Tag: vocabulary

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:

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:



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.

It’s on evenings like this that I especially appreciate summertime in Paris.  The Euro 2016 is in full swing, and the streets of my neighborhood are full of little crowds of soccer fans wearing the jerseys of their team and chanting and singing in the language of whatever country they happen to be from.  Weaving in and out of them are women in cute dresses and impressive heels–not unusual here, but especially salient to me today due to their contrast with the junkie nodding off in a doorway across the street, who I would guess couldn’t tell you what she’s wearing or, indeed, what feet are for.

It’s also June 21st, the summer solstice and the day of the Fête de la musique, the annual festival that is marked by musical happenings large and small all over France.  Standing on my balcony (don’t get excited, it’s about the size of a phone booth and occasionally splattered with bird shit), I can hear a guy playing the guitar and singing in front of a set of speakers that are much, much bigger than his limited skills merit.  In other neighborhoods you might hear a local choir singing on a street corner, or a full brass section in a park, or whatever.  It’s totally cool.

Of course, with crowds come assholes.  I took a break from memorizing vocabulary about semantics and knowledge representation to take a walk by the Eiffel Tower just now, and saw seven guys running the ball-and-cup scam (the norm would be zero to one), including one guy who was speaking Russian (there are tons of them in town–the president of the Russian soccer hooligan association was escorted onto a plane and out of the country by the French police a couple days ago; today he tweeted a picture of himself in a stadium in Toulouse, having taken advantage of the Schengen Agreement to get back into France, and is now sitting in a jail cell) and one guy who, by his accent, his enthusiasm, and his backwards ball cap, seemed pretty clearly to be an American.  It is, after all, entre chien et loup at the moment, I guess–dusk, when dogs go home and the wolves come out.  Back to my apartment to memorize vocabulary and feel grateful that if Europe has to end, I had the good fortune to see a bit of what the glory was like first.

• le shit: hash, pot. Probably not what the junkie across the street has been doing today.
• l’essentialisme: essentialism.  Easy enough to spell, but I have no clue how to pronounce it–seems like there oughta be some accents in there somewhere.  This is the idea that language is the way it is because it reflects something real about the world–Cratylus’s position in Plato’s Cratylean dialogues.
• l’arbitraire (n.m.): arbitrariness.  This is the idea that language is the way it is purely as a matter of social convention and chance–Hermogenes’s position in the same.
• le normativisme: the attitude that language is something to be regulated by fiat.

I’ve occasionally read that Neanderthals were so similar to modern humans that you wouldn’t notice one if you walked by them on the street.  This is probably not true.  Leaving aside the question of whether people who write things like that know anything about what I, personally, am and am not likely to notice, anatomically modern humans have quite different facial structures from anything else out there today, and also from any of our hominid relatives.  That includes Neanderthals.

In recent posts, we’ve talked about three unique features of the anatomically modern human face:

• A high, vertical forehead
• A chin
• Primarily located under the eyes

If you’re not sure about what any of those mean and you want to know, follow the links, which will take you to illustrated posts on each of those individual features.

The tendency to notice faces, and the ability to read facial expressions, seem to be very important in humans, based on things like the sophistication of the musculature that we have for controlling facial expressions, the amount of the motor nervous system that is developed to controlling those muscles, and the skill that most humans have in recognizing facial expressions of emotion.  For an accessible discussion of the psychology and biology of all of this, see this Wikipedia page.  Chimpanzees are lousy at recognizing human facial expressions–dogs can be pretty good at it, though.  (There’s a lot of variation here, so don’t get pissed at your dog if he doesn’t seem to be up to the task.  He undoubtedly has other charms.  Another cool thing that dogs can learn to do, but chimpanzees can’t: understand that when you point in a direction, they should look that way.)

If you’ve read the preceding posts, and you can remember these three features–forehead, chin, and being located under the eyes–then I’m guessing that you can impress your kids the next time you go to the zoo/museum/catacombs by explaining what to notice about the faces of the skulls of the various and sundry critters that they’ll see.  Want to test yourself?  Here are some skulls to check out.  See if you can tell which are anatomically modern humans and which aren’t.  Answers at the bottom of the post, along with some French vocabulary for talking about faces.

1. Modern human.  This is the ballot box from Yale’s Cross and Bones society.  Picture source: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/4503
2. Modern human in the front, Neanderthal behind it.  Picture source: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/dramatic-wall-of-skulls-to-be-built-at-london-museum-to-illustrate-human-evolution/
3. Modern human infant.  (Trick question.)  This is a reproduction of the skull of a deceased 4-month-old child.  Human infant skulls are similar to chimpanzee infant skulls in that they both have foreheads (which the chimp will lose as it ages), but note that the human infant’s face is located beneath the eyes.  Picture source: https://boneclones.com/category/child-skulls/human-anatomy#view=grid&category=76&page=1&pageSize=30
4. Australopithecus.  No lower jaw, so you can’t look for a chin, but notice the lack of a forehead and the forward-protruding muzzle (i.e., the face is not located under the eyes).  Picture source: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Australopithecus
5. Chimpanzee–underside of skull.  You don’t have to look for a forehead or a chin to know that this wasn’t an anatomically modern human–the muzzle protrudes way out in front.  Picture source: http://www.dlt.ncssm.edu/tiger/360views/Hominid_Skull-Chimpanzee_1200x900/bottom.htm
6. Bornean orangutan.  Picture source: http://www.skullsunlimited.com/record_species.php?id=1767
7. Modern human.  (Replica.)  If you got this one wrong: maybe the discoloration threw you off?  It’s totally typical, though–forehead, face below the eyes, and a chin.  Picture source: http://www.boneroom.com/store/c115/Museum_Quality_Human_Skull_%26_Skeleton_Casts.html

• la figure: face.
• le visage: face. I think this might be a higher register of language than la figure–perhaps more literary?  Not sure.  Here’s a link to the Noir Désir song Des visages des figures, just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW533pwLMv0.
• le sourcil: eyebrow.  The l at the end is silent, unlike most word-final l‘s.
• le cil: eyelash.  This l is pronounced.
• la joue: cheek.
• un œil: eye.  Pronunction: [œj].  That is: the L is silent.  Follow the link to the Lawless French web site if you want to hear a recording of the proper pronunciation.  (I threw this one in despite the fact that we all probably know it because I was recently in a French theater class, and I noticed that NONE of the students (including me) was sure how to pronounce it when it would come up in a play, despite the fact that we all had good enough handles on French to talk about Molière in it.  Like I always say–it’s the little things that get you…)
• les pattes: sideburns.
• la barbe: beard.
• barbe-à-papa: cotton candy.
• la gueule: mouth.  Ta gueule!  Shut up!
• être très physionomiste: to have a good memory for faces
• le/la physionomiste: bouncer

Just as Paris has a begging ecosystem and an ecosystem of hustling (in the bad sense of that word), it also has an ecosystem of hustling in the good sense of that word.  (See here for an explanation of the two senses of hustle in English.)  The people who make their living in this system are almost entirely foreigners, as far as I can tell, and they are pretty much just out there working their asses off, in good weather and bad–earning a mostly honest living within the law, if just on the edges of it.

I say “just on the edges” because the only thing that anyone could complain about concerning these people is that they aren’t licensed.  I find it hard to see how anyone could complain about what they do, really–personally, I admire their hustle (in the good sense of that word), how hard they work.  And, since these people have their little niches in the ecosystem, it’s not like they’re taking away money that could have been earned by French citizens, either–these people are doing things that no one else does.

Of course you’ll see people doing this kind of hustling anywhere, and supporting the people who do work of this kind can be a good way to help support the local economy.  In fact, in some places, the beggars are so totally controlled by criminal gangs that take a large chunk out of their earnings that if you want to support the local poor people, it’s much better to buy stuff from the little old ladies who show up in the town squares with a few pieces of fruit that they picked in their back yard or buns that they baked at home that morning than to give money to people begging on the street.  The begging situation isn’t under that kind of criminal control in France (with the possible exception of the Roma women that you’ll see–Roma women are very often exploited as beggars in this way in Eastern Europe).

Having said that, some of these things are quite Parisian.  As we’ve so often seen to be the case, different ethnic groups have different niches, and different kinds of selling take place in different parts of the city.  Here’s a sketch of the sorts of (the good kind of) hustling folks that you’re almost certain to see in Paris.

Eiffel Tower sellers

These guys are the most common sight in the Parisian hustling ecosystem (in the good sense of “hustling”).  What they do: they sell little replicas of the Eiffel Tower.

They mostly work the area of the Eiffel Tower–a little bit on the steps of Sacré Coeur, too, but it’s primarily an Eiffel Tower thing–not surprising, given that that’s mostly what they sell.  (A year or two ago, they started peddling selfie sticks, too.)  There are two kinds of these guys:

1. Guys that walk around with big metal hoops full of Eiffel Towers.
2. Guys with a square piece of cloth with a bunch of Eiffel Towers on it–they try to sell stuff to passers-by.

The Eiffel Towers come in a range of sizes.  The smallest ones are on little key rings, at 5 for 1 euro.  They get as big as maybe 8 inches–no clue what those cost.

The square pieces of cloth that the guys who aren’t walking with a ringful use have a standard construction.  They’re roughly a yard or a meter square.  They have a strip of cloth running down opposite sides of the cloth.  When the police come around, they pick the cloth up by those strips, the square of cloth becomes a sort of pouch, and they take off running.

Selling the little Eiffel Tower things is a West African monopoly, and again, you almost entirely see it around the Eiffel Tower and on the steps of Sacré Coeur.  Why West African?  This post on Quora by Jacob Hood might shed some light on the question.

Wine and beer sellers

Another thing that’s quite specific to the Eiffel Tower area is the South Asian guys selling bottles of wine and beer.  More precisely, these guys wander the Champ de Mars (the big grassy area to the south of the Tower).  They spend their entire day carrying a heavy bucket full of ice, beer, and bottles of wine and champagne.  I’ve heard that they will try to charge outrageous prices for their wares, and that makes them the only people on this page with whom I have any problems whatsoever.  I’ve also heard that they will give you a reasonable price if you haggle with them, though (although perhaps they won’t give it to you very graciously–remember, these guys are hauling those heavy buckets around all day long).  There’s a perfectly good wine store a couple blocks away on the Rue Cler, and I don’t know why anyone would buy their booze from a guy with a bunch of bottles in a bucket–but, hey, these guys gotta make a living, too.  (You can read an American expat’s story of haggling with one of the wine sellers here.)

This is a South Asian monopoly–Indian and Pakistani guys.  I’ve only ever seen it on the Champ de Mars.

I spent way too much time trying to find a picture of these guys on line, with no luck.  Yesterday I left work early enough to walk up to the Champ de Mars and take a picture of one myself (questionable legality, with Europe’s privacy laws), only to discover that the Champ de Mars is completely fenced in until mid-July due to the Euros 2016, and the majority of these guys have been displaced for a month or so.  If you happen to have a picture of a Champ de Mars wine seller that I could post here, it would be great.

Water sellers

Water sellers sell…bottles of water, of course!  You’ll see them around a lot of the touristy areas. As Phildange has pointed out:

The water sellers are a modern echo of the “porteurs d’eau” from the Ancient Regime. They did exactly the same job, selling water to the thirsty, but in a time when there were no taps anywhere, and fountains could be far away. Amazing how globalized economy makes society regress to XIXth ot XVIIIth centuries, and in many points.
In the kings’ times there was also a glamour function that has not been replicated yet: some guys carried portable latrines, with a big blanket for privacy and water for cleanliness . Fantastic job, isn’t it ?

Water is generally 1 euro a bottle if it’s not oppressively hot, and 2 euros a bottle if it is oppressively hot.  (Don’t hate them for this–you can go cool off in the shade any time you want, but those guys are going to be out in the sun all day.) Personally, I think these folks are doing a public service.  Could be anybody doing this, but it’s mostly a South Asian thing–Indian and Pakistani guys.

Rose sellers

You’ll have seen these guys in most of the tourist cities of Europe.  They show up on the patios of restaurants, and very occasionally inside.  They carry a bouquet of roses, and primarily approach tables with couples at them.  This is mostly a South Asian thing, again.

In case I haven’t made it clear: I admire these guys.  (They’re almost always men.)  They’re not begging, and they’re not ripping people off–they’re out there every day, working their asses off for what can’t be very much money.  Good for them, I say.

• mars (n.m.): March.  Note: the s is pronounced.
• Mars (n.m.): Mars, the god.  Reminder: the s is still pronounced.
• Mars (n.f.): Mars, the planet.  Yes, the s is pronounced.  Yes, WordReference.com says that the planet is a masculine noun.  Yes, I checked with multiple native speakers, and it does appear to be feminine.

One of the characteristics of the modern human skull is that the face is located primarily under the eyes.  What the hell does that mean?  For comparison, let’s look at some not-terribly-exotic animals. We’ll start with a nice side view of a cow.

Check out the cow’s muzzle.  Is there any sense in which you could say that the cow’s face is under its eyes?  No–the muzzle protrudes out frontally quite a bit.

In fact, by definition, a muzzle (or snout) protrudes.  From the Wikipedia post on the subject: “A snout is the protruding portion of an animal’s face, consisting of its nose, mouth, and jaw. In many animals the equivalent structure is called a muzzle, rostrum or proboscis.”

There’s quite a bit of variety in muzzle (snout) shapes in the animal kingdom.  Here are some possibilities in dogs.  Mouse-over the pictures for technical terms that describe these different skull shapes.

If you have a long, thin snout, you’re Dolichocephalic. Picture source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Lamtara_Golden_Spritzer.jpg/180px-Lamtara_Golden_Spritzer.jpg.

If you have a medium-length snout, you’re mesocephalic. Picture source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Cocker_spaniel_angielski_zloty_photoshop.jpg/180px-Cocker_spaniel_angielski_zloty_photoshop.jpg.

If you have a very short, flat snout, you’re brachycephalic. Picture source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Pug_600.jpg/180px-Pug_600.jpg.

If we look at various and sundry apes, we see that they have protruding muzzles (or snouts), as well.  (Scroll down past the pictures.)  Compare the human, the chimp, the orangutan, and the macaque, and you’ll note that the three non-humans have protruding muzzles.  The human: no.  (BTW: I don’t think that the macaque is an ape.)

We can see how this anatomy relates to the rest of the skull if we look at the skull from the underside.  Let’s go back to dogs–or dog-like things, at any rate.  Here are four different canid species.  Look at the second row from the top–that’s the underside of the skull.  The narrow thing sticking out towards the front of the skull is the palate, or roof of the mouth.  That’s the bone of the muzzle.

Where this becomes relevant to humans is that over the course of human evolution, we’ve gone from having protruding snouts to not having them. It’s hard to find a single picture that illustrates the progression, so I’ll run some individual ones by you.  Here’s an Australopithcus africanus.  Australopithecus was around from about 4 million years ago to about 2 million years ago.  They’re probably ancestral to us–if not, we share a common ancestor. Note the prominent protrusion.

Here’s a nice side-by-side of a Homo erectus skull and a modern human skull.

Homo erectus was around from about 1.9 million years ago until about 70,000 years ago.  It’s probably an ancestral species to modern humans.  The frontal protrusion is nothing like the australopithecine one, but it’s still there.  (Keep scrolling down–alignment problems…)

 

Neanderthals were around from maybe 250,000 years ago until about 40,000 years ago.  I’m not clear on the arguments as to whether or not they’re ancestral to modern humans, but we probably inbred with them.  Not much protrusion left, at this point.

So, how does this relate to the question of why you have wisdom teeth?  The thought is that as the muzzle of early hominids shortened down to what we (don’t) have today, it resulted in a crowding of the teeth into a smaller anterior-posterior (front to back) area.

Do we get anything out of all of this change in oral anatomy?  Actually, modern humans do have a fairly unique oral cavity morphology (shape, in this sense of the word morphology).  One of the results of that morphology is a lot more space in which to make different kinds of sounds, and those possibilities do indeed get exploited in the languages of the world.  More on that another time.  Until then, here’s some relevant French vocabulary.

• le museau: muzzle, snout
• le groin: pig snout
• le boutoir: wild boar snout
• la dent de sagesse: wisdom tooth

By the way: if you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s worth checking out both the English-language Wikipedia page on wisdom teeth and the French-language Wikipedia page on wisdom teeth.  Each one has interesting content that the other one doesn’t.