Zipf's Law

I think it was Adam Gopnik who said that in order to be able to live in Paris, you need to be able to simultaneously have a deep appreciation for that which is ancient and familiar, and accept that nothing is forever–sometimes, the things that we love change out from under us.

Doing my first-day-back-in-Paris grocery shopping when I arrived this week, I noticed that the fruit and vegetable stand down the street was closed.  Today, doing my weekly shopping, I saw that it was still closed.  I stopped into the florist’s shop next to the fruit and vegetable stand for my Saturday morning bouquet.  Tell me please, what to itself happened the fruit merchants to the side?  He took my 3 euros.  They closed.  A restaurant is going to open there.  It’s a shame–they were nice. 

Them being French and all, I never knew their names, despite having shopped there whenever I was in Paris for the past year and a half.  When I went there for the first time, I made the classic American rookie mistake at a French fruit and vegetable stand: I picked up a piece of fruit to smell it.  (In America, that’s how we tell whether or not it’s ripe.  I learnt this as a young man, by flirting with little old ladies in the produce section.)  Don’t smell the fruit!, the lady scolded me.  I’ll get it for you.  I asked for some figs.  Do you want wall figs?  I gave her the puzzled look that I give people in France so often.  When are you going to eat them–today?  Tomorrow?  Eventually, I realized that she had not asked me if I wanted figues murs–“wall figs”–but figues mûrs–“ripe figs,”   which is pronounced the same, but which wasn’t a word that I’d heard in a while.  (Zipf’s Law: most words are rare, but they do occur.)  After that, we got along fine.  Once you go back to a French business a few times, they recognize you as a regular, and they are far less formal.  She, or her husband, or her father-in-law, depending on who was working, would often throw some dates or an apple in my bag along with whatever I had purchased.

I guess the whole appreciate-what’s-old, accept-that-things-change thing is a good idea for life in general, just as much as it is for living in Paris.  Wives move on, or you move on, start-ups fail, people die.  I guess that if you can be aware of that impermanent nature of things, you either have to be chronically depressed, or–and this is very fortunate, if you can manage it–resolve to live them fully while they’re around.  The fruit merchants that were such a familiar part of my daily life here are gone.  I’ll miss hearing their kids chattering in Arabic in the stairwell, and seeing their youngest daughter giggle and hide her face when I call her ma belle–“my beauty.”  But, for a while there, they were part of what made this place home, and I am grateful for that.

One day in Japan, a few of us Westerners were out with some Japanese guys.  We walked by a weathered old wooden building with beautiful, faded characters written on the side.  It was really quite striking.  “What does it say?,” we asked the Japanese guys.  The answer: “no parking.”

Indeed, just reading the signs that I walk by on the way to work–well, really, on my way anywhere–is a common way for Zipf’s Law to make its appearance in my day.  The picture above shows a sign that I passed on my way to the lab yesterday.  It’s on a pretty pedestrian subject, but I still had to look up a number of the words on it.  And so goes the romance of the experience of learning a language.

• le décharge: garbage dump.  (Also a shot or a salvo.)
• l’encombrant: I haven’t been able to find this as a noun, although that seems to be how it’s being used in the sign.  As an adjective, it means “in the way,” or “cumbersome.”
• le créneau: this can mean a number of related things–a slot, a niche, a crenel, and I guess metaphorically, a time slot.
• le créneau de collecte: the trash collection time, I think.
• le conteneur: container.
  
• les ordures (n.f.pl.) litter, trash.
• l’encombrement: blockage.
  
• passible de verbalisation: I think this is “subject to reporting.”  Native speakers?

Although when I’m in the US I’m generally counting the days until I can get back to France, there are definitely things about the US that I miss when I’m in the City of Light.

• Soft towels.  You think I’m kidding?  Do this search on Google and you’ll find that this is a very common issue for Americans in France: “crunchy towels” france.
• Big cups of coffee, with free refills.  I like to sit in a café with my little cup of espresso as much as the next guy, but I miss the big cups of coffee that we Americans are so used to.
• Understanding little snatches of conversation in the street.  For me, understanding a discourse about the nature of happiness at a café philo is not nearly as satisfying as walking by people on the street and catching those little snatches of …and then she…so my brother said…no matter how hard you…next Tuesday…
• Tortillas.  Paris is the New York of Europe, and you can buy anything there–except, for no reason that I can understand, corn tortillas.  When I get on the plane to France, there’s usually a bag of fresh tortillas in my luggage for my Mexican friend who lives there, and those are the last tortillas that I see until I get back to the US.
• Knowing that no matter how late I stay in the lab, I’ll be able to find a store open on my way home from work.  Very few French stores are open past 7 PM.
• The customer always being right.  If you’ve spent much time in France and the US, this needs no further explanation–if you haven’t, see here.
• Casual interactions with strangers.  Americans will talk to anyone, anywhere.  Stand in line with an American at any tourist attraction at Paris, and by the time you get to where you’re going, you’ll know where they’re from, their favorite TV show, and where their kids go to college.  Sit next to any French person on a plane across the Atlantic for several hours, and by the time the plane lands, the extent of your conversation will have been excuse me, may I get up?  In contrast, I once sat next to an American woman on a much shorter flight, from Chicago to Denver, and the next thing I knew, we were married.
• All of the plugs fitting my gadgets/not having to worry about forgetting that I need a transformer and destroying my gadgets.
• My minuscule art collection.  I own very little, but do have a number of paintings.  I don’t know of any way to shlep them back and forth, so whatever is on the walls of the apartment that I rent in Paris is what I stare at until I go back to the US.
• Being able to sound educated when I want to/being able to sound casual when I want to.  In an English-speaking environment, if I want to sound like a professor, I can–I am one.  If I want to sound like a sailor, I can do that, too–I was one, for many years.  In France, I can’t tell the difference between French as spoken by a college professor and French as spoken by the drunk who habitually sits slumped against a stanchion at the metro station by my house, and I know that I mix both kinds of French together all the time, not knowing the difference.
• Knowing that if I lock myself out of the house, someone can come and let me in.  My biggest fear in France is not a terrorist attack, or a repeat of the 1871 revolution (20,000 Parisians were killed by the French army), or a repeat of the German invasions of 1870, 1914, and 1940, but locking myself out of my apartment in a city in which I know almost no one.  (Side note: I once spent a few days in Jena, the small town in east Germany where Napoleon crushed the German army.  The bridge that leads from the Trocadero to the Eiffel Tower is named after it.  I’ve heard that when the Germans entered Paris in 1940, the first thing that the occupying general wanted to do was blow it up, but they didn’t.  Today you will find at least one shell game scam artist on it pretty much every day of the year–tourists beware.  Jena itself is very nice, despite the fact that we bombed the shit out of it during World War II–there was a factory there that manufactured bomb sights.  The local schwartzbier has to be tasted to be believed, and I cannot say enough good things about the local sausages, which are somewhat comical in that the sausages themselves are quite long, but the bun that comes with them is just this little round thing.)
• Back yards and front porches.  The stereotypical American life involves lots of sitting in back yards and on front porches, but in Paris, those things don’t exist–everyone lives in apartments, and if you want to sit outside with your friends, or a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper, or your dog, you go to a cafe.
• 3×5 index cards.  Much of my life is spent sitting with a pile of index cards in my hand, memorizing the many vocabulary items that you read about on this blog.  However, if it’s possible to buy an index card in France, I’m not aware of it.
• My judo bag.  Along with my paintings, this goes into the category of things that are too bulky to be shlepped back and forth between France and the US, so I usually carry my stuff to practice in a carry-on or something, and I feel silly.
• Knowing where to buy things.  Need a tablecloth in the US?  I know exactly where to go to buy one, depending on whether you want a nice one, a crappy one, a weird size/shape, or whatever.  Contact lens solution?  Of course.  Socks?  A finger nail file?  I don’t know where to buy any of those in France.
• Feeling like a competent adult because I understand the basics of how to do things.  If you’ve been following this blog for the past year and a half, you know that in France, I struggle constantly to get and keep phone service.  Trying to pick up my mail is unsuccessful more often than it isn’t.  Checking the balance on my French bank account?  Forget it.  At 54, I can negotiate much more difficult things than that in America without really giving it much thought.  In France?  I’m as helpless as a college freshman with helicopter parents.
• Stars.  In the US, 4 AM typically finds me outside with one of those big cups of coffee in my hand, checking the position of the Big Dipper and looking for planets.  Everything is spread apart–there’s just more space on this very big continent.  In Paris, only a small patch of sky is visible between the apartment buildings on either side of my street, and in any case, it’s cloudy much of the year.

All of this notwithstanding, I do indeed spend much of my time in the US waiting impatiently to get back to France, and a lot of my energy goes into figuring out how to get back to France as soon as possible and stay there as long as possible.  Watch this space for things about France that I miss when I’m in the US.

• la Grande Casserole: the Big Dipper.
• la casserole: pan; stew, casserole; scandal, disgrace; out-of-tune instrument.
• trimbaler: to shlep.

The news from France: one of the Immortals is going to be replaced.  An immortel is a member of the Académie Française, the French Academy.  This is a group of 40 people who have been tasked with setting standards for the French language since 1635.  Membership in the Académie is for life.  You get to wear a fancy gown, and carry a sword.  You also have a chair assigned to you.  Assia Djebar, chair #5, died last February, and the 39 remaining Immortals will soon elect her replacement.  The chairs are handed down, and the new Immortal will be chair #5.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you’ll see a screen shot of the written form of a column that appeared on this subject on the radio show Les matins de France Culture.  There are sooo many directions that we could take this–so many things to talk about concerning this story!  Do we discuss the fraught notion of language standardization?  Do we talk about the concept of metonymy, which Jacques Munier (the columnist) mentions in his column?  Do we talk about what, exactly, is immortal about the Immortals?

Given that embarrassment of choices, I’m going to talk about…the chairs.  Still, there are so many choices to make.  Do we discuss why the Immortals have chairs at all?  Originally, they didn’t all have them–they met in a small space, and only the most distinguished got a seat.  They squabbled about this, and Richelieu supplied them all with some place to sit.  Do we discuss Bea dM’s observation that it was originally the French language itself that was felt to be immortal?  Munier’s contention that it can just as well be the chairs that are immortal—Immortel est en revanche le fauteuil, qu’on se transmet de génération en génération…  “Immortal is, on the other hand, the chair, which is passed from generation to generation…”  I suggest that we talk plutôt about the meaning of “chair.”

The word chair turns out to be of some significance in French lexical semantics, the study of what words mean and how they mean what they mean.  In a previous post, we talked about how to study the meanings of verbs.  In another post, we talked about one theory about how words have meanings–the notion of conditions nécessaires et suffisantes, “necessary and sufficient conditions.”  There we saw some problems with the “necessary and sufficient conditions” model of meanings, such as the facts that, as Zufferey and Moeschler put it in their book Initiation à l’étude du sens, le modèle des conditions nécessaires et suffisantes présuppose certains faits à propos des catégories.  Tout d’abord, les catégories ont des frontières clairement identifiables….Ce modèle semble…trop rigide pour pouvoir intégrer de telles propriétés.  Par ailleurs, de nombreuses expériences ont démontré que les limites entre les catégories sont souvent floues.  “The model of necessary and sufficient conditions presupposes certain facts about categories.  First, that the categories have clearly identifiable borders….This model seems too rigid to be able to integrate some properties.  Furthermore, many experiments have demonstrated that the boundaries between the categories are often fuzzy.”  (Yes, you can study meaning experimentally.)  We also talked about prototype theory, a theory that tries to deal with some of the deficiencies of the necessary and sufficient conditions model by allowing for fuzzy boundaries between categories.  Rather than defining something by its boundaries, it defines a category by its “center”–un objet est catégoriser selon sa ressemblance avec un élément central de la catégorie, appelé son prototype.  “…an object is categorized according to its resemblance to a central element of the category, called its prototype.”  Prototype theory has its own problems, though–la notion de ressemblance de famille est trop vague…  Si le modèle des CNS semble trop rigide pour rendre compte de la catégorisation, le modèle du prototype ne semble pour sa part pas être suffisamment contrait.  “The notion of family resemblance is too vague…  If the model of the necessary and sufficient conditions seems too rigid to account for categorization, the prototype model, for its part, doesn’t seem to be sufficiently constrained.”

Crap–700 words, and I still haven’t worked my way back to that chair.  So, here’s a promissory note: so far, we’ve been talking about things.  Next time, we’ll move on to words, particularly sememic analysis.  Here are some of the words that I needed to look up in order to get this far.  (Definitions from WordReference.com.)

• vague: vague.  If it’s a noun: “wave.”
• présupposer: to presuppose, to assume, to presume.
• par ailleurs: besides, moreover, for that matter.

Scroll down just a bit and you’ll see an excerpt from the transcription of the Matins de France culture story.  Try to figure out the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a chair, and be sure that they exclude being a sofa/couch, a stool, or a recliner.  Then try to do it for a mug, and be sure that they exclude being a cup.  Good luck!

Exciting news from the Middle East: the cease-fire in Syria is mostly holding.  I wake up every day happy that I have food to eat and a job that I love–the people of Syria wake up happy that they’re still alive at all.  I hope that this keeps working.

• le cessez-le-feu: cease-fire.
• la trêve: truce.  Also a break, a let-up, or a rest, as in la trêve des confiseurs, the period around the end-of-year holidays when people bring treats to work.

Le cessez-le-feu is an interesting word, because it brings up the topic of nouns that come from verb phrases.  It’s quite common for nouns to be made from verbs.  For example, in English the verb imitate gives you imitation, create gives you creation, and so on.  It’s less common to see a noun that comes from an entire phrase.  You see these in French, though:

• le cessez-le-feu: cease-fire.
• le garde-à-vous: the position of attention (in the military).

There are lots of shorter ones, too:

• le porte-parole: spokesperson.
• le prête-nom: front man, figurehead.
• le rendez-vous: appointment, date, meeting place.

Are they all masculine nouns?  I don’t know–I don’t have a very big sample size.  Why are some formed from the vous form of the verb, and others not?  I don’t know.  Input from native speakers would be much appreciated!

The web, and the shelves of your local bookstore, are full of resources for getting introduced to the French language.  Once you get to a more advanced level, it’s much more difficult to find good materials.  One that I like is the 7 jours sur la planète app.  Available for the iPhone and for Android, 7 jours gives you the following, every week:

• 3 TV news stories
• For each story:
  • the film clip,
  • an audio recording of the story,
  • its transcription, and
  • a selection of words from the story with monolingual definitions (i.e., definitions in French).

There’s also a vocabulary-learning game, although I’ve never really figured out how to use it in any amusing sort of way.

The topics of the news stories are always topical.  (Is that a tautology?  I think maybe it is, but can’t think of a better way to say it.)  This week’s topics are:

• Umberto Eco (he just died)
• The territories of French Polynesia, which Hollande (the president at the time of writing) just visited
• A festival in Mali

As one of the reviewers on the Apple App Store pointed out, the words that they select to define are often not the ones that you would want.  For example, in the story on the Malian festival, the words that the app defines include attaque, festival, lutte, and quartier, all of which I would think you would learn in French 101.  However, the story also includes échassiers, fanfare, investir, orphelinat, and couche, all of which seem to me to be more advanced, and none of which get defined.  (The word orphelinat is obscure enough that it actually appeared in a previous post on this blog.)  However, since the whole thing is transcribed, it’s not difficult to identify words that even as a more advanced speaker, you might not know, and to then look them up elsewhere.

• l’échassier (n.m.): wading bird; tall, skinny person
• la fanfare: brass band; fanfare
• investir: to flood (several other meanings)
• l’orphelinat (n.m.): orphanage
• la couche:  social class (several other meanings)
  

Tout commence par la traditionnelle parade.  Des centaines de personnes suivent échassiers et marionnettes géantes au son de la fanfare.  Pendant quatre jours, les artistes investissent les quartiers, les orphelinats, les villages alentours.

Everything starts with the traditional parade.  Hundreds of people follow stilt-walkers and giant puppets to the sound of the brass band.  For four days, artists flood the neighborhoods, the orphanages, the surrounding villages.

On permet aux couches défavorisées, à toute personne sans distinction, de pouvoir vivre la culture…

This lets the disadvantaged classes, every person without distinction, to be able to live the culture…