate origin.
-ón probably from the ending of Latin words belonging to the Third Declension (-ō, -ōnem), from Proto-Indo-European * -h₃onh₂- (?).
Meaning :
Cabesson = headrest, caveçon.

Interesting posts, but how would the words sound if spoken? Well the only real clue is that mysterious IPA representation: \kabasɔ̃\

Fortunatly there is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud at: http://ipa-reader.xyz/

This is also good. If you use French to English, you will get the IPA for the French word, plus a sound clip of the pronunciation
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/

French to IPA dictionary:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/master/data/fr_FR.txt

Making Grain Bundles - David Chaudoir & Francis Jauquet

Walloon virtual assistant ?

When my aunt and uncle were telling of their trip to Belgium and bringing a group of visiting Belgians around in the 1990's, I was in high school, I seriously considered taking a French class. Back then, area immigration was at a standstill (unlike the last ~20 years), as the last group were the Hmong. I had other interests in tech-ed, so I never persued that idea. And today I could just kick myself. At the time I figured I'd never use it and likely forget what I would have learned. I was also aware there were differences between Walloon and French and figured learning French might lead to some counter productive mixed ideas that "this must be like this etc".

I never envisioned that actual genealogical records would one day be available in their native French form on the internet. The internet wasn't quite a thing back then. So that is where I kick myself today.

There is still a lot of truth to the if you don't use it, you loose it logic. So enter in virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa. Could this be a way to keep fluent when you don't have anyone to talk to in French or Walloon?

Back in 2012 a bit before these things became more common placed, I did experiment with ASR (auto matic speech recognition), or what some people may refer to as voice recognition. I'm a bit more of a hacker and a coder than a gadget obsessed techno-weirdo, so at the moment I haven't picked up any of these virtual assistants.

But if you could ask Alexa in French what the weather is, I could see some value to this technology.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22088394/amazon-alexa-multilingual-support-italian-german-french-shopping-fire-tv

https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-06-alexa-finally-comes-to-france.html