Tag: vocabulary

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…

 

 

 

As we saw in a recent post, beauty is not a linguistic concept.  Linguistics is about the scientific study of language, and science doesn’t have a concept of beauty, at least not for its objects of study (as opposed to, say, a really nice proof).  So, if I say that Brazilian Portuguese has the most beautiful consonnes fricatives (fricative consonants), I’m speaking as a civilian (or “normal person,” as we linguists call the rest of you), not in my official capacity.

Having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, you’ll find below a list of people’s thoughts about the most beautiful French verbs.  There aren’t a lot of repeats on this list (unlike a similar list of nouns that I saw the other day), so I’ll just pass it on without much comment, and add some of my favorite French verbs or verbal expressions to use:

• rester cloîtré dans mon appartement: to stay shut up in my apartment–literally, to stay cloistered.
• haussmanniser: to Haussmannize.
• podcaster: to download a podcast, to listen to by podcast.  (In other words: the opposite of the English meaning, although if you look it up on Linguee.fr,you’ll see some translations with the English meaning, too.  I’ve only heard it with the opposite of the English meaning, though.)
• retweeter: to retweet.
• chunker: to break down into analyzable units.  This is a technical term in language processing, where the usual English verb is “to chunk.”

Here’s the list, from Quora:

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-beautiful-French-verbs-youve-ever-come-across

 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
–John Keats, Ode on a Grecian urn

I knew that I was meant to be a linguist the day that I was listening to a Brazilian guy being tortured on the radio.  As the Portuguese-speaking police officer questioned him and the guy screamed in the background, I thought: what beautiful fricatives.  I think that this is also strong evidence that I am a terrible person, but that’s a conversation for another time.

There’s something that you need to keep in mind about this story: my judgement about the relative beauty or lack thereof of a language isn’t a professional judgement at all.  Rather, it is an entirely personal one.  Linguists think of themselves as people who study language from a scientific perspective, and from a scientific perspective, beauty is not a relevant characteristic for describing a language.  Are there people who study language from a non-scientific perspective?  Sure–poets.  Poets typically have a very deep awareness of language, and fantastic insights into it.  However, a poet’s understanding of what language is and how language works is very different from a linguist’s understanding of what language is and how language works.  I can’t imagine protesting against a poet’s description of something linguistic as beautiful.  But, that’s not a word that you would hear coming out of my mouth as a linguist.  As a civilian?  Sure–for example, Brazilian Portuguese is beautiful.  But, as we’ve seen, I’m a terrible person–so, take my aesthetic judgements with a grain of salt.

• la consonne: consonant.
• fricatif (adj.): sibilant, fricative.
• la consonne fricative: fricative consonant.
• la voyelle: vowel.

 

 

The Poisson distribution describes the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since the last event (definition from Wikipedia.com).  Who cares?  As Wikipedia puts it, with some highlighting by me: The Poisson distribution can be applied to systems with a large number of possible events, each of which is rare. How many such events will occur during a fixed time interval? Under the right circumstances, this is a random number with a Poisson distribution.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that (a) a language has a lot of words, and b) most of the words in a language are rare–that’s why we can use Zipf’s Law to describe the distribution of words in a language, and that’s why I write this blog, which keeps track of the obscure words that I learn in the course of my day.  (Just some of them–there are far too many in any given day for me to track them all.)  So, you could imagine using the Poisson distribution to predict things like how many new words I will run into today.

There are many practical applications of the Poisson distribution.  For example, most of my colleagues work with genomic data of one sort or another.  Say you’re looking at the number of mutations in a particular stretch of DNA.  Mutations are rare.  You have a stretch of DNA that you think has a lot of mutations, and you think that you know what caused them.  Before you draw conclusions about whether or not the mutations were, in fact, caused by that, you need to be sure that the stretch of DNA couldn’t have acquired that large (you think) number of mutations by chance.  The Poisson distribution lets you assign a probability of that number of mutations occurring by chance in that one stretch of DNA.  If the Poisson distribution suggests that the probability of that number of mutations occurring by chance is greater than, say, 5%, then you probably shouldn’t draw the conclusion that you were considering concerning what caused it.  On the other hand, if the Poisson distribution suggests that the probability of that number of mutations occurring by chance is, say, 0.00001%, then you may be onto something.  Poisson distributions have been used in many fields; the most famous application was a study of the number of Prussian soldiers killed by horse-kicks.  Suppose that you suddenly have a large number of soldiers being killed by getting kicked by horses.  Do you need to be training your soldiers differently?  Has someone been selling you lousy horses?  If the incidence of deaths by horse-kicks follows a Poisson distribution (and deaths by horse-kick are rare events that are presumably independent of each other, so they do follow a Poisson distribution), then you can calculate the probability of the aforementioned large number of horse-kick deaths having occurred by chance.  If the probability of them having occurred by chance is large, then you probably don’t need to retrain your soldiers or start looking for a lousy horse-dealer.  If the probability of them having occurred by chance is low, then you might want to look into retraining your soldiers, or reconsidering your horse-buying practices, or whatever.  (I don’t know how the study turned out–see this Wikipedia page for a reference to the book.)

One of the practical consequences of the Poisson distribution is that even rare events will occasionally occur together.  The classic example: three rock stars die in the same month.  Here are some of the rock stars who died last month (January 2016):

• David Bowie (January 10, 2016)
• Gary Loizzo (January 16, 2016)
• Glenn Frey (January 18, 2016)

…and there’s your classic three-rock-stars-in-one-month phenomenon.  Actually, it’s even weirder—three rock stars actually died on one day that month.  January 17th, 2016 saw the loss of Blowfly, Mic Gillette, and Dale Griffin.

What’s going on?  Is someone killing off the rock stars of the Anglophone world?  Probably not–the Poisson distribution tells us that such events, which are both rare and independent, will sometimes occur in bursts, despite their rarity and independence.

Some implications for the world of Zipf’s Law:

1. I have to admit that I’ve been mischaracterizing the Poisson distribution somwhat in previous posts.  Briefly: I’ve been ignoring the independence assumption.  More on that later, because it’s a really big deal in language in general.
2. When you’re learning a second language, you’re going to have some good days and some bad days.  On the bad days, you’re going to run across a lot of words that you don’t know.  The Poisson distribution tells you to not get down on yourself about this fact: it’s just the nature of rare events (including words) to show up in clusters sometimes.
3. All of these dead rock stars have brought a new word into my life: la disparition.  As you probably know, this can mean “disappearance.”  What you might not be aware of is that it can also mean “death, passing,” or “demise.”  So, on the radio this morning, the host of Les Matins de France Culture was talking about la disparition of Umberto Eco.

Reviewing some relevant vocabulary (definitions from WordReference.com):

• disparaître: to disappear; to die out.
• disparu (adj.): vanished
• le disparu: missing person; the deceased.

 

 

I’m watching a French movie about a Rom guy who finds God.  In the part of the movie that I’m currently at, the plot involves a feud between an old man and a young guy.  The old man feels disrespected, and wants revenge.  This gets expressed linguistically in part by the way that various participants are referred to in the script.  Specifically, disrespect for a man is communicated by referring to him with some variant or another of the word boy.  In the little world in which I spent my teenaged years in, this was a huge insult–far better to be called mother fucker than to be called boy.  The connotation is that you’re weak and insignificant.  In his essay on the development of the concept of the intellectual in Ancien régime France during the mid-1700s, Robert Darnton talks about how the policeman and inspector of the book trade Joseph d’Hémery referred in his files to writers without social distinction as boy, regardless of their age.  Gentlemen, in contrast, were referred to as men.  As Darnton puts it, “Boy” implied marginality and served to place the unplaceable, the shadowy forerunners of the modern intellectual, who showed up in the police files as gens sans état (people without an estate).  I was quite shocked when I found myself living in the southern US later in life and discovered that it’s quite common for older men there to address younger men as boy.  Here are some of the words that are used in this way in the film:

• le gosse: kid.  (In Quebec: testicle.)
• le gamin: kid, youngster.

Simultaneously, there’s a lot of talk in the film about testicles.  It’s not cross-linguistically uncommon for testicles to be a metaphor for courage, and this Slate article by Juliet Lapidos maintains that such is the case in French.  (I don’t know anyone in France well enough for them to use that kind of slang around me, so I can’t speak from experience, one way or the other, but I was able to validate this claim on WordReference.com.)  (Another aside: an old friend used to claim that the following typology exists: languages that use the word nuts to refer to testicles, and languages that use the word eggs to refer to testicles.)  Testicles are referred to in the film as follows:

• les couilles (f.pl.): balls (testicles).  We saw this recently in the expression je m’en bat les couilles (I don’t give a shit).

One evening in December I sat in the living room of a friend half an hour south of Paris.  We sipped wine and talked about the recent kidnappings of hens from her hen house.  She knew what kind of animal was stealing them, but neither of us knew what the French word for it was in English.  Words for animals are a great illustration of Zipf’s Law—you know so, so many of them, but the vast majority of those almost never get used.  We discussed this fact, and that discussion quickly led to the word ornithorynque: “platypus.”

Why the hell would a couple of computational linguists half an hour south of Paris need to talk about a platypus, or for that matter, an ostrich?  Me and my friend both work with things called ontologies.  You can think of an ontology as a set of things and a set of relationships between them, where the relationships are generally restricted to either “A is a B” or “X is part of Y.”  For example, the Gene Ontology contains the specifications that a cell wall is an external encapsulating structure, that an external encapsulating structure is a cell part, and that a cell part is part of a cell.  Armed with that information, a computer (or a person) can infer things, such as that a cell wall is part of a cell.  This might seem obvious to you, but it’s not obvious at all to a computer.  A computer can’t really understand language, and to a computer, cell wall and cell migration both look pretty similar—two nouns in a row, the first of which is cell—but, a cell wall is a part of a cell, and cell migration is not.  Ontologies are one way of encoding the kinds of information that we think humans use (and therefore computers presumably need) to understand language—for example, to be able to understand that if I say The children ate the cookies.  They were delicious, then they means the cookies, but if I say The children ate the cookies.  They were hungry, then they means the children.

Ontologies are great ideas, but in practice, it isn’t that easy to get them to work.  Let’s take mammals, since it’s a mammal that was stealing my friend’s chickens.  In an ontology, in order for something to be fully defined, you have to state the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to belong to a category.  That is, the conditions that must be met to belong to the category—the necessary conditions–and the conditions that, if they are met, are sufficient to let you belong to that category.  In French, we call these les conditions nécessaires et suffisantes, or CNS.  Let’s think about the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a mammal.  Nurse your young; three middle ear bones; hair; neocortex; endotherm; give live birth.  Damn–what about the platypus?  The platypus is a mammal, but it lays eggs.  That’s why the platypus—l’ornithorynque (n.m.)—came up in our conversation.  The fact that things like the platypus exist is a problem for ontologies (and ontologists).  Ontologies have to assume these really rigid boundaries for semantic categories, established by conditions nécessaires et suffisantes, and in practice, people don’t seem to think about semantics that way.

 

How do people think about semantics, then?  There’s decent evidence for what’s called the prototype theory.  The prototype theory posits that we have representations in terms of some prototypical member of the category.  Other things might be closer to the prototype, or other things might be farther from the prototype, but we can accommodate all of them within the category, since it doesn’t require rigid boundaries.  If you have feathers, and you’re bipedal, and you lay eggs, and you fly, then clearly you’re a bird–you’re like the prototype for a bird.  But, even if you don’t fly, you can still be a bird—and that’s how an ostrich gets into the conversation.  Last summer I was giving a talk about semantic representations, and I was reviewing prototype theory.  The ostrich is a classic example to use when you’re talking about prototype theory—unlike a prototypical bird, it doesn’t fly, but it’s still a bird.  I couldn’t remember the word for ostrich, which I constantly confuse with the word for Austria.  Mercifully, my host was sitting in the front row, and he told me: autruche. 

If you’re interested in reading about this kind of stuff in French, I’m a big fan of the book Initiation à l’étude du sens, “Introduction to the study of meaning,” by Sandrine Zufferey and Jacques Moeschler.  I don’t know of any book in English that’s better.

• un ornithorynque: platypus
• une autruche: ostrich.
• Autriche (n.f.): Austria.
• les conditions nécessaires et suffisantes: necessary and sufficient conditions
• le modèle du prototype: prototype theory