Zipf's Law

There’s something about Zipf’s Law–the property of language that about 50% of the words that you run into are quite rare, statistically, and yet they do occur–that seems quite random when you’re face to face with it. However, it’s just as context-dependent as anything else linguistic. So, getting up at 3 AM to catch a plane exposed me to lots of new words, as you would expect–but, as you can see from the list below, they mostly do go together, in some sense, at least from the second word in the list on.  Here are the words that I had learnt before breakfast:

• illégal: illegal, banned, outlawed, criminal.  You would’ve thought that I would’ve heard this word before this, and certainly I’ve come across interdit and défense (de).  However, I don’t recall ever coming across illégal until 4 AM today, when I was standing in front of the hotel in Montréal with a suitcase, a taxi driver came by, I shook my head “no,” and he pulled over, rolled down his window, and screamed UberX is banned! at me repeatedly.
• le gruau: in theory, “gruel.”  In practice, “oatmeal.”  I’m looking forward to a bowl of gruau while I wait for my plane.
• érable (nm): maple.  Where there is gruau, there always seems to be sirop d’érable (maple syrup).  
• la garniture: side dish.  Way more meanings than you would think, actually.  In this case, roughly equivalent to “condiments.”  That might be a Canadian usage, though–not sure.
• la cassonade: brown sugar.  Wondering about the etymology of the word, I looked it up on the French Wikipedia, and learnt that it refers to a different kind of brown sugar in the north of France and in Belgium than elsewhere.  Who knew that brown sugar was so complicated?
• la canneberge: cranberry.  Cranberry production is mostly a North American thing, so it’s not shocking that I would have come across this word in Canada, but not in France.

That’s a lot of words to learn before sunrise, though, so I’m going to eat my gruau and make another cup of coffee now–flight boards in 15 minutes…

There’s something about the French-speaking parts of Canada that has always amazed me.  In any French Canadian city that I’ve been in, there’s always a substantial English-speaking minority.  If you watch a cashier with a line of people in front of them, you’ll see the following.  As each person gets up to the cash register, the cashier looks at them for a split second, and then greets them–either in French, or in English.  The customer will almost always answer them in the same language.  I can’t begin to imagine how they know which one to use.  I asked my cousin about it the other day.  She grew up here, and works in customer service.  She says that she has no idea how she does it, but that she almost never gets it wrong–she can tell which language you speak by looking at you.  (Like a typical Québécoise immigrant of her generation, she speaks three languages–in her case, Italian, English, and French.)  If you have any insight into how this works, perhaps you could tell us in the Comments section?

There are countless books about the French language of Quebec–I saw several in every bookstore that I went into in this city.  Stereotypical Quebequisms abound, but the one that struck me as most salient doesn’t show up in any of the obvious places, like on T-shirts.  You might remember the word le dépanneur from a previous post (it showed up in an incredibly stupid French movie that I watched).  Normally, it means a mechanic.  In Quebec, however, it is a convenience store.  I haven’t seen a single 7-11, but I saw stores labelled dépanneur all over the place–mystifying, until I looked it up.

When you find a great bookstore, there’s always that question: do you keep it to yourself so that no one else gets the really good books, or do you tell the entire world about it so that the bookstore stays in business?  The long-term solution is clear: you have to tell people about it.  In that spirit, I’ll tell you how to find great Francophone used bookstores in Montreal.  All you have to do is go to rue Mont-Royal Est in the Plateau neighborhood and wander up and down the street.  Even on a Sunday afternoon, I found a number of used bookstores open–more accurately, bookstores with a mix of used and new books, for the most part–and they were all great.  If you want a place to sit and read your purchases, I recommend the Kahwa Café (more on that below).

If you want to find addresses for specific bookstores in the Plateau, as well as other Francophone used bookstores in Montreal, grouped by neighborhood, try this link.

Zipf’s Law strikes, as always, and I had to consult a dictionary just to understand the names of some of the bookstores:

• Le port de tête: WordReference.com translates this as “the way you hold your head.”  Le port de tête is the name of one of the bookstores that I visited.  Looking for a way to use this expression, I found two pages of Google hits about the bookstore–and the picture on this blog post, in an article titled Comment être élégante avec un joli port de tête?  (How to be elegant, with a pretty port de tête?)
• Le port: port, harbor, shelter; bearing, wearing (e.g. le port de lunettes, “wearing glasses”); bearing, way of holding, way of carrying.  That final sense is the one that we see in le port de tête.
• le rhinocéros: rhinoceros.  In the Le port de tête bookstore, I asked the owner if she could recommend a cafe.  She told me about the Kawha Café, and told me that it was on the other side of the street, down the block, and had two [unintelligibles] sticking out of the wall, making this odd gesture of showing things sticking out of her forehead.  Turned out that the unintelligible words were “rhinoceros heads.”  Hard to catch, out of context, even with the helpful hand-gestures–I guess that now I know the international hand signal for “rhinoceros head,” though…  Picture below.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while–or just have a degree in something quantitative–you know about Zipf’s Law.  This formula describes the distribution of word frequencies, and captures the fact that our daily language is filled with a small number of words that occur extremely frequently (in English, the, a, me, and the like; in French, le, un, moi), and a very large number of words that almost never occur–and yet, they do occur, thus damning second language learners to a hell of constant dictionary consultation for the rest of their lives.

We’ve talked far less often about the Poisson distribution.  The related formula has the consequence that even rare events will sometimes occur in clusters.  Maybe three rock stars die in the same month, or the same tree gets hit with lightning twice in a week.  Similarly, it’s not that unusual to see unusual words in clusters.

I was reminded of that last night, when I ran into the verb clignoter, which is used in reference to lights and means to flicker or to blink.  I don’t think I’d ever run across it before, but I saw it not once, but twice yesterday: once in the elevator, related to the light that lets you know if your emergency call to whoever it is that answers emergency calls from elevators has succeeded, and once on a big sign at an intersection with a bunch of construction going on.  (Yes, I’m such a geek that I am basically constantly looking up new words.  That’s what smart phones were made for, right?)

Now that we know this rare-but-it-happens word, we need to cover another word to go with it.  For reasons that will be obvious to the phonologists in the audience, it looks almost identical to the word clignoter to a linguist, and I know that I’m going to confuse these two constantly, so let’s memorize them:

• clignoter: [of a light] to blink or flash.
• grignoter: to snack or nibble; to edge forward, to gain on.

Due to my poor command of the French language, I scared the heck out of my cousin.

I’m in Montréal for a family wedding.  Riding from the airport to the hotel, the cab driver was listening to the radio.  I heard this (if it’s in italics, it happened in French): 3 degrees tonight, 0 in the suburbs, chance of freezing.  Snow likely tomorrow. 

This wasn’t good news–lots of family coming into town for the wedding.  Really?, I asked the taxi driver.  Snow?  Tomorrow?  Yep, he answered.

Arriving at the hotel, I called my cousin, whose daughter is getting married this weekend.  “How’s the weather where you came from today, as opposed to here?”, he asked me.  (If it’s not in italics, it happened in English.)  “About like here,” I said–it’s quite nice here in Montreal today–“but I understand there might be snow tomorrow.”  “No.  No.  You’re kidding.  Snow?  It can’t,” says my cousin.  You see, several years ago, he had another occasion here.  It was April.  With all of the family in town, it snowed 12 inches, and no one could get out of town the next day.  “Well, maybe I misunderstood,” I said.  “My French isn’t that great.”

After we hung up, I looked up the word that I had heard on the radio that described what the weather was going to be like the next day.  Crap!  I always mistake these two words:

• la neige: snow.
• le nuage: cloud.

Indeed, it’s going to be cloudy tomorrow, not snowy–no need to panic.  I won’t soon be forgiven for the 5 years that I probably took off of my cousin’s life with that mistake, though!

When I started studying French last winter, I fell in love with a song from Quebec called Petite annonce amoureuse (“Personals ad”–for those of you who are too young to remember, personals ads were the precedents of Match.com; they were short advertisements that ran in newspapers, from people looking for love).  The song was originally recorded by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and recently re-recorded by Chloé Sainte-Marie.  The song begins with these words:

In French, trois (“three”) and roi (“king”) rhyme–no big deal.  Just a quirky line in a song, right?

Fast forward two years, and I’m now reading The story of French, a book about the history of the French language by the always-interesting Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlowe. The book tells the story of the population of French Canada. While the population of the English colonies was booming in the 1600s, the French Canadian population most definitely was not, with a ratio of six men to every female. The administration tried to address the situation by sending marriageable young women, mostly from orphanages, from France to the New World. These women were accompanied by dowries provided by the Crown, and were known as filles du roi (filles du roy, in the orthography of the time)–“daughters of the King.”  The King’s Daughters feature strongly in the creation myth of Canada, and various and sundry people of whom you would have heard are descended from filles du roi, including Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, and Madonna, according to Wikipedia.  Here are some words related to the filles du roi:

• l’orphelin, l’orpheline: orphan
• l’orphelinat (masc.): orphanage
• le foyer de l’enfance: orphanage (more current term, according to the French Wikipedia entry)