Zipf's Law

In his book Babel no more: The search for the world’s most extraordinary language learners, Michael Erard talks about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti.  Mezzofanti spoke a lot of languages.  It’s not clear exactly how many–certainly that depends on your definition of what it means to “speak” a language–but, nevertheless, it was a ridiculously large number of languages.  Something that Erard says about him really struck me: What [we] can’t explain is how he could switch from one language to another without confusing them.  Here’s an anecdote from the book:

On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him.  When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him “each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.”  Mezzofanti didn’t flinch but “took them up singly, and replied to eachin his own language.” The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious.  Mezzofanti could not be bested.

Why this struck me: we’ve talked before about the difficulty that many people have with keeping foreign languages “separate.”  Before a recent trip to Guatemala, I prepared by basically purging French from my life completely for the month before I went there.  I didn’t study French vocabulary, I didn’t listen to the news in French, and I didn’t read in French.  Of course, I listened to Spanish podcasts, I read in Spanish (a book about semantics, and The Walking Dead–I’m not picky), and I watched Spanish-language movies.  But, pushing French out of my head was as important to the process as packing Spanish into it.

So, when I got to Guatemala, it was interesting to see where I had trouble keeping the two apart.  I don’t really know what to make of it.  Here are the facts.

For background: I would never claim to speak either French or Spanish.  I’m pretty comfortable in Spanish, which serves very nicely with my siblings if we want to have a private conversation in Shanghai, and when I’m in France, I don’t speak English very often–I live my life in French, both personal and professional.  I would guess that my vocabulary is a thousand times better in French than in Spanish, and that my grammar is a thousand times better in Spanish than in French.  Pronunciation: who knows.

So: as it turns out, I didn’t have trouble keeping the vocabulary apart.  What I had trouble with was the little stuff.  Here are some specific things that struck me:

Possessives

In French, there are three (simplifying by just talking about the second person informal, since that’s what I use the most in the hospital):

• tes for plural nouns.  Sou: tes parents your parents, tes soeurs your sisters.
• ton for masculine nouns and before any noun that begins with a vowel. So: ton chiot, your puppy, because chiot ‘puppy’ is masculine; ton orange, your orange, even though orange ‘orange’ is feminine, because it begins with a vowel.
• ta for feminine nouns that don’t begin with a vowel.  So: ta chaussette your sock.

In contrast, Spanish only has two:

• tus for plural nouns.  So: tus padres your parents, tus hermanas your sisters.
• tu for singular nouns.  So: tu perrito your puppy, tu amigito your little friend.

It’s things like tu amigito that threw me.  I just could not wrap my tongue around the sequence tu + vowel.  It just…stopped.  Eventually I would push it out, while people turned and looked at me like what’s up with the old dude?

The word after

Even after a week incountry, if I did not pay attention, the Spanish word después ‘after’ would not come out of my mouth.  Instead, it was the equivalent French word: après.  Even if I did pay attention, I really had to struggle to dig up después.  I eventually started pausing every time I needed to say after, and thinking to myself: say después, not après.  

Excuse me

If I had a nickel for every time that I said pardon or désolé instead of con permiso or disculpe… 

The “excuse me” problem doesn’t puzzle me that much–that’s right-brain language.  The little function words, though–I’m not sure what to think about that particular phenomenon.  It’s a pretty small sample, so maybe I shouldn’t generalize.

The other funny thing about Cardinal Mezzofanti: apparently, he didn’t actually have much of interest to say.  As Erard puts it:

Despite this…Mezzofanti was…the target of sarcastic barbs.  Irish writer Charles Lever wrote that Mezzofanti “was a most inferior man….An old dictionary would have been to the full as companionable.”  Baron Bunsen, a German philologist, said that in all the countless languages which Mezzofanti spoke he “never said anything.”  He “has not five ideas,” said a Roman priest quoted in a memoir.”

Speaking as someone who was once married to a woman who coined the term of venery a boring of linguists, I fear that there may be a cautionary note for me here…

French notes

From the French Wikipedia article on Mezzofanti:

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, né le 17 septembre 1774 à Bologne en Émilie-Romagne et mort le 15 mars 1849, fut un religieux et un universitaire italien du XIX^e siècle, qui devint cardinal de l’Église catholique, et était un linguiste et un polyglotte renommé.

• le religieux: clergyman, priest.
• renommé: renowned.

English notes

to throw (someone): 5. Informal To cause confusion or perplexity in; disconcert or nonplus.  (From The Free Dictionary.)  How it appeared in the post:

It’s things like tu amigito that threw me.  I just could not wrap my tongue around the sequence tu + vowel.  It just…stopped. 

Even more than soccer, flirting is often said to be France’s national sport.  I like it–it’s fun, and (so far) a harmless way to practice my French.  So, I was chatting with a girl over a cup of coffee in a café by the Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology one day (no, I’m not making that museum up–along with the Pergamon in Berlin and the British National Museum in London, it’s one of my favorites in the entire world, and I can’t even imagine how many hours I’ve spent there) when she said something that made my ears perk up: she mentioned la partie inférieure de la mâchoire.  The “lower part of the jaw:” what you and I probably know as the mandible, and most French speakers as la mandibule.  

On the surface, the jaw doesn’t look that interesting.  One bone, with a pretty simple hinge on each side.  It’s got a lot of subtleties, though, and if you look at how jaws vary across species, a jaw can tell you a lot about an animal.

Let’s look at the “gross anatomy” first–the basic parts.  In many species, the mandible has two main parts: the body, and the ramus.  The body is the part that’s parallel to the ground, and the ramus is the part that goes up vertically.  We’ll go through the French vocabulary now, rather than at the end of the post, because it’s essential to understanding my flirty ways.

• la mâchoire: the jaw; jawbone.
• la partie inférieure de la mâchoire: the lower part of the jaw. The official term for the mandible.
• la partie supérieure de la mâchoire: the maxilla–again, the “official” term.
• la mandibule: mandible.
• le maxillaire: maxilla.
• l’articulation temporomandibulaire: temporo-mandibular joint.
• la branche de la mandibule: the ramus of the mandible.
• le corps de la mandibule: the body of the mandible.

Why it made my ears perk up when she said la partie inférieur de la mâchoire: as far as I know, that’s the technical term for the mandible, versus la mandibule, which I believe to be more general language.  How often do you meet someone whose idea of witty repartee includes throwing around technical terms for bones?  Of course, then a bum walked by.  Blah blah blah blah, you gotta blah blah for me? 

What’s a blah-blah? …I asked my terminologically gifted new friend.  He wants a cigarette, she replied.  And what does blah blah blah blah mean? 

“Kevin Costner”–he called you Kevin Costner.

How the fuck does he know my name’s Kevin?

He doesn’t–you’re an American, and you’re bald, so…

Whatever.

English notes:

to make someone’s ears perk up: to make someone suddenly interested in what you’re saying.  How it was used in the post: She said something that made my ears perk up: she mentioned la partie inférieure de la mâchoire. 

repartee: (Yes, this is an English word.)  Witty conversation that goes back and forth.  From Merriam-Webster: conversation in which clever statements and replies are made quickly.  How it was used in the post: How often do you meet someone whose idea of witty repartee includes throwing around technical terms for bones?

In truth, though: it’s not so clear that it’s a great thing.  One of the problems with Big Data is a special case of a general problem in the ethics of technology: the kinds of things that can go wrong when the public perception of how well/poorly technology performs doesn’t match well with the truth. In particular: when the public thinks that technology performs way better than it does.

You will occasionally hear people talking about how algorithms are going to take our jobs, bring about the zombie apocalypse prematurely, etc. More commonly, technology gee-whizzers will tell you the opposite: that they will remove bias and introduce complete objectivity to sentencing guidelines, for instance.  In fact, an algorithm is nothing more (or less) than a defined set of procedures.  In the case of an algorithm for computing, it’s typically a set of calculations. An algorithm can’t be biased. It can’t be unbiased, either. The data, though: that can be biased. An example from the interview: train an algorithm to evaluate resumes from applicants for jobs at an engineering firm. You could imagine training it with the resume of everyone who has ever been hired in the past, and the following piece of information for each person: whether or not they were a successful employee. If the engineering firm is a typical one, those previous hires are mostly going to have been males. Now the program learns the characteristics of a successful hire, and among other things, the program will conclude that a successful hire is going to be a male, since that’s all that it’s ever seen. Is the algorithm biased?  No. Is the person who programmed it biased?  No. What’s biased?  The data. Not biased in the way that a person is biased–rather, biased in the statistical sense: not every member of the population had an equal likelihood of being included in the training set.

Where people get seduced by things with the Big Data label on them is by the bigness. Most people know that the bigger your data set is, the more reliable the statistical model that comes out of it will be. A lot of people look at Big Data and think: there’s a LOT of data, so it’s GOT to be good. That’s where the trouble comes from.

I like this interview because it’s neither a gee-whiz-this-technology-is-so-great story, nor an ignorant oh-my-God-the-data-miners-are-going-to-kill-us story. The interviewee, Cathy O’Neil, knows what she’s talking about, and she explains it well.  The unbiased sentencing program?  It didn’t work out so great–see a very detailed story about it here.

Link to the interview with Cathy O’Neil:

http://one.npr.org/i/493654950:493654951

French notes:

• le big data: Big Data.
• les mégadonnées: Big Data.
• les données massives: Big Data.

English notes:

• to sentence to (a punishment): to assign a punishment or penalty to someone.  Examples: A 46-year-old man threw feces in a Clark County, Ohio, courtroom Wednesday after learning he was being sentenced to 40 years in prison for armed robbery.  (Story here.)  Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist and cryptanalyst who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, was sentenced to chemical castration as a punishment for his homosexuality.
• sentencing guidelines: instructions for how to determine the length of the jail or prison sentence of someone who has been convicted of a crime.  How it was used in the post: More commonly, technology gee-whizzers will tell you the opposite: that they will remove bias and introduce complete objectivity to sentencing guidelines, for instance. 

One of the many things to like about France: random people will occasionally toss out words and concepts that would be quite unusual in the United States.  (To toss out explained below in the English notes.)  Case in point: the expression “lexical field.”  A lexical field, also known as a semantic field, is a set of words that share some focus of meaning.  In American English, this is a highly technical term, and you wouldn’t expect to hear it come out of the mouth of anyone who isn’t an academic of some sort.  As Wikipedia puts it: The kinds of semantic fields vary from culture to culture and anthropologists use them to study belief systems and reasoning across cultural groups.^[7]  ….The term is also used in other academic disciplines, such as … computational semiotics,^[4] and technical exegesis.^[5]

In France: not nearly so obscure.  It came up over a glass of wine with a friend one night, and I’m talking about a music person, not a linguist friend.   Yesterday evening I ran across it on a web site for kids who are preparing for the bac, the high school exit exam.  Here is how it showed up:

Montaigne parsème ainsi son texte du champ lexical du combat: “César,” “Alexandre,” “grand besogne,” “vigueur,” “courage,” “violentes occupations,” “grands maniements,” “batailles,” “provinces,” “grand et glorieux.”

In English:

Thus, Montaigne sprinkles his text with the lexical field of combat: “Caesar,” “Alexander,” “great work,” “vigor,” “courage,” “violent activities,” [not sure how to translate maniements–can a native speaker help?], “battles,” “provinces” [Montaigne refers to conquering them–bear in mind that at the time of writing in the 1500s, it wasn’t that long since Louis XIV had finished the unification of France], “great and glorious.”

Wrap your head around that one: a concept that most of us almost certainly didn’t run into until college, and probably not even then—the lexical field—is used in test-prep materials for high school students, without explanation.   And people ask me why I like to hang out there…

French and English notes follow…

English notes:

to toss out: in this sense, it means something like “to mention casually,” similar to Definition 2 on the Merriam-Webster web site.  Note that it has many other meanings, mostly negative ones having to do with discarding something.  An example of the sense in which I’m using it here, from this story by Alexandra Rosenmann:  “Tell me,” Trump continued. “I mean, I don’t know. You tell me.”  It’s a phrase Trump tosses out a lot: Discussions on everything from Obama’s birthplace, to why gays support Clinton, to why Ghazala Khan stayed silent at the DNC all end the same. Either Trump’s stumped, or he thinks we are.  How it appeared in the post: One of the many things to like about France: random people will occasionally toss out words that would be quite unusual in the United States.

French notes:

Translations from WordReference.com:

• la besogne: hard work, task, labor.
• besogner: to slave away.
• besogner quelqu’un: to have sex with someone.  WordReference.com gives pénétrer as an explanation of the phrase, so presumably this can only have a man as the logical subject (a technical term–my dog is the logical subject of both My dog stole the butter and The butter was stolen by my dog, but it is the grammatical subject only of My dog stole the butter.  She did, too–horrible shit to clean up for the next 24 hours or so…).
• C’est aller en peu vite en besogne: to be a bit hasty or premature, to get ahead of oneself a bit.
• la basse besogne: dirty work.  From Twitter: Honte à ceux qui utilisent les enfants pour leur basse besogne.  Another tweet: @TLaFronde au fait ce ne sont pas des flics femmes qui auraient dû faire cette basse besogne?????????

One of my cousins says: “Wikipedia is the Devil.  The Devil, I tell you!”  Here’s a case in point.

It is sadly the case that women get mistreated in pretty much the same shitty ways all over the world.  (Shitty and other American English expressions explained below.)  Certainly there are some places where it is much worse for women than it is in other places, and in very regionally specific ways–female genital mutilation in some parts of Africa, honor killings in the Middle East, widow immolation in some parts of India, female infanticide in some parts of China–but, all in all, the same issues of violence, sexual abuse, and underpay plague women all over the planet.

Given a certain homogeneity of experience, you might expect feminism to be the same everywhere–the null hypothesis is that everything is the same as everything else, right?  However, it has often been observed that feminism in America and feminism in France have different sets of concerns and preoccupations.  Here’s a capsule description from the Wikipedia article on feminism in France:

In the English-speaking world, the term ‘French feminism’ refers to a branch of feminist theories and philosophies that emerged in the 1970s to the 1990s. French feminist theory, compared to its English-speaking, is distinguished by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of “the body”.^[13]

I’m surprised by the statement that French feminism’s “writings tend to be…less concerned with political doctrine…” …as that is completely the opposite of the impression that I have.  The renaming of an important French feminist group seems relevant as an example of this.  In the forward to their collection New French feminisms: An anthology, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron describe it like this:

Women concerned with the woman question in France use the words “feminism” and “feminist” less often do their counterparts in the United States.  …[T]here is a … profound reason.  The desire to break with a bourgeois past–with the inadequacies and fixed categories of humanistic thought, including feminism–has led to a vigorous attack against the labels by one of the most influential and radical of the women’s groups (known originally as “Psychanalyse et Politique”–“Psych et Po”–and more recently as “politique et psychanalyse)…”

My point being: French feminists are really, really into critiquing psychoanalysis.  (American feminists aren’t crazy about it, either–the amazing American sociolinguist Robin Lakoff and her colleague James Coyne wrote a book about Freud’s Dora case–but it’s not the subject of nearly as much discussion in the US.)  If the group felt so strongly that politics should have top billing over psychoanalysis that they actually changed the name of the group to reflect that, then that’s an indication that they feel that politics is really, really important.

The third chapter of the feminist classic Le deuxième sexe, by Simone de Beauvoir (she’s shown up in this blog before, as Nelson Algren’s lover, before she dumped him for Sartre), is devoted to Engels.  The Wikipedia page on her book describes one of its (indirect) effects like this:

European women became more involved in politics and by the 1990s held six to seven times more legislative seats than the United States, enabling them to influence the process in support of programs for women and children.^[104]

The moral of the story: be as cautious of Wikipedia as you would with any other source.  It’s great, but like anything else, it’s not foolproof–citations, or no citations.

French and English notes below.

Want to know more?  Follow these links for:

• What happens if you get caught crossing a border with a copy of New French feminisms in your backpack
• Transcendence, immanence, existentialism, and feminism

French notes:

• la psychanalyse: psychoanalysis.  Pronunciation: [psikanaliz]
• bien avant: well before, well in advance.  Le féminisme en France naît au milieu du XIX^e siècle mais bien avant des personnalités s’étaient préoccupés de l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes.  (Source: Wikipédie page on French feminism.)
• le courant: branch (of a party); trend, movement.  Either of them should work for this sentence: Plusieurs courants ont coexisté et des divergences existent encore même si le but est le plus souvent le même, à savoir l’égalité totale.  (I’m not sure how to translate si in that sentence–even if??  Can a native speaker help?)

English notes:

• shitty: (of a person or action) contemptible; worthless.  (Definition from Google.)  How it was used in the post: It is sadly the case that women get mistreated in pretty much the same shitty ways all over the world.  
• capsule (adjective): short and concise; brief and summarized.  (Definition from Dictionary.com.)  How it was used in the post: Here’s a capsule description from the Wikipedia article on feminism in France.
• top billing: the first or most prominent position in a list of actors or entertainers, as on a marquee or screen.  (Definition from Dictionary.com.)  You can use it for any ordered list.  How it was used in the post: If the group felt so strongly that politics should have top billing over psychoanalysis that they actually changed the name of the group to reflect that, then that’s an indication that they feel that politics is really, really important.