Interesting write-up marred by the injection of politics: Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep -theft- inventory details
Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
This is not an academic piece but a blog which is trying to be light hearted.. The first sentence says
"The other day I posted a tweet with this image which I thought was funny:'
So not being 100% serious is to be expected.
I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.
But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.
no, my parent comment was about the museum location: if Hergé was from Québec he might have mentioned a museum in Montreal, if he was from Tahiti he might have mentioned Papeete... since he was from Belgium (a thing) he mentioned Brussels (the capital city of the thing)
Right. You're not a native English speaker, I guess, so I'll offer some advice on how you could have read this correctly.
You can tell that "the original French" is a noun phrase, because it's the object of the preposition "in", and prepositional objects are always noun phrases in English. Given that, there are two possible parses: either "original" is an adjective and "French" is a noun, or "original" is a noun and "French" is an adjective. In English, adjectives nearly always precede nouns, so the second possibility is very weak.
The noun "French" in English can refer either to the French language or (always with "the") the French people. But interpreting the phrase as meaning "in the original French people" is clearly incorrect, because a museum is too large to fit inside a person, and even a somehow miniaturized museum could only be inserted into one person, not many people.
So the phrase unambiguously means "in the original French language", that is, "in the French-language text originally written".
Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.