Author: zipfslaw1

J’ai bien reçu cet SMS du chiot d’un pote aujourd’hui :

yavê une feui é jl’é reniiiphlé é yavê dé krokè é sétè miam miam et pui jé fê pipi é popo et pui jmesui fê un peti som et pui jé fê pipi et pui yavê un ouoyzo et jé hurlé trê férossmen et ysanètalé et pui on a jwé roy de la montanie et pui jé fê un peti som et pui jé fê pipi é pui ma seur m’a bouskulé et jé di “iapiapiap” é pui on a rennniphlé un ballllon é pui on a jwé loup-garou é pui jé fê pipi é pui jmsui fê un peti som et pui jé fê pipi

Nul en ponctuation mais il se débrouille pour bien exprimer ce qui lui passe quand même, hein ?

French notes: You’ll find the names of some dog breeds below.  (I have no idea how one pronounces chow-chow in French.)  One of the delightful aspects of regulation in France: you can call your purebred dog  (le chien de race) anything you want, but its registry name has to start with the official letter of that year.  2017 is N, so look for lots of registry names like Ninou, Nanette, or Nadine until fin décembre, and then lots of puppies named things like Olivier, Odette, or Ourson beginning January 1st…  One of the delightful aspects of the language itself is the occasional presence of names for males and females of a given breed, but the only one that I know off the top of my head is levrette–no limite remarks necessary on that one, but I’d love to hear about others in the Comments section…

When I’m in the US, I live in the Wild West, and that means rabbits.  Where there are rabbits, there are probably man-eating rabbits, and I hate them.  So, the chart explaining rabbit coat coloration that you see above intrigued me–to survive the man-eating rabbits, you must be able to spot them, and you can’t always rely on seeing their long, sinister ears protruding from the grass, so you need to know their coat colors.  But, how do those particular genes explain the devilishly sly diversity of color and pattern that you see in the illustration?

For context, let me give you the rundown (as I understand it–bear in mind that I’m a linguist, not a geneticist) on Labrador retrievers:

• Labs come in three colors: black, “chocolate,” and yellow.
• Which color they are is determined by two genes.
• One gene determines whether your hair is black or “chocolate.”
• The other gene determines whether or not your hair has any pigment (think of pigment as the molecule that actually has the color) at all.
• If you have the form of the gene (the “allele”) that allows your hair to have a color, then you will be either black or “chocolate” (assuming that you are a Labrador retriever).
• If you have the form of the gene (the “allele”) that keeps your hair from having any pigment at all, then regardless of which form of the black-versus-chocolate gene you have, you will be yellow–yellow being what a Labrador retriever hair looks like if it doesn’t have any pigment deposited therein.

My point being: you don’t actually need to have a large amount of genetic variability to get a large amount of “phenotypic” variability (in this case, variability in appearance)–actually, very few things are affected by a single gene.  Rather, most traits are affected by a combination of a number of different genes.

OK, so: how do those rabbits come about?  They differ not just in their colors, but in the pattern of those colors.  Here’s a reasonable guess.

The odd data point in that graphic is the Himalayan.  Everybody else is monochrome, but the Himalayan has a color difference between his (I’m pretty sure that rabbits are generically male, probably due to the known viciousness of the man-eating variety–le lapin anthropophage in French, el conejo antropófago in Spanish, Lepus anthropophagos in Latin, I think, but I couldn’t swear to it) extremities and his…well, everything else.

You’ve seen that pattern before–in Siamese cats, for instance.  My understanding is that the distribution–lighter towards the center, darker at the extremities–is related to reduced blood flow in said extremities.  The reduced blood flow gives you a reduced temperature, and that has some effect or another on the deposition of pigment.  (As I said, don’t quote me on this–I’m a linguist, not a Siamese cat expert.)  Looking at the rabbit that way, you wonder: OK, dark on the extremities and light on the rest, but which dark?  Which light?  Why doesn’t the rabbit have the same colors as a Siamese cat, for instance?  (Think of the evolutionary advantage for a rabbit who looked like a cat–it would be soooo much easier to get humans to take you in, in which case if you were the man-eating variety of rabbit, you could just gobble those overly-trusting humans right down.)

I went digging around for evidence for this explanation for the coloration patterns in Siamese cats.  I found a few papers on a group of related temperature-sensitive tyrosinase mutations that are associated with eye color differences in a range of Siamese cats and Himalayan mice and a rare mink discovered on a ranch in Nova Scotia–and with albinism in humans. (As an albino, your likelihood of going blind due to a lack of protective pigment in the iris and the retina is high–and that’s why we spend your tax dollars on studies of Himalayan mice.)  I found a paper on a temperature-sensitive tyrosinase mutation in a human with the following: white hair in the warmer areas (scalp and axilla) and progressively darker hair in the cooler areas (extremities) of her body. I haven’t tracked it down to the fur color question in Siamese cats, though.  Still think I just make this shit up?  Here’s the paper on the mink found on the ranch in Nova Scotia.  I mean, yeah, I make up the zombies and the man-eating rabbits–but, the rest of the stuff is “for reals,” as the kids say.

Look to the left, look to the right: if the colors in the figure are true to life, the Himalayan rabbit extremities are the color of the rabbit to the left, while the center is the color of the rabbit to the right.  (I am cursed to always remember a scene from an autobiography that I read when I was a kid.  The author has been arrested by the NKVD and finds himself in their notorious Lubyanka prison.  Whenever a prisoner is taken from one room to another, the machine-gun-toting guards intone step to the left, step to the right: attempt to escape.  The NKVD were murderous fuckers, and the threat was entirely believable.  Hence: look to the left, look to the right.)  Likely cause of the pattern of the Himalayan: temperature-dependent pigment deposition gradient of whatever pigment the chinchilla and albino rabbits have or do not have.

Yes, I have been known to spend my Saturday mornings looking for scientific literature on the topic of pigmentation deposition in Siamese cats when I could have been taking a walk in the beautiful fall weather.  This is probably related to why I get divorced so often.  French notes below–no English notes today.

French notes

le dépôt: deposition, in the sense of deposition of a substance.  This seems to be what would be used to talk about pigment deposition.  For example:  La synthèse et le dépôt de mélanines continuent jusqu’à ce que la structure interne ne soit plus visible, on parle alors de mélanosome de stade IV.  (biologiedelapeau.fr)  

le gisement: deposit, in the sense of a deposit of minerals, of archeological finds, and the like.  I haven’t been able to find any examples of it being used in a medical or biological context to refer to deposition of pigments in the skin.

I am of the “write about what you DON’T know” philosophy, and I sure as hell don’t know how to speak French.  So: today, here are two words that native speakers of English (say, me) tend to have trouble with in French: emporter  and emmener.   They both can be translated as to take, but they get used in different contexts.

First, I recommend that you check out this video on the topic from the Learn French with Pascal YouTube series.  Pascal’s explanations are always clear, he always has good examples, and he will give you native speaker pronunciations.  For example, emmener can be pronounced with or without the medial e, and he demonstrates both of them.  Scroll down after you’ve watched the video, and I’ll give you a bunch of examples from the Sketch Engine web site.

[https://youtu.be/xrDcv8KIf3o]

Pascal’s take on these two verbs is that you use them as follows:

•  emmener in a situation where the thing being taken can move on its own.  He lists people and animals as the two kinds of things with which you would use emmener.
• emporter when the thing that is being moved cannot move on its own–for example, a package.

Let’s see how this holds up in practice.  As we’ll see, it seems to be the case that these are more like heuristics than absolute rules; more probabilistic than deterministic.  In other words: the observations hold true more often than not, but there can be some variability.  To find these examples, I went to the Sketch Engine web site.  It allows you to search multiple corpora (singular corpus)–that is, collections of language that have been analyzed in some way.  I used the DGT French corpus, which is intended to support translations and therefore gives us English equivalents, as well as the frTenTen corpus.  It contains 9.9 billion words scraped from the Web.  When I got my results back, I randomized their order so that I wouldn’t be biased towards any particular sets of documents.

• Objet: exemption de l’exigence d’ emporter un document de transport et une déclaration du transporteur pour certaines quantités de marchandises dangereuses définies sous 1.1.3.6 (n1). 
  • Subject:Exemption from the requirement to carry a transport document and a shippers’ declaration for certain quantities of dangerousgoods as defined in 1.1.3.6 (n1).
  • Comment: these are documents, therefore not capable of moving themselves, therefore emporter.
• Les voyageurs ne peuvent emporter dans leur bagage à main que des marchandises dangereuses destinées à leur usage personnel ou professionnel. 
  • Only dangerous goods for personal or own professional use are permitted to be carried in hand luggage.
  • Comment: we’re talking about dangerous goods of some sort, and apparently those dangerous goods do not include, say, tigers (which are capable of movement on their own), so: emporter.
• Et au lieu d’ emporter la pizza, j’ai eu envie de manger sur place, pour changer un peu…
  • Comment: it’s a pizza that’s being (or not) transported, therefore emporter.
• Où est-ce que je nous ai emmenés ? 
  • Comment: the object pronoun is “us,” therefore the transportees are animate (alive), therefore they are capable of moving themselves, and therefore the verb is emmener.  
• Indique-moi juste le chemin de ta villa, je t’y emmène.
  • Comment: the thing being taken somewhere can show something, so it is animate and sentient, so it can move on its own, so the verb is emmener.
• La vie de Caroline est monotone, et sans surprise : chaque matin son père l’ emmène à l’école, et le soir une étudiante pas très sympa vient la chercher.
  • Comment: Caroline is human, so she can move on her own, so the verb is emmener.
• Sécuriser les appâts afin qu’ils ne puissent pas être emmenés par les rongeurs.
  • Secure bait blocks so that they cannot be dragged away by rodents.
  • Comment: I have no clue why this is emmener.  By Pascal’s rule, since the things being moved–les appâts–are not capable of moving themselves, this should be emporter.
• Le véhicule est alors emmené au moteur jusqu’à l’enceinte de mesure, en utilisant au minimum la pédale d’accélérateur.
  • The vehicle is then driven to the measuring chamber with a minimum use of the accelerator pedal.
  • Comment: maybe this is emmener because a vehicle is capable of moving under its own power (so to speak)?
• Dans les 5 minutes qui suivent l’achèvement de l’opération de préconditionnement décrite au paragraphe 5.2.1., le capot-moteur est fermé et le véhicule est emmené hors du banc à rouleaux et est parqué dans la zone d’imprégnation.
  • Within five minutes of completing the preconditioning operation specified in paragraph 5.2.1. above the engine bonnetshall be completely closed and the vehicle driven off the chassis dynamometer and parked in the soak area.
  • Comment: another example of emmener with a vehicle.

There are other verbs that refer to taking stuff places–apporter, amener, ramener–but this is about all my little head can handle for one day.  Native speakers: have at it in the Comments section, please!