Excerpt from The French Element in the Canadian NorthwestFrench quite as well as the ma jority of educated Americans talk English. I might have said more, for I am not aware that there is any such common and widespread fault in French Canada as the use of will for shall, and would for should. But in the main the parallel holds good even in the matter of accent. For the chief characteristic of the French Canadian, as well as of the American, accent, is the tendency to draw], to be monotonous, and to exaggerate the number of nasal sounds. But these peculiarities are not confined to this continent of ours. They exist in Normandy and many other parts of France, they are not by any means so faulty as the Provencal or Gascon accent. I have met highly educated men from the North of England whose accent was as nasal as if they hailed from Idaho or Ari zona. In fact I am inclined to think that in all European countries and partien larly in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, the farther you wander away from the great centres of culture, where the concourse of highly trained minds stimu lates men to perfection in the use of their vocal organs, the more likely you are to find nature's great law of following the line of least resistance assert itself in drawling and nasality. However, in this respect as also in a more correct use of French prose - that most subtle and delicate of all modern vehicles of thought - Canada has improved wonderfully in the last quarter of a century and is im proving every day. If the United States can point to a revival of letters heralded in the present day by such skillful artists as James, Howells and Cable, French Canadians may well be proud of Judge Routhier, Benjamin Sulte, Chau veau, Marmette, the two Taches (our archbishop and his brother), and Louis Honore Frechette. The discovery OF the red river.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.