19 December 2014

Le gîte à Môlay

Gîte is a word you hear often in France, especially when you are planning a trip including a longer stay than you would want to spend in a hotel. The full term is gîte rural, and there's a French association of property owners called Gîtes de France (web site in English or French) where you can choose the place you want to spend a weekend or a week or more in when you go on vacation. A gîte rural [zheet ru-RAL] is a vacation rental out in the country.

Notice that the word is pronounced with a "soft" G, which in French is pronounced [ZH], like the G in bourgeois or the S in English treasure, measure, or pleasure. It's not the hard G of give or gift. In French, a G before an E or I is always a soft G. In English, there are no rules about whether the G will be "hard" or "soft" before those two vowels. (Why is is the G of gift, gizzard, or Gilbert different from the G of gist, giraffe, giant, or gin?) Before A, O, or U, the G in both English and French is a "hard" G.

Our gite was an apartment in this outbuilding in the owners' back yard. The car on the left is our old Peugeot and the one on the right, a Renault Twingo, must have belonged to people staying in the B&B.

Anyway, the American Heritage Dictionary says that a gite (no accent in English) is a "simple, usually inexpensive rural vacation retreat especially in France." An apartment in Paris wouldn't be called a gîte in French. By definition, a gîte is located in a rural setting. In fact, one of the meanings of the word is 'den' or a 'lair', describing the place where a wild animal takes shelter from the weather or from predators. You shouldn't expect a gite to be luxurious — it should be a little rustic but comfortable.

The gite called Le Nid was tiny but well arranged and amply furnished. It was comfortable for a three-night stay.

So I had found a gite on the Gîtes de France web site for our short trip to Burgundy. It is called Le Nid (The Nest), and it is owned by a couple who live in the village called Môlay. They also operate a B&B in the larger house on their property. Here's their web site in French and in English. Their gite has a full kitchen, a full bathroom, and a small living room downstairs. The bedroom is a loft up a narrow, steep staircase (almost a ladder) over the kitchen. The owners of Le Nid are pet-friendly, so Callie was welcome.

On our four-day trip, we went to exactly one restaurant. Otherwise, we had dinner (and one lunch) at the gite. At lunchtime, when the weather permitted, we had picnics either outside or just in the car. That was easier with Callie, less expensive for us, and a less time-consuming way to get something to eat but continue spending as much time as we could driving or walking around to see the sights. (Lunch can take a couple of hours in a French restaurant, and going to restaurants was not the point of our trip.)

This is the owners' house, part of which is given over to guest rooms (chambres d'hôtes or B&B).

Le Nid cost us 200 € for three nights. That's less than many hotel rooms rent for, of course, and we had use of a kitchen. We could get something like 200 channels on the flat-panel TV set — mostly French of course, but some in English or German. There was wifi for the Internet on our tablets, but no phone (almost everybody brings a cell phone these days, including us).

Here's Callie waiting patiently to be let in while I take photos. She knows Walt is in there...

Gites vary widely in the number of modern conveniences they offer. They are really designed to accommodate people who drive in and who can bring a lot of things with them. For example, we took our own sheets and towels rather than paying the owners to rent linens for the three days and nights. We also took food with us, but not wine — this was Burgundy, after all!

38 comments:

  1. To make things more confusing, gîte can also be a feminine word and in this case, as in donner de la gîte, it means listing for a ship.

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    1. Sometimes it seems that the French language is so complicated that it is not surprising that few people are willing to make the effort to learn it any more. But then maybe that is true of most or all of the world's languages.

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    2. Yes, I agree. In fact, any language that is not your own is complicated.

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  2. We rented a gite in Normandy three years ago for a week and had a wonderful time. I love to cook and having a kitchen was really great.

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    1. One of the best things about being in France is shopping in the open-air markets and even the supermarkets and then cooking "at home."

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  3. This is absolutely charming and that entry is beautiful. What a great way to escape.

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  4. Of course, "gite" derives from the verb gésir "qui signifie être couché, n'est utilisé qu'à l'indicatif présent, l'indicatif imparfait, au participe présent et à l'infinitif. On l'emploie en parlant des personnes mortes ou malades ou de choses renversées par le temps. On l'utilise également avec l'adverbe de lieu ci dans l'expression ci-gît qui signifie "ici est enterré". On notera que la réforme de l'orthographe de 1990 autorise à supprimer l'accent circonflexe de la troisième personne du singulier du présent de l'indicatif : il git, ci-git" (Le Conjugeur website).

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    1. @Bob F: Ceci explique la gîte pour listing!

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    2. Gésir veut dire être couché et le navire est à moitié couché, alors...

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    3. Thanks, Bob. Very interesting.

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    4. Nobody has mentioned the word gisant, meaning a « statue représentant un mort étendu (...gisants sculptés sur les tombeaux du moyen âge). » In English, a gisant in this sense is a recumbant statue, the ones you see on tombs in old churches in France.
      .

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  5. Now... about the soft vs. hard g in English... growing up in the U.S., I learned the same rule for English, as for French, about with a soft g or c happening if it is followed by i or e. I think they teach it as a most-of-the-time rule, with just a few exceptions (as you cited).

    In French, when I'm teaching -er verbs in present tense for the first time, I, of course, have to bring up this rule for verbs like manger, nager, and partager, for the -ons ending, so this year, I used the catchy little phrase, "Soft G needs and E". I was pretty pleased with myself *LOL*... until it didn't really seem to help the kids remember *LOL*.

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    1. p.s. No word verification happened.
      Also, just FYI, I couldn't post at all while in Firefox, but I think that's a problem I've noted before. I wish that bloodspot folks would fix this issue.

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    2. Holy cow, I wrote blogspot, and it auto-corrected it to bloodspot *LOL*.

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    3. I wondered where that came from...

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    4. Judy, look at this web page about English pronunciation. One commenter says that the Oxford English dictionary lists nearly 700 words in GE-, GI-, and GY- that are pronounced with a "soft" G, and more than 150 that have the "hard" G.

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  6. This gite of yours looks like it was once a barn, non? We stayed in one near Saint Remy once that was part of an eggplant farm. You were lucky to find a gite with such character (who are those farmers? watching Callie in the courtyard below? My Swedish friend has a cottage with steps like you had for the loft. They are not for old folks...did Callie climb them?

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    1. Yes, it seemed to be more or less a barn. The stairs were pretty dangerous, actually. The steps slanted down slightly, and if you were going down in sock feet they were slippery -- there was a sign posted by the owners asking guests not to wear shoes when they went upstairs. Because the steps were open, I think, Callie was afraid to go up them. She slept downstairs.

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  7. Bonjour, Ken. C'est très mignon et très bien éclairé comme gîte. C'est un vasistas à la soupente que l'on voit sur la photo?

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    1. I remember learning the word 'vasistas' for a skylight more than 40 years ago. There was one over the Turkish toilet on the landing outside my apartment door (5ème sans ascenseur) when I lived just off the rue Montorgueil near Les Halles. I don't know if the word vasistas is still in common usage. Now it's a vélux.;

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    2. French people always snicker when I use the word, "vasistas", but the origin of the word is so intriguing to me that I use it every chance I get!
      Origin of the word vasistas

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    3. One meaning of the word vasistas [vah-zee-STAHS] in French is the small opening in some doors that allow the person inside the house to peer out and even talk to someone on the other side. Our front door has one of those (I should take and post a picture). Such peepholes might have been more common in Germany. A German person might talk through the hole in the door and say "Was ist das?", meaning "What can I do for you? What's your business?" That's how the term vasistas got into French with the meaning it has (the skylight meaning is more obscure). Once somebody told me that when the Germans came into France they had never seen such a thing as a skylight, and would point to one and ask "Was ist das?" That might well be a fold etymology. Oh, here's a Wikipedia page in French.

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    4. Hi, Ken.
      Calogero's recent hit, "Le Portrait" is being played quite a bit on French radio. Maybe the word "vasistas" is going to make a comeback!
      "Il mélange au fond de sa tasse
      Du miel,
      Il regarde par le vasistas
      Le ciel."

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    5. Bonjour, Ken. Connais-tu la chanson assez récente de Calogero, «Le Portrait»?
      Je l'entends souvent à la radio française.
      Peut-être le mot, «vasistas» va faire un retour?
      «Il mélange au fond de sa tasse
      Du miel
      Il regarde par le vasistas
      Le ciel»

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  8. I'm guessing that in English, the difference between soft and hard G before I might have something to do with whether the word in question came to us from Norman French (soft?) or Anglo-Saxon (hard, as it would be in modern German equivalents). Or maybe it was just fashion.

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    1. It probably is as you say. Hard G words from German/Anglo-Saxon and soft G words from (Norman) French, when the G is followed by E or I.

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    2. In gigot d'agneau you have three pronunciations of the G in French! That's international. LOL

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    3. The -gn- in a work like agneau or magnifique can be pronounced in one of two ways. Most commonly, people touch their tongue to the roof of the mouth right behind the front teeth and say something that sound's like [nyuh]. An older pronunciation, I believe, was the result of raising the back of the tongue to the back of the roof of the mouth, near the uvula, and saying something similar to [ngyuh]. That one is hard to describe. I think that second, older pronunciation is dying out.

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  9. In my opimion this part of France is very interesting and worth visiting.

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  10. It's been very interesting to learn about gites. So often I am asked by a person who's first language is not English why something is pronounced a certain way and so often I have to reply, there is no rule that covers it. It is just how it is.

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    1. Exactly, Andrew. You can only ask "why..." so many times about another language. Then you just have to accept whatever point or pronunciation you're wondering about and move on.

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  11. "un lièvre en son gîte songeait
    car que faire en un gîte à moins que l'on ne songe"
    deux vers de La Fontaine mais je me souviens plus du nom de la fable
    bien à vous

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    1. Ce sont les deux premiers vers de la fable Le Lièvre et les Grenouilles.

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    2. Bonjour M. Vergne, et merci. Je vous souhaite de passer de très bonnes fêtes de fin d'année.

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