15 thoughts on ““I Take Up My Pen”: French Mission, 1939”

1. Ah, sans serif!

2. How fitting!

3. Ardis: Did your name tag have Eglise or L’Eglise? I could have sworn my French one for Tahiti said L’Eglise. Maybe it didn’t. Don’t ask me to find it.

4. Re: #3, time frame is 1978 when I received it from the place we had to order it ourselves.

5. Mine (dating to 1981) said “Eglise” — but then it also said “Sister” instead of “Soeur,” something that disappointed me then and now.

6. What are you guys talking about?

7. Gary’s “sans serif” is an indication of the typeface — the letters are made up of plain strokes with blunt ends, without the little extensions that you see on, for example, Times New Roman; my “fitting” only meant that it was appropriate to have a French name (“sans serif”) for the type used on the French letterhead. DavidR was wondering whether the name of the Church on my French nametag had been “Eglise ..” (Church oJCOLDS) or “L’Eglise …” (The Church oJCoLDS”) — I answered, and my lament was that my nametag had used the English “Sister Parshall” instead of the French “Soeur Parshall.”

   So in short, I guess Gary, DavidR and I are former French-speaking missionaries yakking about trivial linguistic points.

   Aren’t you sorry you asked? 😀

8. I got the sans serif part, but I thought it was Latin.

   The name tag stuff I wasn’t sure about. If I’d tried to say Eglise out loud I would probably have understood it to mean Iglesia and figured it out. But I didn’t think of it. I, too, would have lamented not being an Hermana.

   And, there are no trivial linguistic points. They’re all fun.

9. The whole discussion made sense to me.

10. But now I’m suddenly imagining a simple type face in reaction to the overly ornate rococo called ‘Sans Seraphim.’

11. Our sisters were “Soeurs” but we were “Elders.” And it was simply “Eglise.”

12. Italian elders are ‘anziani’ which unfortunately has connotations of old (more than elders in english does at least).

13. Found the name tag. Not totally nuts. It was L’Eglise.

14. Japanese has no articles, so there’s no way to specify that it’s “The” church. We had to come up with some other reasons to support that assertion.

15. Quelle surprise. I thought the “rule” says to omit the accents on capital letters . . . hmmm . . .

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