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At the risk of encouraging any Derek Trotter impersonations, is there anyone out there who can confirm the literal translation of ‘Poule d’Essai des Poulains’. With my GCSE French I can cobble together the words but they seem to make no sense in combination. Or is that the point – a sneaky French trick to make us feel foolish?
Any help anyone could offer would be gratefully received.
Bonjour!
i think it means "grand prix of chickens" or more colloquially "the chicken race"
Oh…..i thought it was the Egg & Spoon race
It means pretty much "race to test the foals" I believe, despite the fact that they are not actually foals.
I suppose like "Oaks", "Derby", & "St Leger", it is merely a race-name which has stuck through the generations
Don’t know the history behind it though
It’s a nice image (chickens driving formula one cars) and I thank you for introducing me to it.
it also means colt, skid[?] or pony skin[??]….but race to test the foals sounds really cute; why don’t we have race names like that?
Perhaps it is a baxtardisation* of the translation of "Guinea Fowl" from English to French back in the 1880s
*: the correct spelling gets deleted for obvious reasons
I asked the very same question a while back which elicited some interesting answers, notably from Wit late of this parish. Unfortunately the thread has been deleted.
Poulain is Colt, Pouliches is Filly
IIRC the conclusion was that it was something like ‘the test of the young colts/fillies’, with Poule being used in a sense of ‘young animal’ rather than the seemingly likely ‘hen/chicken’
Any French correspondents care to comment?
Ah oui monsieur Drone
le chat est sur la table
Là où est la plage?
Quand est le prochain s’exercer?
C’est viande de cheval là où est le jambon garcon, vous fils d’un chien
C’est Ne Magnifique!!!
d’Essai des poulains is definitely the test of the colts (with pouliches being fillies).
Oddly, I’d always assumed that the ‘Poule’ kind of meant ‘gathering’ (root of our ‘pool resources/tote pool’ word and was used either in the sense of gathering the colts together to test them, or a gathering of money to be given to the tested colts.
Double checking with my French books, I can’t see any evidence behind this at all, so it may be my over-active imagination.
Ah oui monsieur Drone
le chat est sur la table
Là où est la plage?
Quand est le prochain s’exercer?
C’est viande de cheval là où est le jambon garcon, vous fils d’un chien
C’est Ne Magnifique!!!
Mon aeroglisseur est plein d’anguilles
Whilst on this subject. Does anyone know what Voy Por Ustedes means when translated into english assuming that it is a french name anyway as a lot of French jumps imports have french names while others are named in english such as Mater Minded.
Voy por ustedes is Spanish for ‘go for you’ or ‘going for you’.
Not too hot on Spanish personal pronoun declension but I think ustedes is the plural of usted ‘you’ (singular) so he ‘goes for us all’ fittingly enough
Voy Por Ustedes means "I go by you"
also…
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poule_d’Essai_des_Poulains* copy and paste the url into your address bar without the asterix
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