Author: zipfslaw1

The best map of Paris, and what it tells us about the nature of human language

There are no good maps of Paris. This leads us to some interesting observations about the nature of human language.

Spoiler alert: there is no great map of Paris.  There never has been.

435px-Arrest_of_Louis_XVI_and_his_Family,_Varennes,_1791
The arrest of Louis XVI and his family, dressed as members of the bourgeoisie, in Varennes. By Thomas Falcon Marshall (1818-1878). Picture source: This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art (Wikipedia).

Graham Robb maintains that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads in part because of the lack of a good map of Paris.  In his book Parisians: An adventure history of Paris, he tells the story of how the French royal family planned to sneak out of the Tuileries Palace under cover of darkness.  Unfortunately for them, their departure was badly delayed when Marie got lost trying to find the place where the carriage was waiting for them; due to the delay, they were spotted in Varennes the next day, stopped, arrested, and eventually beheaded.  (See this Wikipedia page for more details.)

It really wasn’t that hard to get lost.  Until the Hausmannian reconstruction in the mid-19th century, Paris was a typically medieval mess of tiny streets intersecting at bizarre angles, and in truth, it mostly still is.  Robb explains the maplessness situation like this:

Screenshot 2016-07-12 17.19.42

It still isn’t that hard to get lost in Paris.  And, there still isn’t a great map.  However, there are certainly more maps than there were in 1791, and they each have their strong points.  The basic issues to think about when picking your map(s) of Paris are:

  • You need sufficient detail.  Paris is still full of those tiny, crooked medieval streets, and you want a map that shows all of them.
  • You want to know which metro lines the metro stations on your map serve.
  • You want a size that will be convenient for you to carry and wrestle with.

The problem is that if there’s a map that does a good job with both of these, I haven’t found it yet.  Here’s a quick review of what’s available.

  • Don’t rely on any map in a guidebook that you’ll be reading on a Kindle.  I’ve found Kindle maps (at least of Paris) to be more or less worthless.
  • Paris Pratique is more or less the standard, as far as I can tell.  If you see a Parisian pull out a map, it’s probably going to be this one.  It’s sold in every news kiosk in Paris, so you can wait until you get there before buying one.  There are different versions–with and without the suburbs, large and small format, and probably others.  Advantages: the version that you see the most is small enough to carry in a back pocket, and it is super detailed.  It gets updated every year–you’ll see the publication date on the cover.  Disadvantages: it’s so detailed that if you’re as old as I am, it might be hard for you to read, and it doesn’t show which metro lines the stations serve.
  • Streetwise Paris: this is the easiest map to find in the US.  It’s printed on heavy stock and laminated, so it will take a beating while you carry it around on your adventures, and it also won’t flop around in your hands as you attempt to figure out where you are while your kids whine about wanting to go to McDonald’s.  Advantages: It shows the metro lines that serve the metro stations.  It’s both detailed and big enough to read, and you can buy it before you leave the US.  Disadvantages: it only shows the main parts of the city, which will be fine if you’re only planning on going to the usual areas that tourists go to, but if you plan on exploring more extensively, it may not cover every area that you plan to visit.  The trade-off for the easy readability is that it’s too big to fit in a back pocket, so unless you’re carrying a purse, it’s an obvious marker of touristness.  (More on this word below.)  It’s also hard to tell when the most recent update was done.
  • The free maps that you get at metro stations: not surprisingly, these are the best maps for navigating the metro.  They come in a larger size and a smaller size, and I would guess that most Parisian women have the smaller one in their purse.  (Not that I know every Parisian woman, but I do know a few, and they all carry one of these.)  Advantages: very good for the metro, and they don’t immediately mark you as a tourist–see above about Parisian women.  Disadvantages: not enough detail to be useful in finding your way around once you’re out of the metro station; printed on regular paper, so they flap around in the breeze.

There are plenty of mapping apps for your smart phone, and there seem to be new ones all the time.  I don’t have a favorite; features to think about when picking one:

  • Does it update to your current location automatically when you open the map?  Some do, some don’t, and sometimes you want this feature, and sometimes you don’t (e.g. if you want to keep consulting the same map without it updating to your current location constantly).
  • Can you search it for categories of places–restaurants, cafes, etc.–or just by address?
  • What kind of support does it have for walking directions?

One app that I do recommend that you download is the RATP app.  This will do a good job of finding the best metro routes for getting from point A to point B.

Earlier in this post, you saw the word touristness. Whether or not you’ve ever seen that word before, if you’re a native speaker, you probably had no trouble understanding it.  How can that be, when common conceptions of meaning hold that they are attached to words?  If that word isn’t in the language, how could I use it to say something, and how could you understand it?  The answer: the productivity of derivational morphology.

Morphology is the (study of) the structure of words.  What do I mean by the “structure” of words?  Think about the English word unlockable.  What does it mean?  It’s actually ambiguous.  It can mean capable of being unlocked, in which case you have un + lock, with unlock having able attached to it.  It can also mean not capable of being locked, in which case you have lock + able, with un attached to lockable.  These are two different structures of the parts that make up the word.  Those “parts” are called morphemes–the basic units of meaning in a language.  (We see here a problem with the common conception of meaning as being something that’s attached to words, per se, but we’ll come back to that another time.)

Morphemes–those minimal units of meaning, like un, lock, and able–can be grouped into a number of categories.  Derivational morphemes change either the meaning or the part of speech of what they’re attached to.  So, un changes the meaning of lock or of lockable to mean something like the opposite of whatever it means without un, and able changes the part of speech of lock or unlock from a verb to an adjective.  So, now you understand what I meant by derivational morphology when  mentioned the productivity of derivational morphology earlier.

One of the characteristics of human language is that it is productive.  That means that we can use it to say and to understand things that haven’t been said before.  Derivational morphology in English is something that’s quite productive–we can use it to form words that we haven’t used or heard before, and when we hear those words that we haven’t heard before, we can understand them.  Hence: it’s the productivity of derivational morphology that let me say, and that let you understand, the word touristness, even if you haven’t run across it before.

So, this is nice: we know a couple facts about language that perhaps we didn’t know before.  But: facts are generally interesting (at least from a scientific point of view) only to the extent that they have larger implications.  Here are some larger implications of the productivity of derivational morphology:

  • It illustrates a basic difference between human language and animal communication systems.  There are some fascinating animal communication systems.  The thing about them is: even the really fascinating ones only communicate a pretty limited range of meanings.  Vervet monkeys have this really cool system of calls that communicate the presence of three different kinds of threats: airborne predators, terrestrial predators, and snakes.  It’s cool because it reflects interesting abilities to categorize, and because juvenile vervet monkeys display errors in using the system that are very much like a type of error that human children display when learning human languages.  But: the only things that it can communicate are the presence of one of these three kinds of threats.  A vervet monkey can’t say anything that hasn’t been said before.  Contrast that with your ability to use derivational morphology productively, which lets you say–and understand–things that have never been said before.
  • It raises a problem for the idea that meaning is a property of words.  A couple problems, actually.  One problem: it suggests that there has to be a unit of meaning that is smaller than the word.  Another problem: if words have their meanings by being shared within the community of speakers of a language, then how can you explain the ability of speakers of the language to understand a new word, which by definition cannot have been shared?
  • It raises a problem for any easy behaviorist explanation of human linguistic behavior.  If you want to claim that know a word because you’ve learnt some association between a stimulus (presumably the word) and a response (harder to define, but let’s say that your response was some sort of reinforcement, even if indirect, for having understood it), how can you explain the production and the understanding of words that you haven’t been exposed to before?

So, you probably want to draw conclusions something like these:

  • Meaning is attached to morphemes, not to words.  We can share the meanings of the morphemes within a community of speakers of a language–no problem.  We probably don’t understand those morphemes by means of any simple behaviorist phenomenon of stimulus/reinforcement, though.

You can find 22 interesting maps of Paris at this link.  They won’t help you find the street that you’re looking for, but they have lots of interesting information on things like rental prices, where to rent bikes and scooters, locations where movie scenes were filmed, refugee camps–all sorts of stuff.

Back to maps: when figuring out your way around town, keep in mind that streets have a bad habit of changing names abruptly.  One minute you’re on blvd. Grenelle, and the next it’s turned into ave. Garibaldi.  This is important if you’re planning on walking down street X until you come to street Y–you have to bear in mind that street Y might be called one thing to your left, but something entirely different to your right.

Back to Marie Antoinette: the failure of the attempt to escape from Paris had a number of consequences.  Any claim that the king was in agreement with the Republican government was pretty much trashed by the fact that the king had attempted to escape from it.  Other European monarchies then worried even more that the Republican revolution would spread to other countries, which trashed relations between the new government and the rest of Europe, or a lot of it.  Louis XVI and his family were imprisoned thereafter; they were eventually tried for treason, and he and Marie Antoinette had their heads lopped off. Something to think about the next time you pull a map out of your pocket…

 Want to know more about new words and how to spot them?  Check out Orin Hargraves’s book New Words.

Lawless French: an interview with Laura Lawless

lklIf you’ve spent any time at all researching the French language on the internet, you’ve almost certainly run across Laura Lawless.  For 15 years, Laura was in charge of the biggest source on the internet for French language instructional content, and the folks that run the site tell me that her materials are still their biggest traffic draw.  Laura took time off from her busy schedule as the owner of the Lawless French web site and the marketing coordinator of Kwiziq.com, a company offering a unique artificial-intelligence-assisted language learning system, to talk with me about becoming a French teacher, the future of publishing, the excitement of the start-up boom of the 1990s, and where all of those fantastic verb tables come from.

Me: You live in Guadeloupe now.  How did you land in such an exotic location, and how do you like it?

Laura: Before moving to France, we’d spent 9 months in Costa Rica and loved it – I often said that if it were francophone, I could have happily stayed there forever.
Then we moved to France, fulfilling my life-long dream. But after 5 years there, I found that it was just too cold in the winter, even in the south. Figuring that Guadeloupe is basically the illegitimate love child of Costa Rica and France, we moved here 2½ years ago. It’s beautiful, it’s warm all the time, the people are nice – what’s not to love?

Me: Presumably part of the reason that you can live on a French island in the Caribbean (which apparently is heaven) is that you support yourself by doing web-based work.  How did you become the goddess of Internet-based French instruction?

Laura: LOL!  A combination of hermitry and luck. I’d always wanted to be an interpreter, but that dream died when I was unable to live in France for a year, which was a requirement for returning to Monterey Institute for the 2nd year of my MA in translation and interpretation. So in the late 90s, I found myself working as an admin assistant and, briefly, as an adult ed teacher. Since I was bored to tears doing the first and terrible at the second, I sat down and really thought about what I wanted to do. The answer was work at home and the timing, with the growing importance of the internet, was perfect.
I bought HTML for Dummies, learned how to build a simple website, then started looking for work. I soon found a page of job listings on a telecommuting site, one of which was something like “Be a Guide at MiningCo – I love my job and you will too!” So I took a look at the available topics, thinking vaguely that I might be able to write about dancing or California, and my heart almost stopped when I saw “French language.” I applied immediately, built a test site, my site went live in June of 1999, and MiningCo became one of the most popular sites on the internet under a new name.

Me:  OK, that is AMAZING.  How did you come to be comfortable in French?  Second language instruction is not exactly something that we’re good at in America.

Laura: Many years of studying and eventual immersion. I learned a tiny bit of French – a few pages of vocab, half a dozen essential phrases – when I was about 10, but I really started learning in high school. Sophomore year, my teacher announced a spring break trip to France, and I knew I had to go. I worked at McDonald’s to pay for two thirds of the trip (my parents paid the rest), went to Paris and Tours and Dinard and just fell in love with France.
Very soon after that I realized that I wanted to work in some kind of language related field – but not teach. So after some research and guidance counseling, I came up with the idea of being an interpreter.
Seeing/hearing simultaneous interpretation blew my mind.  Simultaneous interpretation is the most difficult form of interpretation–one person says something live, and you interpret it in “real time.”  You’re listening and speaking at the same time. Have you ever been talking to someone and heard your name from another part of the room?  So you try to listen to what that person is saying while still carrying on your conversation?  It’s kind of like that.    Simultaneous interpretation is the most efficient form of interpretation from the point of view of rapidity of communication, but also the most difficult–-you have to listen, understand, mentally convert (being sure to take into account not just grammar and vocabulary but also cultural differences), and speak, all at the same time. (Besides, that, you generally have no resource materials, and even if you did, there’s no time to use them.)  I wanted to be able to do that. And while I firmly believe that anyone and everyone can learn a foreign language with the right motivation, I do feel like I have a bit of an advantage because of the way my brain works. I’m not bored or frustrated by seemingly arbitrary grammar rules; on the contrary, I’m fascinated by them, and being interested in what you’re learning makes a huge difference.
Even so, it wasn’t until I actually spent some serious time in France – a month and a half in Rouen after 8 years of high school and college French classes – that everything started coming together. Learning from books and in the safety of a classroom is one thing, but the moment of truth comes when you’re actually out there using it. That was when I felt the first glimmers of fluency – I could literally feel my French improving every day. Despite making many mistakes, I started feeling more and more comfortable speaking French, and it just kept getting better after that.

Me:  Falling in love is beautiful!  Did you fall in love with French first, and then France?  Either way: tell me about falling in love.

 

Laura: I can’t really say which came first – the language and the country are woven together for me. I’d been studying French for nearly two years and it obviously spoke (ha ha) to me enough that I felt compelled to visit France. Being there, surrounded by so much history and culture and this beautiful language that I barely spoke was such an amazing experience. When I did manage to make sense of those strange sounds, it was like magic. I knew they both had to be part of my life, forever.

Me: I can relate!  What’s the language situation in Guadeloupe?  Do people speak French? Creole? Some combination?

Laura: Guadeloupe is an overseas French department – it’s just as much a part of France as any department on the “mainland.” (It’s like Hawaii and Alaska in the US.) So the official language is French and that’s what’s taught in schools – everyone speaks it.
Most people also speak Antillean Creole, which is based on French but also includes aspects of African languages and Igneri (the language spoken by the Caribs, who wiped out the original Arawak inhabitants of the island). Like all of the many creoles in the world, it is a fully-featured language, not just an impoverished form of French, used by writers like Raphaël Confiant–I can make out a few words here and there, but not enough to get the gist of the conversation.

Me: You had a rather unusual experience with the Internet boom–you worked for a start-up or two, but as a content matter expert, not as the typical techie.  What was that like–the vibe, the times, the energy?

Laura: In the beginning, it was fantastic! My site went live in June ’99, so I barely missed out on stock options (which were eventually extremely lucrative for some of my colleagues).  Right after I started, the Red Ball was announced: a completely over-the-top promotional event consisting of an all-expenses-paid, 4-day weekend in Las Vegas. IIRC, more than half of the then 650 content creators attended. There were expert panels and expo booths and even a few celebrities. But the best part was meeting other content creators and, to a lesser extent, staff (editors, CEO, etc).
All content creators were freelancers, there was no office we met in daily – or ever – so we got to know each other through chatrooms, forums, and listservs. We talked about work, of course, shared successes and failures, and quickly branched off into personal chitchat, so many of us became friends. Then we met IRL, and let me tell you, there’s just nothing quite like meeting people you’ve known online for a while.
After the Red Ball, content creator events were held a few times a year in different cities, but they were just for company announcements, training sessions, networking, stuff like that. We had to pay our own transportation and lodging. I attended half a dozen over the years and visited the New York offices (where staff worked) a couple of times, and meeting other content creators was always the highlight, by far.

Me: You’ve written a book or two (and their reviews on Amazon are truly impressive–way better than mine!).  What are your thoughts on the future of publishing, at least publishing language instructional materials, in these days where everyone seems to expect to be able to find all information for free on line?

 

Laura: Ugh, I don’t know. I got started teaching online, and my content has always been free, so I thought that when I wrote a book, my readers would all buy it as a sort of thank you, but that’s just not the case. Which is OK, because if it had been a tremendous success I’d probably feel obliged to write more, but I don’t want to. Writing a book is hard, especially when working with an editor and a publisher with whom you have, let’s say, creative differences. Aside from that, I find those monster deadlines – 3 chapters by August – very difficult. I do great with little deadlines – a new lesson by Friday – so working online is perfect for me.
Sorry, got a little off-track there. The thing is that authors do far more work than they get paid for – they do at *least* 50% of the work, but only earn 8-15% of the sale price (and then typically lose 15% or so of that to their agent). I’ll never do that again – if I do feel inclined to write a book, it will definitely be self-published. And since, as you said, most everyone wants everything to be free, I’ll probably have to sell it for 99 cents which means it’s not worth it which means I won’t be writing any more books. LOL, how’s that?

Me:  Quite the ride!  It seems like all of that experience led really naturally to, and prepared you for, your current project.  What can you tell us about that?

Laura: It definitely did! During my 15 years at the network, I wrote something like 6,000 pages of lessons and other types of content, sent 2 newsletters a week (plus several automated e-courses), managed 5 forums, answered countless emails, did all of my own marketing, etc., etc. I was completely obsessed with it and it was very difficult to leave (before you ask, it was my decision and due to creative differences).
I thought briefly about doing something completely different, because the idea of starting over was unbearable. Not just recreating thousands of pages of French content that I don’t hold the copyright to, but competing with that behemoth of a site in search engines. For years, I was at the top of Google for just about every French grammar or vocabulary topic you could think of. Google likes big sites, it likes longevity, and it loves – or loved – my site. Interestingly, a lot of my old content isn’t doing as well any more, so the competition isn’t quite as fierce as I’d feared.
Anyway, that pity party lasted all of 5 minutes, because the fact is that I’m really not capable of doing anything else. I still love French, I still love France, and I still love writing about both of them. So I created LawlessFrench.com and got down to work rewriting lessons, recreating verb tables, and revamping (and renaming) the Subjunctivisor. It’s been 2 years and I’ve recreated close to 1,500 pages of content, plus written tons of new material.
It’s an uphill battle. Since all my old content is still there, I have to not just rewrite everything, but improve upon it: rethink each topic completely to make sure that I’ve covered it from every angle. Some of my new lessons are considerably better than the old ones.  Most importantly, I have complete control over the contents, and I’m very open to suggestions about content, too.
I am starting to place well in Google for a few pages, but I’m probably still years from actually making a living from Lawless French. Fortunately, I got involved with the British start-up Kwiziq last year, first as an Education Partner with a co-branded site, progress.lawlessfrench.com, and then by joining the company (remotely, of course) as marketing coordinator. It’s pretty much a match made in heaven, and my only regret is that I didn’t go out on my own a year or two sooner.

Me: OK, an aside: do you type all of those verb tables by hand??

Laura: The irregular ones, yes. When there are patterns, as for regular verbs, I use an existing table as a template and just find/replace the stem.
Me: OK, there’s one more question that I HAVE to ask you: what’s the story behind your last name?
Laura: LOL!  Marriage. I normally wouldn’t have changed my name, but who can say no to Lawless? As a friend of mine recently pointed out, Laura Lawless sounds like a superhero name. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of Ls, so that’s why I always include my middle initial.

 

I broke my finger and now I’m writing Old French: why French and English spelling are both so bizarre

Where do all of those accented letters come from in French, and what does that have to do with my broken finger?

judo hands 1c3ac19fabe33edd524985ab92bbc972
Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/478296422904013134/

A few years ago, I broke a finger in a judo class.  It was nothing spectacular–I got my finger wrapped up in a guy’s collar, somebody moved the wrong way, and I felt it snap.  I scooted over to one of the aged teachers with half of my finger pointing out at a weird angle, he grabbed it and did something and it stopped hurting, and I went home and taped it up.

Over the course of the following weeks, I learned to type with one non-functional finger, and all was fine.  I spend the vast majority of my day typing, and I just kept doing the same thing for years–no problem.

Then I started hanging out in France, and writing lots of emails in French.  I never learnt to switch to a French keyboard, so I’ve been doing digital (in the sense of “with my fingers”) gymnastics to write the many accented characters, and that’s been fine, too.

However, the other night I was awake working into the wee hours of the morning.  2 AM came along, and I was tired and had an aching headache, along with the arthritis that I always have in that broken finger.  All of a sudden those digital gymnastics weren’t so OK.  In my next email, I included a little note: I’m going to start writing an s instead of an accent.  (If it’s in italics, it happened in French.)  So, même became mesme, écrire became escire, and so on.

This elicited no comment whatsoever–the email correspondence went on just as if I was using accents normally.  The reason that this could work without a hitch: in using an s instead of an accent, I was just going back to an older French spelling.

People often ask why French spelling is so bizarre.  They ask the same thing about English.  The cool thing is, they’re both bizarre in the same way.  This is because both spelling systems primarily try to reflect not the pronunciation of a word, but rather its meaning and/or history.  So, in English, we have the spellings electric, electricity, and electrician–three different pronunciations of that second c, which reflects how we say the word pretty poorly, but reflects very nicely the relationships in meaning between the three words.  We write knife and knight, which reflect the pronunciations of those words poorly, but reflect very nicely the history of those words, which originally did start with a k sound.

French spelling tends to work the same way.  Tête has an accent over the first ê to reflect the fact that it was originally teste.  Écrire with its accent over the first é reflects the fact that it was originally escrire. 

The title of this post implies that this is an Old French pronunciation and spelling, but I could just as well have said Middle French.  This is because there’s not a lot of cross-dialectal consistency in when these s‘s disappeared, and there’s also not a lot of consistency in when various and sundry authors started reflecting that change in pronunciation by replacing the disappeared s’s with accents.

You may be wondering: if s’s disappeared, why does French still have them?  How can we have saint, sacré, and savate?  In this case, it has to do with the fact that the s’s went away only before other consonants.  Saint: no problem, because the s is before a vowel.  Teste becomes tête because the s preceded a consonant.  So: how can we have écrire from the original escrire, but still have escroc?  How can we have tête from teste, but still have test?  The answer is typically related to when the words entered the language.  Teste is an original French word, descended from Latin.  Test was borrowed from English late in the 17th century, long after the loss of s in front of a consonant (probably around the 11th century, but see above about the inconsistency in the timing), and it didn’t undergo that change.

You can see similar patterns in English.  English words that start with the sh sound typically were originally pronounced with an sk–shirt, ship, shape, etcetera.  Often, though, we also have a corresponding word that comes from the same root historically, but is pronounced with an sk sound.  Shirt and skirt come from the same root; ship and skiff; and a number of others.  How can we have both the sh that developed from sk, and also the sk sequences?  Because the sh words were original to the various and sundry Anglo-Saxon varieties.  The words with sk were borrowed from various and sundry Old Norse words from the same roots, Old Norse being the language spoken by the Vikings who beat the shit out of England (and much of the rest of Europe, including a lot of northern France) in the Middle Ages.  This was after the sk t0 sh change had happened in Old English, and we kept the sk sounds in those new words.

Now, the whole accents-over-vowels thing in French is all more complicated than this.  Here are some facts that I’ve left out of the discussion:

  • other consonants disappeared and also get reflected with an accent
  • there was a vowel lengthening that I haven’t talked about that’s also reflected in the current uses of accents
  • some accents are probably there purely to indicate differences in meaning, without necessarily reflecting former differences in sound
  • the evolution of the spelling system is still ongoing, and the use of accents is one of the things that will change somewhat when the next spelling reform becomes official at the beginning of the 2016 academic year
  • there are other things that contribute to the bizarreness of both French and English spelling, particularly in the case of vowels in English

If you want more of the technical details and can read French, I would suggest starting with this Wikipedia page on French spelling, and then following the link to this page on the accent circonflex in French.

My arthritic formerly-broken finger still hurts most days, but I’m not as cranky as I was the other night, and I’ve gone back to typing accents again.  I find it interesting that when the spelling reform showed up in the news this past winter, many of the most vociferous complaints came from native speakers of English, rather than from French people–the general attitude was something along the lines of “I spent years learning those fucking accents–you can’t take them away from me now!”  For my part, I find them quite charming–half of the fun of writing French is those accents, and my favorite French words tend to be ones where every possible vowel has an accent.  So: yes, French and English spelling are both quite bizarre, but there’s a method to the madness, and you can make a good case that they improve reading comprehension.  So, try to accept them both in good humor–there are plenty of worse things to complain about in the world.

Case in point: Republican politicians are mostly up in arms about two things right now.  One of them is regulating which bathrooms transgender people should use.  The other is ensuring that Americans can easily get access to firearms.  The most frequently-cited justification for controlling which bathrooms transgender people use is the possibility of a male-t0-female transgender person sexually molesting a female.  I don’t know what the most frequently-cited justification for ensuring that Americans can easily get access to firearms is.  What I do find interesting in this context is the following sets of numbers.  The number of times that a male-to-female transgender person has sexually molested a female in a bathroom is 0.  That’s zero, if you have trouble reading numbers on a computer screen.  The number of firearm deaths in the United States in the past 72 hours is 69.  Here are some details on the most recent ones:

  • A two-year-old child in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  The shooter is unknown.  See here for the news story.
  • One person in Memphis, Tennessee.  See here for the news story.
  • Two people in one incident in Indianapolis, Indiana.  See here for the news story.
  • A guy shot by his seven-year-old son in Gratiot County, Michigan.  Quote from the news story: Police say the boy took the gun from a locked case after finding the keys and accidentally shot his dad.  See here for the news story.

And yet: many, many Republican politicians are passionate about keeping transgender people out of the bathroom of their choice, and even more passionate about ensuring that Americans have easy access to firearms.  Go figure…

Things to do in Paris on a Sunday

The French tend to value their time off more than Americans do.  In general, people are willing to trade the little bit of extra money that they would make by keeping their business open on Sunday for more time with family and friends.  Consequently, the majority of things are closed on Sunday in France.

That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon, though.  Here are some options for you.  They’re slanted towards the kinds of things that I like to do, of course–this is my list!  If you don’t like it, go to Paris and then write your own damn blog (insert smiley-face here).

Café philo: This is one of my favorite Sunday-morning activities.  It seems to be a lot of peoples’ favorite Sunday morning activity–the ones that meet on Sunday morning (I said “ones” because I can’t figure out how to pluralize café philo–native speakers, can you help??) always seem to be quite full, and maybe standing room only.  The original café philo at the Café des Phares on the place de la Bastille meets on Sunday mornings, actually.  Note that this kind of thing is a lot of fun if you have a pretty good handle on French, but probably isn’t any fun at all if you don’t.  (I should mention that I have even more trouble than usual following the discussion at the Café des Phares precisely because there are so many people there that they have to pass around a microphone, and that makes it harder for non-native speakers to understand.)

Church: I recommend this not out of any particular interest in your eternal salvation (I’m Jewish, personally), but because it can be a really nice experience.  The vast majority of those ancient churches that you see in Paris (see this post for how many there are, and why there are so many) are still functioning regularly, and if you think that they’re cool when they’re empty, imagine what they’re like with a choir singing the Mass.  There is no end of possibilities–I’ve heard the nuns at Sacré Coeur, a boy soprano in Notre Dame, and there’s a gospel group at the American Cathedral pretty much all the time, I think (possibly only in the evening).

Franglish language exchange: I highly recommend this, no matter how much or how little French you speak.  Here’s how it works: you sign up ahead of time through their web site.  This lets them balance native speakers of French and native speakers of English.  You show up up, pay 12 euros, and get a free drink.  They will have made a rotation schedule.  For the next couple hours, you spend 15 minutes each with a variety of people.  You speak one language for 7 minutes, then the other language for 7 minutes.  It is fun at worst and hysterical at best, and it really doesn’t matter what your level of skill in the other language is, or what theirs is–people adapt to each other, and you will love this.  People of all ages and backgrounds come–I’ve spoken with college students, electrical engineers, a high school teacher, a guy trying to get a start-up off the ground with his big brother.  The organizers are pretty much always looking for more native speakers of English, but do sign up beforehand.  The location varies, so check the web site, but it’s typically in a bar or cafe.

Boulinier on Saint-Michel: a little used CD and book store.  They have multiple locations.  I only know the one on Saint-Michel, so anything that I say only applies to that one.  It’s open until 9 PM on Sundays, which in a Parisian context would be amazingly late even on a weekday.  The general selection isn’t necessarily super, but they have some beautiful multi-volume sets for very good prices, and occasionally you’ll get lucky and run into something wonderful, like an old Grevisse at a price that a normal human being could actually afford.  Since it’s open so late, I tend to save this for my last stop on a Sunday.

Shakespeare and Company: This English-language bookstore is open until 11 PM on Sundays–a true rarity.  37 rue de la Bûcherie, almost right across from Notre Dame.

Markets: Some neighborhoods have their weekly or twice-weekly market day on Sundays.  You can find a great one on blvd. Grenelle under the métro tracks between La Motte Picquet-Grenelle and Dupleix (you pronounce the x at the end).  Search Google if you want to find one closer to wherever you happen to be.  Check out the aligot sellers–a highlight of my week.

2014-06-07 11.25.12Marché du livre ancien et d’occasion: tons and tons of people selling antique and used books.  I’ve occasionally found really cool stuff there, and occasionally found more or less nothing.  You can also find paper ephemera–posters, theater bills, stuff like that.  There’s a highly-rated little cafe right across the street.

Marché aux timbres: A stamp collector’s market.  I’ve never been to this one, but if you’re geeky enough to be reading my blog, this might be right up your alley.

Other markets: there’s a list of various and sundry other markets here, but it’s dated 2015, so verify: http://www.marjorierwilliams.com/best-paris-markets-open-sunday/

Lots of theater matinées mid-afternoon: most Sunday plays and concerts are mid-afternoon.  There are various and sundry web sites that will sell you cheap tickets.  If your French is not up to sitting through an entire play in the language of Molière, go see How to become Parisian in one hour–it’s entirely in English, and very popular.

Movies: The cinema is very popular in France, and that includes movies in English.  If you want to see them in English, look for VO (“version originale”) on the schedule.  There are movie theaters all over the place; I especially like the ones in St. Germaine (6th arrondissement) because it’s so easy to find a place to have a dessert before or after.

Panthéon: this is the kind of place that French tourists will go to, but foreigners don’t typically visit.  It’s basically the National Mall in Washington, DC, but all under one roof.  I recommend it especially on a Sunday afternoon because you can walk from the Panthéon through the Luxembourg Gardens to St. Germaine for a movie (see above), and that’s pretty much an entire Sunday afternoon.

Walk like crazy: Weather permitting, this is one of my favorite Sunday-afternoon activities.  You can find entire books full of planned walks in Paris, and if you want to plan something in detail, I would look for one of those.  Personally, I tend to just pick a metro stop to ride to, and then walk for 3-4 hours (with a break to sit in a café with a dessert and a book, of course).   On Sunday, one area where I know that lots of little restaurants are open is the Canal St. Martin.

Eiffel Tower/Tour Montparnasse: Sunday is pretty good timing for an Eiffel Tower visit, just because it’s open then, when so many things aren’t.  I’m not saying that it’s a good time to go up the Eiffel Tower–it probably isn’t.  Then again, no time is good for going up the Eiffel Tower–come see it, then go up the Tour Montparnasse.

So, you could imagine a full Sunday like this:

  1. Go to the market and pick up your groceries.  Drop them off at home, then…
  2. Go to a café philo.  Have a bite to eat afterwards with some of the attendees, and then…
  3. Visit the Panthéon.  From there…
  4. Walk through the Luxembourg Gardens to Saint Germaine.  There you will…
  5. Catch a movie. Then…
  6. Walk to Boulinier and pick up a book to read.
  7. Head to a café to read your book over a beverage of some sort.

…and that, my friends, is why I am counting the days until I can get back to Paris!

Where to buy non-touristy souvenirs in Paris

Want to buy non-touristy souvenirs in Paris? Here are some places to check out. You can find stuff at a range of prices, a range of tastes, and a range of weights (important when you’re packing to head home).

Nalola, 51 rue Mouffetard, 75005

img_4832Nalola on the rue Mouffetard is one of my favorite places to pick up gifts for folks back in the US.  The rue Mouffetard is one of the most touristy places in Paris.  However, Nalola is not.  They sell a ton of stuff that wouldn’t be obviously touristy at all and that is aimed more at French customers than at tourists.  This includes stuff like:

  • Coffee cups saying things like Chieuse 24/7/365 (pain in the ass 24/7/365), Pousse pas mémé dans les orties (don’t piss off mama), Les hommes sont comme les grenouilles, ils ne veulent que sauter (men are like frogs–they just want to “jump” [sauter is slang for having sex with someone])
  • “3ème oeil” kitchen towels (famous picture of a cat’s butt)

Les Parisettes, 95 ave. Emile Zola, 75015

img_4823Les Parisettes mostly sells Eiffel-Tower-related stuff, but not the usual crappy little metal Eiffel Tower replicas and the like.  Lots of historical stuff–period photos, stuff like that; some unusual guide books, mostly in French, but some with English translations; all in all, this stuff is more clearly touristy than the stuff that you’ll find at Nalola (see above) in that it’s almost entirely explicitly related to things in Parisian (versus the Nalola stuff, which is culturally French but not in a souvenir-y way at all), but it’s a big cut above the usual crap that you find in souvenir stores.  There are a couple of locations, and I’ve only been to the one on Emile Zola, but I can vouch for it.  (If anyone goes to the other one, let me know what you think…)

Shakespeare and Company, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005

Shakespeare and Company is the best-known English-language bookstore in Paris.  It has an interesting history and a great location–right across from the parvis of Notre Dame.  What you want to do here is to buy a good book (as you can imagine, there’s a great selection of books about France and French history, for example) and then get it stamped when you buy it.  This means that they put a “Shakespeare and Company” stamp on the title page.  Few people will see it, but those who do will know that this is a super-cool Parisian souvenir.  (They have other “personalization” options–one of them is spritzing your book with perfume.)  Note that this place is super-popular, and if you come on a weekend during tourist season, you can expect to wait in line to get in.

Breizh Café, 111 rue Vieille du Temple, 75003

Caramel au beurre salé (salted butter caramel) is an excellent food souvenir.  You can get them lots of places, at qualities ranging from average to really spectacular.  The Breizh Café is a restaurant with a little store attached, and that little store is where I go to pick up good-quality caramel au beurre salé.  Breizh means Brittany, and Brittany is where caramel au beurre salé originated.  The restaurant is quite good, by the way, but it showed up in a popular tourist guide a while ago, and now you generally have to wait in line to get in.  Another good option here would be a tin of crêpes dentelles, a sort of thin cookie that comes in a cool box (at Breizh Café, at any rate) with pictures of Breton girls in traditional dress on it.  I mentioned really spectacular caramel au beurre salé: see David Lebovitz‘s web site for his current recommendations.

Use an emoji, go to jail: semantics versus semiotics

If you send someone a pistol emoji, does that mean that you’re threatening them? It depends: what is “meaning,” and how can an emoji have it?

I was sitting in on a class on lexical semantics a couple years ago.  Lexical semantics is the study of the meanings of words.  What that means: think about the difference in meaning between The fairy godmother waved her baguette and The fairy godmother’s baguette waved her.  On some level, we can describe the difference in the meanings of those two sentences as coming from the facts that (a) an English sentence with a subject, a verb, and an object has the meaning that the subject did something to the object, and (b) the two sentences have different subjects and objects.  That’s not about lexical semantics, or the meanings of words–we could call that sentential semantics, perhaps.

In contrast with that, consider these sentences:

  1. Bobo swept the floor.
  2. Bobo swept.
  3. Bobo broke the glass.
  4. The glass broke.

In the case of sentence (2), Bobo did the sweeping.  In the case of sentence (4), though, the glass got broken.  To put it another way: in (2), the subject of the sentence carried out the action of the verb, while in (4), the subject of the sentence underwent the action of the verb.  This difference in meaning doesn’t have anything to do with the structures of the sentences, as was the case with the fairy godmother and her baguette–this is about the difference in meaning between sweep and break.  (For example: break involves a change in the state of something.  Sweep, in contrast, doesn’t.)  That’s lexical semantics–the study of the meaning of words.

So, back to that class: one of the folks in it started complaining about how deficient both of these approaches to thinking about semantics are.  Sure, we can formalize the meanings of words in a way that captures the differences in meaning between sweep and break.  We can formalize the meanings of sentences in a way that captures the differences in meaning between the two fairy godmother/baguette sentences.  But, what about the rest of the meaning?  How does the meaning of sweeping change, depending on whether Bobo is a property owner, or a member of the proletariat?   What does it mean that the fairy godmother is a godmother, and not a fairy godfather?  Indignation was widely shared.

Actually, this is a misunderstanding of what semantics is, versus semiotics.  Semantics is (in my version of the world) about how language means things.  Semiotics is about how meaning gets meant, in general.  If I say to you Bobo swept the floor, that’s got one kind of meaning.  If I give you a single red rose on our third date, that means something, too.  How does Bobo swept the floor mean what it means?  I can talk about that–we just did.  How does that single red rose on our third date mean what it means?  I don’t have a clue.  The meaning of the sentence: that’s semantics.  The meaning of the single red rose: that’s semiotics.  One way to think about why to study linguistics: suppose that you’re interested in the question of meaning.  You could think of language as the system of meanings that is the easiest to study.  So, if you’re into semiotics in general, then semantics might be a way to get a handle on what seems like a very large problem.  On that picture of the universe, semantics is a subset of semiotics.  (I don’t mean to imply that I think that we totally understand how meaning works in language, either–I don’t.  Indeed, we’ve had a number of posts on this blog about controversies and problems with representing the meanings of words.)

All of this came to mind recently when I came across a couple news stories on the use of emojis to convict people for various and sundry crimes.  (See below for a discussion of the differences/similarities between the English constructions a couple and a couple of.)  For those of you who have been in a digital wasteland for the past few years, here is a definition of emoji from Google:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 02.59.34
Picture source: screen shot of Google’s definition of “emoji.”

It is amazingly easy to find examples of the appearance of emoji in criminal cases.  I Googled this:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.04.55

…and got tons of results.  A 12-year-old girl in Virginia is facing charges of threatening a classmate for sending her this message on Instagram:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.05.53
Picture source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/02/27/a-12-year-old-girl-is-facing-criminal-charges-for-using-emoji-shes-not-alone/

Last year, a 17-year-old male was arrested and charged with making terroristic threats for posting these emojis of a police officer and some guns on Facebook (a grand jury later declined to indict him):

aristypost

Picture source: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/teen-arrested-after-alleged-facebook-emoji-threats/

David Fuentes and Matthew Cowan of South Carolina were arrested and charged with stalking after they sent these emoji to someone whom they’d beaten up the month before:

ambulance emoji-2-e1457457813222
Picture source: http://crimefeed.com/2016/03/3-times-emojis-landed-people-behind-bars/

Smiley-faces show up repeatedly in court cases, both criminal and civil.  Anthony Elonis’s case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  A quote from an article by Karen Henry and Jason Henry on the Law360 web site:

The defendant in Elonis v. United States had argued that his conviction for posting threatening communications on Facebook should be reversed in part because the presence of emoticons in some of the posts made them “subject to misunderstandings” and not as threatening as they would otherwise have been. For example, one of the defendant’s posts said that his son should dress up as “matricide” on Halloween, perhaps by wearing a costume of her “head on a stick.” He followed that post with an emoticon of a face with its tongue sticking out. He argued that the emoticon signaled that he was joking…

In a civil lawsuit, Universal Music Corp. tried to argue that the person who was suing them hadn’t really been injured by them, presenting as evidence the claim that an emoji that she had used in an email in which she corresponded with a friend about the case showed that she didn’t really feel that she’d actually been injured (same source):

…the evidentiary value of emoticon/emoji evidence was examined fairly recently in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (widely referred to as “the Dancing Baby” case). In that case, plaintiff Stephanie Lenz moved for summary judgment on six affirmative defenses asserted by Universal in response to Lenz’s copyright claim. Of particular relevance, Universal argued Lenz alleged in bad faith that she had been “substantially and irreparably injured” by its takedown notice. To support this argument, Universal proffered an email exchange between Lenz and her friend. In that exchange, the friend writes, “love how you have been injured ‘substantially and irreparably’ ;-).” Lenz, in turn, responds, “I have ;-).”

Universal contended that Lenz’s use of the “winky” emoticon signified that she was “just kidding.” Lenz countered that her use of the “winky” emoticon replied to the “winky” in her friend’s email, which basically was teasing Lenz about using lawyerese in her complaint — i.e., “substantially and irreparably injured.” The court sided with Lenz, finding Universal’s proffered evidence insufficient to prove Lenz acted in bad faith and granting summary judgment in Lenz’s favor on that affirmative defense.

There are multiple legal issues involved in these emoji cases, some of them just really basic procedural stuff.  If you’re reading an email out loud in a court case, do you have to read any accompanying emojis out loud?  If so: how?  Back to the Elonis case in the Supreme Court–I’m going to add in a clause that I omitted in the earlier quote (same source again):

… one of the defendant’s posts said that his son should dress up as “matricide” on Halloween, perhaps by wearing a costume of her “head on a stick.” He followed that post with an emoticon of a face with its tongue sticking out. He argued that the emoticon signaled that he was joking, but his wife interpreted the tongue sticking out in that context as an insult.

This issue–read them out loud, or not, and if so, how–came up in a case that you may have read about–the “Silk Road” case against Ross Ulbricht for running a huge “dark Web” site for selling illegal stuff:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.32.40
Picture source: screen shot of http://www.law360.com/articles/727700/exhibit-a-winky-face-emoticon-evidence-enters-courts

I write about this here and now in part because there have recently been a couple of similar cases in France (see here for Bilal Azougagh’s case), and I suspect that the French courts will do a much better job of hashing out the theoretical issues behind this than the US courts have so far.  In reading about this issue in the US, I’ve come across “useful” observations like the claim that unlike words, emoji don’t have clear and unambiguous meanings–total linguistic bullshittery, as words don’t have clear and unambiguous meanings in any human language that I’m aware of.  These are difficult and (to me) interesting questions/problems, and I look forward to seeing the French legal system do a much better job of getting at the underlying philosophical issues than the American courts have so far, that being something that the French have much more of a propensity for (and much better educational preparation for) than Americans do.

French notes (scroll waaaay down for the English notes)

For some random Zipf’s-Law-induced vocabulary items, let’s look at the French Wikipedia page on emoji:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.46.33
Picture source: screen shot of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Vocabulary item: I’ve been trying to get straight on the many uses of the verb répandre, and here it is!  (See above about words not having clear and unambiguous meanings.)  Two of the many potential meanings of se répandre that are possibly relevant here (from WordReference.com):

  • se répandre (s’etendre) (sur?): to spread.
  • se répandre (envahir, se disséminer) (dans?): to spread out, to invade.

I’d also like to know the genders of emoji and émoticône.  Let’s see what evidence we can find:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.54.43
Picture source: screen shot of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Certains rather than certaines suggests that emoji is a masculine noun.  Emoticône is easier to figure out:

Screenshot 2016-07-06 03.56.53
Picture source: screen shot of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89motic%C3%B4ne

Une, so: feminine noun.

Back to the lexical semantics lecture: I followed my classmate’s rant with my own, along the lines of the semantics/semiotics split that I talk about above.  The professor gave me an odd look when I suggested that it would mean something if I gave her a single red rose, but otherwise, there were no repercussions that I know of.  Watch this space for further developments.

English notes

I used the expression a couple a couple times in this blog post.  See these links for some discussions of the use of a couple versus a couple of:

It’s complicated–there are situations where either one is fine, and situations where only one of the two is fine.  Here is a little data.

A couple is mandatory:

  • I have a couple (fine)
  • I have a couple of (not OK at all)

A couple of is mandatory:

  • I have a couple them (not OK at all)
  • I have a couple of them (fine)

Either is fine (although I prefer a couple, personally):

  • I have a couple apples (fine)
  • I have a couple of apples (fine)

A couple of is mandatory:

  • I have a couple them (not OK at all)
  • I have a couple of them (fine)

How we’re sounding stupid today: I readed it in college

In which I try to talk about literature, and end up sounding even stupider than usual.

readed xqQV7
Picture source: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/145638/why-do-we-say-and-write-read-instead-of-readed-for-the-past

Like I always say: it’s the little things that get you.  I was chatting with a friend the other day.  Stendahl’s The red and the black, one of the more famous French novels of the early 19th century, came up.  They know about “The red and the black” in the United States?, asked my friend?  (If it’s in italics, it happened in French.)  Oh, yes, I said–I readed it in college. 

I read it in college, my friend corrected me.  Readed–that’s cute!  But, it’s read. Fuck–it’s always those little things…  I got my only C on a literature paper–ever–for a paper on The red and the black, and consequently have never forgotten it.  So, I can talk about unfulfilled homosexuality in Stendahl’s masterpiece, but I can’t say the past tense of the verb to read in French without sounding like a 2-year-old.  ‘tain!

My problem here was the past participle.  This is a form of the French verb that is used in some past tenses, in passives, and occasionally as an adjective.  I need to take a French proficiency exam this fall and don’t want to make this kind of basic mistake, so let’s review.

You almost certainly know h0w to form the past participle of -er class verbs.  These make up about 80% of French verbs, so you hear that past participle a lot.  I’m not aware of any irregular -er verb past participles.  This includes -er verbs that have changes to the stem in some tenses.  For example:

donner donné
appeler appelé
récupérer récupéré
jeter jeté

Now: regular -ir class verbs.  Although the -er verbs are the most common in French, the Lawless French web site points out that there are several hundred regular -ir verbs.  The regular -ir verbs have an i at the end of their past participle.  Let’s look at a few, just to drill this into my head:

to act agir agi
to warn avertir averti
to build bâtir bâti
to choose choisir choisi
to obey obéir obéi

Now, lots of the fun of speaking French comes from its irregularities, and we do have some -ir verbs with irregular past participles.  The Lawless French web site has a helpful page on irregular -ir verbs.  We’ll work our way through it, starting with -ir verbs that have past participles that end with -ert:

to cover couvrir couvert
to open ouvrir ouvert
to offer offrir offert
to suffer souffrir souffert

Notice a pattern there?  It’s our old friends: verbs with a labiodental fricative followed by r. (Native speakers: anyone have an example of a verb with fr or vr in the root that belongs to the -ir class and doesn’t have a past participle with -ert?)

to hold tenir tenu
to come venir venu
to become devenir devenu
to support soutenir soutenu
to refrain, to abstain from s’abstenir abstenu (native speakers, is this right?)
to reach, to achieve parvenir parvenu
to suit, to be suitable convenir convenu

The generalization? All of those verbs end not just with -ir, but with -enir.  Here’s another fun little pattern with the past participles of -ir verbs:

to acquire acquérir acquis
to conquer conquérir conquis
to inquire about s’enquérir de enquis
to recapture, to recover reconquérir reconquis
to requérir requis

I came across this little gem of advice related to this class of irregular -ir past participles in David Brodsky’s book French verbs made simple(r):

Screenshot 2016-07-03 13.17.27
Picture source: screen shot of “French verbs made simple(r),” by David Brodsky.

Easily remembered, my ass…

Now, I know what you’re thinking: I’ve given you all of these irregular past participles, but still haven’t gotten anywhere near the past participle of the verb “to read.”  To which I respond: you’re right.  However, my head is at near-explosion-point with irregular past participles already, so for now let’s just accept that I sound even stupider when speaking French than when speaking English, and let it go until another day.  Oh–number of gun deaths in the United States in the past 72 hours: 104.  Here are the most recent:

  • David Urban, South Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania (click here for news story–his wife did it)
  • Killeen, Texas.  Murder-suicide at a Dollar Store–names not released yet.  (click here for news story)
  • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  54-year-old male, name not released yet.  Drove himself to the ER with a bullet in his chest, hitting a few walls while trying to pull into the parking lot.  Died in the ER.  (click here for news story)
  • Monroe, Louisiana.  Two people shot in the Civic Center parking lot.  Names not released yet.  (click here for news story)
  • Harvey, Illinois.  49-year-old woman, name not released yet.  (click here for news story)

300th post on the Zipf’s Law blog

Dear readers,

This is the 300th post on the Zipf’s Law blog!

In the two years since I started writing miscellaneous and sundry stuff here, the blog has had 13,913 page views and 7,634 visits.  It’s hard for me to believe that what started out as a venue for sharing information about French judo clubs has turned into a blog that gets read by about 40 people per day from every continent on the planet—sometimes hundreds of people in a day. As time passed, this went from being a judo thing, to a place for me to tell my friends and family about my adventures in France in a longer format than Facebook is really made for, and then a place for me to record the French words that I learn every day (whether I’m in France, or in the US). At some point I realized that I just enjoy writing, and this blog became a place for me to scribble about whatever happens to be absorbing me at the moment, usually with some connection to the French language or to the contrasts between American and French society (to the extent that I understand either of them, which isn’t necessarily much). Sometimes I feel free to geek out on topics in computational linguistics, or the anatomy of speech, or the oddities of human language. At this point, about half of my readers come from outside of the US, and so I’ve started occasionally discussing odd corners of the English language–particularly slang and the grammar of casual conversation–along with my misadventures in learning the French language: basically, whatever garbage happens to be rolling around my head at the moment, but almost always with some connection to language, and particularly to French.

Amongst the 40 or so people who visit this blog every day, I’m especially happy about–and grateful to–the people who make my posts better by commenting on them, pointing out mistakes, adding native speaker perspectives, contributing pre-publication material and personal insights, sharing their experiences of the high points and the low points of the “Anglo-Saxon” expat experience in France, and just generally making what I write into less of a solipsistic meander and more of a conversation. I happened to look today at the number of comments that people have left on the blog–for your amusement, here’s the data:

Screenshot 2016-06-27 16.52.27

Thank you to all of you for your support, and a special thanks to Ellen Rosenblum for suggesting this in the first place!

How we’re sounding stupid today: noun phrases

Screenshot 2016-06-27 19.12.23
Picture source: screen shot of zombilingo.org.

Like I always say: it’s the little things that get you.  One of the things that I love about France is that people feel totally free to correct each other’s language, and they certainly feel free to correct mine.  (Truly, I love this–it’s such a help in trying to learn the language.)  I gave a talk in French the other day.  Descriptivism versus prescriptivism, duality of patterning, how even very small choices in building computer programs for processing human languages can imply stances on very contentious issues in linguistics–all that kind of good stuff.  I had memorized the relevant French vocabulary–la référentialité (referentiality), l’épistémologie (epistemology), inné (innate).  I was about as ready as I could be.

Not ready enough, it turns out.  One of the folks in the audience came up to me afterwards to explain a not-very-subtle word choice error that I had blown.  My mistake: I said “phrase” wrong. I was talking about groups of words smaller than a sentence, and used the French word la phrase.  Not okay!  La phrase means “sentence.”  If you want to talk about phrases, you need another word.  What that word is–that’s not so clear.

Why would one want to talk about phrases, anyway?  One of Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics that didn’t suck was demonstrating that syntax isn’t about relationships between words–rather, it’s about relationships between groups of words.  Matt Willsey gives a nice example that illustrates how this works.  In English, one could say:

  • If x, then y. 
  • Either x, or y.

You can embed these:

  • If (either x or y), then (either x or y).

You can embed things in those, too:

  • If either (a or b or c or d), then either (e and f or g and h) or (i and j but k and l).

The point: you get nowhere trying to explain this kind of hierarchical structure by means of the behavior of words.  On the other hand, you can get very far by discussing this kind of hierarchical structure in terms of groups of words.

In linguistics, we tend to refer to these groups of words as phrases.  English has noun phrases, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases–maybe more, but at least these.  (At some level, a sentence is just another kind of phrase, but we do tend to maintain some notion of “sentence.”)

Phrases are typically thought of as having something called a head.  From a syntactic point of view, you could think of the head of the phrase as the thing that determines whether the phrase behaves as a noun, a verb, or whatever.  In the following phrases, I’ve bolded the head:

  • those bananas from the corner store
  • this banana that I got from my cousins

To see why I say that the head determines how the phrase behaves, consider these sentences:

  • Those bananas from the corner store are almost rotten.
  • This banana that I got from my neighbors is just about ready for the trash can.

Prior to Chomsky, the most fully elaborated theory of how syntax works is that it was about connections between sequences of words.  What you can’t explain with that kind of model is how you can have sequences like the corner store are or my neighbors is.  To account for sequences like that, you have to have some notion of structure that can let you represent the fact that it’s the head of a group of words that controls whether the verb is singular (is) or plural (are). 

So, how do you talk about “phrases” in French?  That’s where my problem came up, and how I ended up sounding stupid.  One of my ways of trying to find acceptable technical terminology is to look things up on Wikipedia in English, and then follow the link to the corresponding French-language page.  No love: there’s an English-language page for noun phrase, but no corresponding French page.  Around the lab, some of the students call them phrases–phrase nominale, phrase verbale, etc.  The issue: la phrase is typically used to refer to a sentence.  When I gave my talk, I used the word la phrase to mean “phrase,” as some folks do around the lab.  It didn’t go over well.

So, what do you call a phrase in French?  Here are some options that I’ve found.  The one that has the most support in terms of the number of places where I found it used is one that I have never actually heard!

  • le groupe nominal/les groupes nominaux (Linguee.fr)
  • la locution nominale (Linguee.fr)
  • le syntagme nominal (Linguee.fr; Denis Roycourt’s Noam Chomsky: une théorie générative du langage, in Le langage: nature, histoire et usage, edited by Jean-François Dortier; Maurice Pergnier’s Le mot)

I even came across this, in Maurice Pergnier’s Le mot:

C’est également avec ce sens qu’on rencontre le terme [syntagme] dans les traductions françaises des ouvrages de Chomsky, pour traduire le mot anglais “phrase” (Noun-Phrase; Verb-Phrase = syntagme nominal; syntagme verbal). 

Perpignon goes on to add: Il faut noter cependant que, pour cette…école, le syntagme (angl. “phrase”) ne se définit pas seulement comme ensemble d’unités minimales, il se définit surtout comme partie de phrase, puisqu’il est dégagé par découpage de la phrase (“sentence”) selon la structure arborescente. 

So, we have a very explicit contrast between le syntagme (English “phrase”) and la phrase (English “sentence”).

Now that we know how to talk about phrases, in French and otherwise: getting a computer to find the heads of phrases can be a lot harder than it is for humans to do it.  There’s a very cool web site that lets people play a game that’s designed to create data to be used to help computers learn for themselves how to find the heads of phrases in French.  It’s called Zombi Lingo: zombie, ’cause you have to find heads, and zombies like to eat brains.  (Clearly this is a pre-Walking-Dead conception of what it means to be a zombie.)  Check it out at this link–it’s quite fun.

So, yeah–I gave a talk in which I explained duality of patterning, but screwed up the word for “phrase.”  Oh, well–as Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, would have put it: I got valuable insight into what I need to work on.

Incidentally, here are some details on some of the 85 gun deaths in the United States in the past 72 hours:

  • 3 people in one incident, Marion County, Oregon (source here)
  • 1 church deacon in Shelby County, Tennessee (source here)
  • 1 person in Houston, Texas (source here)
  • 1 person in San Antonio, Texas (source here)

I really don’t have the stomach to go through all 85 of them–sigh…  72 hours, 85 deaths…

 

How we’re sounding stupid today: synonyms

Synonyms are way more complicated than you might think.

For several years, my judo club in the States had a number of highly-ranked players on the junior national level.  The coaches decided to take them to Mexico to train at one of the national Olympic training centers, and they brought me along to interpret.  We spent a week at the training center in Guadalajara, and I interpreted for everything from practice sessions to our head coach explaining his philosophy of judo.

At the end of the week, we all piled into a bus and headed to Mexico City for the annual national tournament–a few of us grown-ups, our kids, and a lot of young Mexican children.

The bus ride was long, and going through the mountains, it was coooold.  As kids got cranky and the ride got miserable, I decided to kill two birds with one stone: distract the kids for a while, and take advantage of an opportunity to improve my Spanish.  I asked the busfull of kids what I sounded like when I spoke Spanish.  Could they imitate me?

I thought that I would learn something that I already knew–hilarious imitations of my aspirated voiceless stops, ludicrously elongated syllable nuclei, vocalic offglides, and the like. I figured that the kids would get a laugh out of it.  In fact, when you learn to do linguistic fieldwork on under-studied languages, you’re encouraged to go to adolescents for feedback–the idea is that teenagers being what they are, they might be less deferential than adults, and more willing to tell you the truth about how bad you sound.  No one was biting, though.

Finally, I managed to convince one of the older guys to speak up.  For once, the bus got quiet.  Well…you always say estoy contento (“I’m happy”) instead of  estoy feliz (also “I’m happy”). 

The kids roared–apparently, they had noticed.  They’re…you know…synonyms, he added apologetically.  Sometimes you use synonyms wrong.

Now other kids jumped in with poor synonym choices that I apparently made quite regularly.  Who knew??  It seemed to be the case that I made a lot of poor synonym choices, because this activity kept the kids in stitches for quite a while.  A bus-wide global meltdown was averted, and we reached Mexico City without any major traumas.

This story came back to me today while reading the comments on a blog post that I wrote the other day about faces.  A question came up: I gave the French words figure and visage for the English word “face,” but what about the French word face?

Simple answer: I didn’t know that the French word face meant “face.”  To my knowledge, I’ve only ever heard it in the expressions face à and faire face à.  My old nemesis: synonyms.

What is a synonym, though?  Here’s the definition from Merriam-Webster:

Screenshot 2016-06-17 06.50.30
Picture source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synonym

Linguists don’t typically like that definition of “synonym,” though.  Meaning is really, really hard to pin down (we’ve had a couple of posts on the difficulty of describing word meanings, looking at a number of options for doing so, none of which works out perfectly–see here for representing meanings with necessary and sufficient conditions, and here for representing meanings with prototypes).  We tend to use a definition more like this: two (or more) words are “synonyms” if they can freely replace each other in all contexts.  The idea would be that if you can say pail every place that you can say bucket, then they’re synonyms.  If you can’t, then they’re not.

The thing is this: on this “distributional” definition of the term “synonym,” there are almost no synonyms.  In American English, I can think of two pairs of synonyms:

  • pail/bucket
  • stone/pit (in the sense of the seed of a succulent fruit–a peach, or a plum, or an apricot)

Bullshit, you’re thinking–English is full of synonyms.  Good, virtuous, righteous, moral.  Bad, wicked, sinful, immoral.  If you look at data, though, you’ll soon see that there are almost no words in English that have this characteristic of being freely replaceable.  Rather, words that we think of as synonymous usually have subtle differences in how they’re used in the language.  In technical terms, they have different “distributions.”

Let’s take two words that I imagine every native speaker of American English would think of as synonymous: big, and large. 

All of the data on big and large in this post comes from Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen’s 1998 book Investigating language structure and use, published by Cambridge University Press.  The graphics are from my lecture notes and are based on Biber, Conrad, and Reppen’s data.

There’s a nice collection of naturally-occurring English texts called the Longman-Lancaster Corpus.  It contains 5.7 million words from fiction and from academic prose.  If you count the number of occurrences of big, the number of occurrences of large, and then convert those counts to frequencies per million words, you get this:

big versus large
Picture source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synonym

What are we seeing here?  If we look at the combined texts, we see that large occurs more frequently than big, and that’s about it–not much of interest.

If we break out the two categories of texts, though–academic prose, and fiction–something jumps out at us.  The two words have very different distributions in academic prose and in fiction.  In academic prose, large is far more common than big.  On the other hand, in fiction, big is far more common than large.  What the hell?

Let’s look at the contexts that the words show up in.  We’ll separate out academic prose and fiction, and within those categories, we’ll separate out big and large.  For each one, we’ll show the most common words that appear to the right of the word in question.

Screenshot 2016-06-17 07.15.10
Picture source: me.

We’ll only show words that show up to the right of these words at least 1 million times.  In the academic prose, that only leaves two–remember how big the bar for large was compared to the tiny bar for big in the academic prose part of the graph above.  In fiction, we see both, although you’ll notice that the numbers for the words to the right of large in the fictional texts are much smaller than the numbers for the words to the right of large in the academic prose–large just doesn’t show up as often in the fictional texts.

Think about the two sets of words–the ones that show up after big, and the ones that show up after large–and you might notice something:

  • big tends to appear before physical objects.
  • large tends to appear before amounts and quantities.

How does that relate to the differences in the distributions of the two words across academic prose, and fiction?

  • Fiction contains lots of physical descriptions, which can refer to size (and therefore uses big)
  • Academic prose is more likely to use measurements to describe size (and therefore is less likely to use big)
  • Academic prose deals more with amounts and quantities (and therefore uses large)

I’ll try not to drone on and on with details, but the effect is quite robust.  It shows up at longer distances, such as when the words are separated by an adjective: big black eyes, big black saucepan, big black mongrel dog.  It shows up when the words follow the words that they modify: The cart was not really big enough…. The revolver, which looked big enough to…. The ratio is large enough, however…. …a finite number of steps (which may be large enough to…

The moral of the story: could you substitute big and large for each other?  You could–it’s not like it’s not interpretible if you say large revolver or big quantity.  You probably do produce things like that–I’m sure I do, too.  This stuff is probabilistic–it’s about frequencies, about what you do more often or less often, not about always or never.  But: if you sound like a native speaker, you mostly don’t just swap these two words in and out randomly.  The distributions are different: if you’re a native speaker, you don’t just substitute big and large for each other freely.  You use them differently, in ways that are so subtle that you’re almost certainly not aware of it.  (I sure as hell wasn’t before I read the book.  I’ll point out that I’ve given linguistics graduate students the homework assignment of finding differences in the use of big and large for maybe ten years, and in all of that time, exactly one student has come up with this.)

So: back to the three French words visage, figure, and face, all of which correspond to the English word “face.”  How the hell could I not know that face meant “face”?  Why have I only ever heard it in face à and faire face à?  And why can’t I figure out the difference between visage and figure?  Let’s look at some data.

I went to the Sketch Engine web site.  This gives me access to a bunch of big collections of texts in an astounding variety of languages, and a tool for searching those collections.  The tool will also do analyses of statistical data–what other words a word tends to occur with in those text collections, what verbs it tends to be the subject and the object of (if it’s a noun), what nouns it tends to have as its subjects and objects (if it’s a verb), and so on.

I picked a corpus (collection of linguistic data) called frTenTen, just because it’s big–9.9 billion words.  For each word–visage, figure, and face–I got an analysis of the words that it tends to occur with, and the structures that it tends to occur in–what verbs it tends to be the subject and object of, which prepositions it tends to modify and to be modified by, and so on.  You can see screen shots of the three analyses below.

The first thing that we see is that the frequencies of the three words are different, and face is actually the most common.  In 9.9 billion words of French text, this is how often they show up:

  • visage: 115 times per million words
  • figure: 48 million times per million words
  • face: 258 times per million words

Seriously?  How did I miss face, when it shows up more than twice as often as visage, which shows up more than twice as often as figure?  If we look closely at how these words tend to combine with other words and structures, it starts to make sense.  In what follows, I’m going to focus on two things: (1) the kinds of words that modify the word that we’re talking about, and (2) the kind of words that it gets coordinated with–in other words, what kinds of words show up on the other side of the word “and” or the word “or” with the word in question.

We’ll start with le visage.  To begin with, let’s look at the words that modify it.  Visage is a noun, so these are probably going to be adjectives.  Why do I care about the words that modify it?  Because different kinds of things tend to get modified with different kinds of words.  Kittens are cuddly, warm, and cute.  Sharks are hungry, vicious, and deadly.  Knowing something about the kinds of words that modify something tells you something about how the people who speak a language think about that thing.
So, the words that modify visage: look at the box to the left in the figure below, labeled modifier.  Here are the words that we see most frequently modifying visage in that 9.9-billion-word sample:

Screenshot 2016-06-17 02.55.46
“Word sketch” of the French noun “visage.” Picture source: me.

Definitions from WordReference.com:

  • pâle:
  • impassible: impassive, calm, emotionless, and many related words
  • angélique: angelic
  • familier: familiar
  • souriant: smiling, cheerful, happy
  • ovale: oval
  • fin: in ths context: small or thin, according to what I found on Linguee.fr.

The generalization that I would suggest here is that these are all words that you would not be surprised to see being used to describe a human face.

Now let’s look at the words that most frequently show up with visage on the other side of the words “and” or “or.”  I care about this because words are often combined by and or or with similar categories of words.  For example, nouns tend to get joined with other nouns, verbs with other verbs, etc.  This time we’ll look at the fourth box from the left, labelled et_ou.  Let’s see if that suggests anything to us about how to understand visage:

  • cou: neck
  • corps: body
  • cheveu: hair (this probably shows up as cheveu rather than cheveux because Sketch Engine oftend does something called “lemmatization:” converting all forms of a word into what you might think of as their “basic” form–in the case of nouns, the singular form)
  • silhouette: profile, shape, contour
  • oeil: eye
  • lèvre: lip
  • sourire: smile

The generalization that I would suggest here is that these are mostly body parts.  Not surprising, if visage is a body part.

Now let’s look at the word that I’m struggling with–la face.  Here are the statistics:

Screenshot 2016-06-17 02.53.23
“Word sketch” of the no: northun “face” in French. Picture source: me.

Once again, let’s look at the most frequent modifiers.  Here’s what we get:

  • nord: north
  • arrière: rear
  • visible: visible
  • postérieur: back, posterior
  • ventral: ventral (this word refers to the side that your stomach is on.  To see why this is a useful word from an anatomical point of view, think about a person, and a fish.  On a person, the belly is to the front, while on a fish, the belly is on the bottom.  Using the word ventral lets you refer to the side that the stomach is on, regardless of the orientation of that side (forward, or down).
  • sud: south
  • latéral: lateral (side)

Here are some uses of ventral (and its opposite, dorsal)–scroll down past them to continue reading:

Dorsal and ventral views of a naked guy. Picture source: https://www.kenhub.com/en/videos/directional-terms-dorsal-and-ventral
Directional anatomical terms illustratd with a fish, including dorsal and ventral. Picture source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location

A totally different set of modifiers from visage!  These sound a lot more like words that word describe one of the several faces of a mountain, or of a building.  When we look for the words that face occurs with in coordinations with et or ou, we find:

  • pile: In pile ou face, it’s “heads or tails.”
  • profil: profile.
  • dos: back
  • cou: neck
  • arête: bridge (of nose)
  • soir: evening
  • samedi: Saturday
  • finale: final

Some of those are consistent with the interpretation of face as a body part–profile, back, necks, bridge of the nose.  The others aren’t.

When we look at the “word sketch” for figure, there’s very little that suggests that the word is used as a body part–at any rate, not as often as it’s used for other meanings:

Screenshot 2016-06-17 02.57.10
“Word sketch” of the French noun “figure.” Picture source: me.



So, what insight does this give us?  For one thing: it’s not surprising that I haven’t come across face with the meaning “face (of a person).”  Rather, it seems to be used more often for the “faces” of objects–buildings, mountains, computers, etc.  For another thing: it’s surprising that I’ve come across figure with the meaning “face” at all, since it doesn’t seem to be used for that as often as it’s used with other meanings.  Finally, the major point: it’s hard to see any of these as synonyms for the others, as the patterns of usage are quite different.  On the definition of “synonym” as “word that is freely replaceable for another word,” these aren’t.

Having said all of this: I don’t mean to imply that synonymy is not a useful concept.  In fact, there’s an enormously useful resource called WordNet that is organized completely around the notion of synonymy.  WordNet encodes relationships between words.  But, what’s the definition of word?  For WordNet, it’s what they call a “synset:” not a single word, but the full set of synonyms for that word.  Synsets are the basic unit of WordNet–this whole (very useful, as I said) resource is organized as relationships between them.

The kids did great at the tournament.  As Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, would have put it: the ones who won got positive feedback on their training, and the ones who lost got valuable insight into the things that they needed to work on.  I got off the plane in the US a couple days later with my boots coated with dust from an Aztec temple, and thought a lot about how small the world is these days.

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