The typical stereotype of Paris is as a beautiful, majestically historical city that just oozes romance, and indeed, Paris is all that.  But, visitors are often surprised to find that it is also a city with a sometimes astounding number of beggars on the street. The reasons behind this are many, and varied, and, I think, interesting.

In the pre-modern period, the vast majority of the French (like the vast majority of everyone else in the world) were farmers.  Most children didn’t live to adulthood, and you needed a lot of hands to work the farm, so people had big families.

In the 1500s, the French death rate took a relatively sudden drop.  People were still having those big families, so there were a relatively large number of people making it to adulthood.  The inheritance laws of the time included primogeniture, i.e. inheritance of everything by the oldest son, so lots of those people wouldn’t have a farm of their own to work.  Options were limited, and if they couldn’t find other employment, a lot of people hit the road.  (There’s an excellent description of the mechanics of this phenomenon in Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and other episodes in French cultural history.)

If you hit the road in France, you’re eventually going to end up in Paris, if for no other reason than that it’s the hub of the road system (and today, the rail system).  If you can’t find other employment, your options come down to begging or stealing, and most people aren’t thieves.  So: begging.

Begging actually has a very long and somewhat respectable history in Europe.  As Robert Cole puts it: “In the middle ages, ‘Christian charity’ perceived the poor as God’s special children and therefore deserving of alms.”  Begging can be a profession, really.  (Old Eastern European Jewish joke: beggar hits a guy up for money.  Guy gives him some helpful hints on improving his approach.  Beggar responds: YOU’RE telling ME how to beg?  This would make total sense in a French context: a métier (profession) is a métier, whether you’re a doctor, an engineer, or an elevator operator.)

If you’re gonna be a beggar, though, it helps to have a schtick.  Physical lack of ability to work was a good one, and Parisian beggars were known for faking such a disability, leading to their squatting areas being known as Cours des miracles (“Courts of miracles”) for their recovery at the end of the working day.  (There was one just to the north of what is now the Place des Vosges, I believe.)  By the 1500s, begging wasn’t viewed quite as kindly.  Robert Cole again:

In sixteenth-century Paris the poor were viewed as merely layabouts who preferred to live off public welfare.  Meanwhile bad harvests, plagues, inflation and religious war increased their number dramatically.  Public begging was outlawed in 1536, and in 1551 laws were enacted which limited eligibility for public assistance and forbad women to have their children in tow when selling candles outside churches.  To do so, went the rationale, evoked sympathy from prospective customer, which proved that such women were really only begging.  A traveller’s history of Paris.

So: there have been a lot of beggars in Paris for centuries.  In 2007, the European Union was enlarged to include a couple countries with large Roma populations.  There have always been Roma in France, but now a lot more came (the Roma rights group FNASAT says 12,000 currently, and that’s after 10,000 being expelled in 2009 and another 8,000 in 2011; other estimates range from 20,000 to 400,000), and they are a prominent part of the Parisian begging ecosystem.  (There is, indeed, a Parisian begging ecosystem, and there are actually a number of distinct genres of begging in Paris–a subject in and of itself.)

To be clear: if you don’t give charity, your life is pointless.  Let me point out that this is a teaching of at least Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, and–for my fellow secularists in France–Rousseau, the revolutionary Constituent Assembly, National Convention, and Directory, and modern French philosophers from Sartre to Alain Finkielkraut.  (All of those links are to citations on the subject, not to their biographies.)  The Buddhist view of charity is especially appealing to me, as a (really bad) student of judo:

Buddhism views charity as an act to reduce personal greed which is an unwholesome mental state which hinders spiritual progress.  What Buddhists believe, Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera.

Judo’s view of the best human relationships is mutual welfare–we’re taught that human interactions should be mutually beneficial.  So, if it’s the case that charity benefits both the giver and the receiver, then it’s very judo.  Seriously, give charity–if for no other reason than that you’ll feel better about humanity if you take part in it being more humane.

• le mendiant: beggar.
• le gueux/la gueuse: beggar (literary).  A number of other, more pejorative meanings–highwayman for men, whore for women, etc.  Probably obsolete, but keep it mind for when you read Tartuffe.
• le clochard: beggar; also bum.  (Slang.)
  
• le/la clodo: beggar; also homeless person, tramp, hobo.

Some additions from native speaker Phildange:

• le vagabond: wandering beggar, hobo.
• le chemineau: same as above.
• faire la manche: to beg.

I was in the Navy with an Armenian woman.  (No, you don’t have to be a citizen to serve in the American military, and that’s probably true in most countries.  In France, you can get citizenship by serving in the military–you are français par le sang versé, “French by spilt blood.”  This isn’t the case in the United States–you can apply for citizenship as a member of our military, but there actually isn’t any guarantee that you’ll get it.) We’ll call her Nairi (not her real name).  Like many members of the Armenian diaspora, Nairi was massively multilingual–she spoke Armenian, Arabic, and Spanish natively, and French and English as very strong second languages.  (I once saw her mother test her to make sure that she wasn’t forgetting any of them.)  One day Nairi came back from leave (what we call vacation in the military) with a seven-language dictionary.  I admired it, and she insisted that I take it.  I refused, she insisted, I refused, she insisted, I refused, she insisted, and finally, I took it.  What I didn’t realize was that in Armenian culture, if someone admires something of yours, you must insist that they take it.  Armenians know that they most certainly should not take it–I didn’t.  Now I do.  Stupid me–every time I see that dictionary on my bookshelf, I feel like a total jerk.

In a recent post, we talked about monolingual dictionaries–that is, dictionaries that list words in some language and give definitions of them in that same language.  Today, let’s talk about bilingual dictionaries–that is, words that list words in some language and give corresponding words in another language.  Of course, anything that we might say about bilingual dictionaries applies equally to dictionaries with even more languages, like the one that I stupidly took from poor Nairi.

I carefully said “corresponding” words just above–I carefully didn’t say “equivalent” or “the same” words.  This is because it’s often the case that there isn’t a single translation from one word in one language to one word in another language.  Even when there is one, it doesn’t necessarily “mean” the same thing, in some sense of the word “meaning.”  To give you an example from my college French 101 textbook: a fenêtre in French is a window in English–fine so far.  But, say window in English, and the referent is most likely a casement window, specifically–one that slides up and down.  Say fenêtre in French, and the reference is most likely a window that opens in the middle–horizontally.  (We would call this a French window in English.  See this post for a list of things that we call French something-or-other in English that aren’t called anything of the sort in French.)  And, as I said, there often isn’t just one.  A language that I worked on in grad school has the word invert.  But: invert what?  If you’re inverting a hollow object, that’s one verb–if you’re inverting a solid object, it’s another verb.  French has maybe two words for snow–la neige, and la poudreuse (powder snow).  Depending on how you count, English has 13 or 55 or 120 (scroll down past the Inuit words) or 182 words for snow.  So: not a 1-to-1 correspondence.

Having at least mentioned some of the theoretical issues, let’s look at the practical points of buying and using a bilingual dictionary.  In these days of Amazon, you can use reader reviews in a way that we never could before–it’s really a nice advantage over the old pre-Internet days.  However, there are also some specific things to look for.

• Example sentences: you want a dictionary with example sentences, at least in the language that’s foreign to you.
• Verb + preposition combinations: a good dictionary should tell you which prepositions, if any, go with which verbs.  You need to know, for instance, that in English you shoot at something, you lean toward (have a preference for) something, and you stop doing something, with no preposition.  Likewise, in French you need to know that you tirer sur or tirer contre (shoot “on” or shoot “against”) something, you pencher pour (lean “for”) something, and you arrêter de (stop “from”) doing something.
• If you are working with language(s) that have gender, you want the gender to show up both in the Language1 -> Language2 section and in the Language2 -> Language1 section.  If you look up kitchen towel and find that the translation to French is torchon, you don’t want to then have to go to the French -> English section to see whether it’s le torchon (it is) or la torchon (it isn’t).
• This might seem obvious, but make sure that the pronunciation is given for the words in any language whose pronunciation isn’t obvious from the spelling–and, yes, that includes both English and French.
• This takes a while, but: when you find the word that you’re looking for in the other language, you might want to look it up in the other direction.  For example: suppose that you look up the English word towel in a crappy bilingual English/French dictionary.  In a crappy dictionary, you might find the following: serviette, torchon.  Both of those can, indeed, be used to translate towel from English to French–but, they’re not equivalent.  Serviette is for a bath or beach towel, while torchon is for a kitchen towel.  You want a dictionary that will distinguish between the various possible translations.  It’s often useful to look the French words up in turn (or the English words, if you’re going from French to English).  If you do that, you’ll find that a serviette can be a towel, but also a napkin, or a briefcase.  A torchon, you’ll find, can also be a messy document, or a rag.  It’s good to be on top of this kind of thing when you’re trying to choose between supposed synonyms.
• Labelling of registers, or levels of appropriateness: you most definitely want a dictionary that includes slang, obscenities, informal words, etc., or you’re not going to get very far in real life.  However, you also want a dictionary that labels words that are non-standard–offensive words, etc.  This kind of thing can be really, really hard to catch when you’re learning a language from movies, your neighbors, etc.

The always-awesome Lawless French web site has a good page on the subject of how to use a bilingual dictionary, and it has much better examples than I do.  You can find it here.

So, what are some good bilingual English/French dictionaries?  Here are some options.

• The best thing out there these days is almost certainly WordReference.com.  It has lots of language pairs, example sentences, colloquial expressions, pronunciations, male and female forms of adjectives, plurals, a verb conjugator, and a reverse look-up feature that does exactly what I suggest you do in the last bulletted item above.  The auto-c0mplete feature in the search box saves me enormous amounts of time (and guessing about spellings).  There’s an excellent WordReference iPhone app.  Be aware, though, that the iPhone app will not generally let you look up obscenities–you have to go to the web site for that.
• For the Kindle or for the Kindle app on your phone, the Collins English-French and French-English dictionaries are quite good.  They’re quite highly rated on Amazon.com.  I have the Collins dictionaries on my phone, and use them whenever I don’t have Internet access and therefore can’t get to WordReference.com.  The Collins dictionaries also have an advantage over WordReference: they don’t give as many super-subtle translations.  The only bad thing about WordReference is that it can sometimes give an overwhelming number of other-language translations.  That’s great when you want it, but when you don’t, you might prefer the Collins dictionary.  As it happens, there is a Collins dictionary tab on the WordReference site, and it’s easy to click on that.
• Linguee.fr is fantastic for seeing things in context.  You will generally get lots of example sentences.  There’s an iPhone app for that, too.
• Reverso.net is another good one for seeing things in context.  It sometimes has better coverage of colloquial, slang, and obscene language than Linguee does.  Again, there’s an iPhone app.

I found Nairi on Facebook recently.  I sent her a friend request–no response.  Is it because she doesn’t remember who the hell I am?  Is it because she hates me for taking her dictionary?  I have no idea.  Nairi, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry!

Many languages have a phenomenon such that nouns belong to groups that affect things about the words with which they occur.  French is such a language.  You can more or less put French nouns into two groups, as follows:

• For one group, the singular definite article (“the”) is le, the singular indefinite article (“a”) is un, the adjective “big” is grand, and the adjective “boring” is ennuyeux.
• For the other group, the singular definite article (“the”) is la, the singular indefinite article (“a”) is une, the adjective “big” is grande, and the adjective “boring” is ennuyeuse.

When a language has two or three of these classes, the language is typically said to have a gender system.  So, French has two of these classes, and we call the nouns in these classes masculine and feminine nouns.  German has three of these classes, and we call them masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns.  Lithuanian Yiddish has three of these classes, but most other dialects of Yiddish have two.  English has basically no such classes–we have words that are sort of intrinsically masculine, like father, and words that are sort of intrinsically feminine, like mother, but since they don’t affect the forms of the words with which they appear (you say the mother and the father, with no differences in the word the), linguists wouldn’t call it a gender system.  On the other hand, Old English (spoken from around 450 to around 1400) had three noun classes.  (Look at the different forms of the word the in these three Old English nouns, taken from Wikipedia: sēo sunne (“the sun”), se mōna (“the moon”), þæt wīf (“the woman/wife”).)  A language on which I did research in graduate school only has two such classes, but referring to anything by the wrong class is a way to insult it.  It doesn’t matter which of the two classes it belongs to–if you use the wrong modifiers, it’s an insult.  I was terrified to ever open my mouth, and don’t speak it at all.  (My son often played in the corner of the office while I collected data.  It’s quite amazing to hear dô páráná come–correctly–out of the mouth of that blond-haired, blue-eyed, video game addict today.)

There’s nothing magic about the numbers two and three–languages can have more or less arbitrary numbers of these classes.  We tend to refer to them as genders when there are just two or three, and to refer to them as noun classes when there are more than that, but there is no difference between what we call the gender system in French, with two noun classes, and what we call the noun class system in Shona, which has twenty noun classes.  It’s a difference of numbers, not of kind–in both cases, you have this more-or-less arbitrary slicing up of the nominal lexicon (noun vocabulary) of the language into groups of nouns that affect the forms of articles, adjectives, etc. in various and sundry ways.

I say “various and sundry” because gender/noun class systems can work out in lots of different ways.  In Semitic languages, verbs agree with the gender of their subjects.  For example, he studied is lamad, while she studied is lamda.  In the first case, it’s the pattern of having the two a-a vowels that makes it the masculine form of the verb, and in the second case, it’s the a in the middle, the md coming together (versus mad in the masculine form), and the a at the end that make it feminine.  Different verbs, tenses, and numbers (that is, singular versus plural) have different forms, so don’t get excited about the fact that there’s an a at the end of the third person singular past tense feminine form of the verb–it’s not that way all the time.  For example, he goes is holekh, while she goes is holekhet. 

Does having classes of nouns in your language–or not having them–make a culture more or less sexist?  I only have anecdotes here, and–counter to what you might hear–anecdote is not the singular of data.  For what it’s worth: my undergraduate advisor always used to point out that Hebrew is about as gendered of a language as you can get (see above–even verbs have to have gender in Hebrew), and probably close to everyone in Israel speaks either Hebrew or Arabic (which has the identical system), but Israel was the fourth country in the world to elect a woman as the head of state.  In contrast, Finnish has no gender whatsoever, but has never had a female head of state, as far as I know.  (This is not to imply anything bad about Finland–there are a bazillion countries with genderless languages that have never had a female head of state.  I don’t know why my professor picked on the Finns.)

English note concerning the title of this post: using the word got (or gots) as the present tense of the verb to have is a social marker of class–that’s “class” in the sense of couche sociale.  Lower class, specifically.  Other speakers might use it for humorous effect.  “To have class” means something like to have elegance of style or manners.  So, if you say you got no class, man, part of the flavor of the expression comes from the fact that you’re using a “low (social) class” verb form to talk about “class” in the sense of elegance.