Almanac – Nuit Longue
March 7th, 2013This week’s Almanac is Nuit Longue – the Longest Night. It is the holiday that Blaise mentions in his conversation with Mathilde in the chocolate house. It’s the Winter Solstice, Yule, and New Year’s Eve all rolled into one.
Only a few more days left to vote for your favorite entry in our Art Contest. I’m impressed with all of the entries and overwhelmed that so many good artists submitted something to us. Good luck to all of you.
And we have another contest going on. Snow by Night earned a place in Comic Mix’s 2013 Webcomic Tournament. Snow by Night is in the second bracket (titled the Kubert bracket), paired against Dreamland Chronicles (a fine webcomic). Please give us your vote. We greatly appreciate your support.
Should be “nuit longue” with a ‘u’ added to force the ‘g’ to be hard.
(French has more regular pronunciation rules than English. Notably, the c and g letters always yield the hard sound in front of other consonant or the a, o, u vowels, and always the soft sound in front of the e, i, y vowels. If you want a soft sound you can insert a mute ‘e’ (e.g.: “Peugeot”) or add a cedilla (e.g. “garçon”). When you want a hard sound you can insert a mute ‘u’ (e.g., “longue”, “cueillir”). This can lead to having to mark a ‘u’ as not being silent by adding diaeresis to it, as in “aigüe”.
While English was heavily influenced by French, it never had this rule, so it happy to have a soft ‘g’ in “judgment” and a hard ‘g’ in “girl”.)
Ah, French fail. I had it right in the comic but both the editor and I missed that in the whirlwind of getting the almanac entry up last night. I’ll update the journal right now and ask Diane to update the almanac when she gets a chance.