The French word for Allah et al is dieu?
Thank you for your patience. I caught your (obviously tongue-in-cheek) question earlier but while my spirit was willing my flesh was tied up. So let's dissect it together; you know I have great regard for the razor-like mind you have.
Yes, "et al' is where it becomes tricky and we will not only be involved in slicing graphemes but in having to accept that someone screaming "Yahweh Rocks!" or "God iz da Man!" is no different to screaming "Allahu Akbar!"
The word for 'Allah' in French is 'Allah'. Not allah or dieu or Dieu but 'Allah'. A specific entity with specific aretalogy. Same with Bouddha. Or Jehovah. (Pardon my lack of a proper French accent, Inglis is my ancestral wiring.)
But let's leave the aretology and cultural colouring aside aside for the moment and focus on the phenomenon that many individuals who voted 'no way' in the poll in the OP (deliberately rigged to present false information as genuine, but quite apparent in its agenda to many others) and regard the word 'god' and 'God' - or Allah and allah and jehovah and . . . yes, Apollo the Greek's god - in the context of proper nouns.
(We can go further into 'proper names' if you wish, later, but that would be linguistic surgery that would shed blood, sweat and tears.)
Jehovah and Allah to the French is not Dieu - the proper name. Allah is Allah and Jehovah is Jehovah and God is Dieu. Not dieu (that's Apollo. Who is also Apollo.)
'Dieu' written in lowercase is a common noun, Dieu is a proper noun.
Some would sweep this all quickly under the mat since it actually requires thought.
For those of us unclear on the issue I will draw on a dictionary entry - fairly standard among all dictionaries :
"
Common and proper nouns
In linguistics, proper nouns, common nouns and mass nouns are three distinct subclasses of nouns. Common nouns refer to a class of individual entities, whereas proper nouns name a unique referent, and mass nouns refer to non-individual referents. In English syntax they can fulfill the same functions, but proper nouns behave differently in that, like mass nouns, they cannot take the determiners "the" or "a" - this is a consequence of the fact that since they denote a unique referent they cannot be indefinite, and they do not have a plural form except in special cases where they are used as common nouns."
This lead us to reading these lines quite differently:
Apollo is God
Apollo is the God
Apollo is a God
Appolo is the god.
Apollo is a god
Allah is God
Allah is a god
God is a god
God is not a god
The god was God
Waiting for God
Good god!
Allah be praised!
Jehovah be damned!
God is great!
The gods must be crazy.
God is Love
......... and obviously translating these words can also lead to many a synaptic mixup with the resulting concepts as diverse as the individuals reading them. Add pro-nouns and it gets even more specific with capitalisation.
Let's look at the OP again with all this in mind as we try to answer the poll:
'no way' (sic) can mean belief in a whole different 'god' to the one so skillfully portrayed in the OP - because disbelief in one god (or God) doesn't necessarily mean disbelief in every god (or portrayal of God.)
As I mentioned we will examine Patrik's aretalogy later (is he 'Christian'? which god is he referring to? 'he' must be still around under another 'name') so that we can rectify the confusion in here between fundamentalists and active atheists about who 'god' or (God) really is or shouldn't be, hopefully at the same time undisturbed by them as we try to uncover this masterful bit of trolling that was set up in the OP (so fiercely guarded by some) to cause strife and instigate the loss of members.
