Tag: vocabulary

The last time I was in Paris, I tried to figure out the optimum time to leave my apartment in order to minimize my wait for the train to the little town where I work.  This requires complicated (at least for a humanities major like me) record-keeping in which I track the time that I leave the house, the time that the metro comes to the metro station by my apartment, the time that I get to the actual train station, and the time that my actual train shows up.

All of this involves a certain amount of time staring at electronic signs telling me the wait time for the next train, and that’s often where Zipf’s Law enters my day.  There are a few words with very similar appearances, but very different meanings, and I confuse them constantly.  They have so many related nouns, so many reflexive forms, and so many related colloquialisms that I’m going to start with just the verbs.  (Definitions from WordReference.com, with some editing.)

• attendre: to wait, to wait for; to expect.
• attenter à: to make an attempt on (to attack).
• s’attendre à: to expect (definition from Phildange).
• attenter à: to be a slur on something/one.
• atteindre: to reach, to get to (a place); to achieve, to meet (a goal); to affect or harm (someone).
• étendre: to stretch out; to spread out; to open out (definition from Phildange).
• s’étendre: to lie down; to talk at length; to pervade, etc. (definition from Phildange).
• éteindre: to extinguish, to put out (a fire, a cigarette); to turn off (a light, a machine).
• s’eteindre: to die, to go out, to switch (oneself) off.
• s’éteindre: to pass away.
• s’entendre: to get along (with each other) (definition from Phildange).

Bottom line: leave the house at 07:55 and I get to work in an hour and a quarter, with very little of a wait at the train station–that’s important when it’s cold.  Leave the house at 08:00 and it’s a totally different story–over a 20-minute wait at the train station, and who knows how long it takes to get to work.

I walked out of my room today–I’m on the road, visiting a research center with which I have a long-standing collaboration–and ran into a local.  We greeted each other politely, saying “good morning” and remarking on the exceptionally cold weather–see this post on the subject of saying hello to strangers in the US–and it was clear from his accent, as well as the accent of the other people that I ran into on my way out of the building, that I was in Kentucky.  I walked outside, looked around, and it was immediately clear that I wasn’t in Kentucky at all, but rather Ohio.  Southern Ohio, specifically–and therein lay my accent mix-up.

Southern Ohio has an identity issue, especially in the moderately large city in which I find myself: is it in the North, or is it a part of Appalachia?  The local Kentucky-like dialect is very strongly socially marked, and people around here do not like having their dialect remarked on, especially if they speak that particular dialect.  Ohio dialects are actually quite diverse–Columbus, in the middle of the state, has four dialect boundaries, roughly corresponding to the four parts of the city divided up at the intersection of High St. and Broad St.–and around here in Cincinnati, there is a long history of prejudice related to social class.  Around here, that social class is reflected most strongly by which dialect you speak, or at least which dialect you speak in public.

The Zipf’s Law connection: I stopped by the cafeteria in the research center to pick up some breakfast, and was happy to see a big vat of Cream of Wheat, a childhood favorite with which my father’s second wife often fed me.  There was something wrong with it, though–what were all of those little yellow specks in it?  A quick look at the menu confirmed my suspicion: it was not Cream of Wheat at all, but rather grits.  Grits is a food of the southern United States, similar to a thin polenta.  Staring at a vat of grits immediately raises a question: how do you say grits in French?  In turns out that you don’t.  It’s actually a complicated issue.  The word can be singular or plural in English, and the French Wikipedia article on it starts out like this:

Le ou les Grits est une préparation culinaire…

“The (singular) or the (plural) Grits is a culinary preparation…”

That is, the word the shows up twice–once in a singular form, le, and once in the plural form, les.  To find some actual French Zipf’s-Law-type words related to grits, let’s look at a couple of sentences from the French Wikipedia article, this time on the subject of the manufacture of grits:

Le grits trouve son origine dans la préparation du maïs par les amérindiens. Traditionnellement, la semoule du grits est réalisée par un moulin en pierre qui broie le maïs. On tamise ensuite et la poudre la plus fine est utilisée comme farine, alors que la plus grossière est destinée au grits.

“Grits originates in the preparation of corn by the Native Americans.  Traditionally, the semolina of grits produced by a wood mill that grinds/crushes the corn.  It is then sifted and the finest powder is used as flour, while the coarsest powder is reserved for grits.”

Let’s just focus on the verbs.  Definitions from WordReference.com:

• réaliser: to make, produce, or create.  (Several other meanings, too, but that’s the one here.)
• broyer: transcription: [bʀwaje].  To grind or crush; figuratively, to destroy or wreck.
• tamiser: to sift, to sieve.
• destiner à: to reserve for.

Click here for a collection of materials from different Ohio dialects.  And yes, the title of this post is a reference to the book/movie Fight Club.

Molière was one of the great French dramatists.  He lived just after Shakespeare, and you can compare them quite a bit in terms of their skill with language–reading his play Le Tartuffe in the original was almost adequate recompense for two years of studying French, mostly in the hours before sunrise.

Dr. Seuss is one of the most beloved American children’s authors.  His classic Green Eggs and Ham was the first book my child ever read out loud, and the notorious American politician-nihilist Ted Cruz read it out loud on the floor of the Senate during his attempt to shut down the American government by filibuster.

One of Dr. Seuss’s most famous characters is the Grinch.  In his book How The Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch is a nasty, bitter character who decides to ruin everyone else’s Christmas by stealing their Christmas presents.

Reading the commentaries on Le Tartuffe, I was thrilled to see the character of Mme. Pernelle, the curmudgeonly mother of one of the main characters, described as grincheuse.  WordReference.com defines grincheux/grincheuse (male and female forms) as “grumpy, grouchy, or cranky.”  Could this be the origin of the name “Grinch”?  Wikipedia says yes!  Who would’ve guessed?

With the world apparently going violently crazy–this year is only 14 days old, and so far we’ve had terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Jakarta, Hurghada (Egypt), Marseille, Kabul–more than I have the patience to list, actually (Wikipedia says 28 of them), and that’s not even counting the nutjobs occupying federal property in Oregon, who haven’t actually killed anyone yet–the news from France is full of stories of searches, arrests, and the like.  A bit of trivia: according to Wikipedia, the English word terrorism comes from the French word terrorisme, which originally referred to the policies of the revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794).  Here’s some of the relevant vocabulary that keeps showing up in the news these days.  Definitions from WordReference.com:

• la garde à vue: custody.  Not to be confused with:
• le garde-à-vous: attention (the military posture).  If you’re French: to us Americans, this sounds just like garde à vue–really.
• être placé en garde à vue: to be held in custody.
• mettre en garde à vue: to put in custody or to send back to custody–I’m not sure about this one.
• perquisitionner: to search.
• la perquisition: a police raid, a police search.
• faire une perquisition: to carry out a search.
• le mandat de perquisition: search warrant.
• les menottes (f): handcuffs.
• passer les menottes à qqn: to handcuff someone.

The French press is just as abuzz about the whole Sean Penn/El Chapo thing as the American press is.  In case you’re reading this 10 years from now: “El Chapo” is the nickname of Joaquin Guzman, until recently one of the biggest drug dealers in the world–he may still be, although from behind bars.  He was arrested and imprisoned in 1991, and then escaped.  He remained free until 2014, when he was recaptured and, again, imprisoned.  In 2015 he escaped again, this time apparently being driven down an underground tunnel on the back of a motorcycle.

All was well for him until he decided that a movie should be made about his life.  He reached out to the motion picture industry, which somehow led to him being “interviewed” by American actor Sean Penn, the resulting interview being published in Rolling Stone magazine.  This exposure led to him being captured once again, and at the time that I write this, he is still in jail, hoping like hell he doesn’t get extradited to the United States.

We actually have two Zipf’s Law connections with this story–one regarding Sean Penn, and one regarding El Chapo.

Some time ago, we read about the filles du roi–the French orphans who were sent to Canada to get married and increase the French-speaking population in North America between 1663 and 1673.  You might recall from that post that Madonna is descended from a fille du roi.  In 1985, she broke the heart of every young man in America by marrying Sean Penn.

El Chapo’s Zipf’s Law connection is lexical–i.e., one of those bazillion words that is not particularly unusual, but that you nonetheless almost never hear (in the big scheme of things).  As I said, El Chapo is all over the news, and he is almost referred to by his name–Joaquin Guzman–followed by surnommé El Chapo, meaning “nicknamed El Chapo.”  Here’s an example from France 24‘s web site:

Les autorités mexicaines ont annoncé vendredi l’arrestation de Joaquin Guzman, surnommé “El Chapo”, le plus important narcotrafiquant mexicain, qui s’était évadé de façon rocambolesque d’une prison de haute sécurité le 11 juillet dernier.

On Friday, Mexican authorities announced the arrest of Joaquin Guzman, nicknamed “El Chapo,” the most important Mexican drug trafficker, who had escaped in an extraordinary fashion from a high-security prison last July 11th.

Surnommer is a great example of Zipf’s Law–not particularly unusual, but low-frequency enough that I haven’t run into it in two years of studying French quite seriously.  Again, it means “to nickname.”  I’m not telling you any of my nicknames…

One of my pet peeves is people making spurious claims that there are some languages in which there are ideas that just can’t be expressed. This is often preceded by uninformed crap like “there are primitive languages that only have 100 words, right?” (There are no such languages.)  Do I know words in language X that we don’t have in English? Sure. For example, there is no equivalent single word in English for the Yiddish word נחת (nakhes).  Does that mean that you can’t express the idea in English?  Certainly not.  Nakhes is a mixture of pride and pleasure–in the prototypical case, you get it when your children do something good.

Now, you may be thinking of a Wittgensteinian counter-argument to this.  My French tutor has the following quote from Wittgenstein in her email signature: The limits of my language are the limits of my world.  What did Wittgenstein mean by this?  He didn’t mean (and, yes, I will have this post reviewed by a philosopher, as I am not one) that it’s the limits of his language that form the limits of his world, and that if he spoke some other language, perhaps the limits of his world would be different.  Rather, his point was that the limits of language in general are the limits of philosophy–he maintained that what we can’t talk about, we can’t think about, and so–as they might put it on the French high school exit exam–philosophy is doomed to always be betrayed by language.  Wittgenstein is not claiming that his language limits his “world”–he’s claiming that all language in general limits the ability to think, and hence to philosophize.

The Zipf’s Law connection: I needed a word today, and I couldn’t find it in my native language, but I did find exactly what I needed in French.  I was writing an email in which I tried to explain the good points and the bad points of a web-based tool that I use in my work, some of which involves formalizing the semantics of the language of bioscience.  As an example, I pointed out what hints it gives me about the kinds of prepositions that can go with the word differentiate, and in particular, how they encode the fact that a cell can differentiate in a particular location–cortex and gonad in the examples above–but that if it differentiates into something, that has nothing to do with location at all, but rather with the outcome of the differentiation–in the examples, we’re talking about cells differentiating into different kinds of cells.  (It’s the ability of stem cells to do this that makes them stem cells.  Cellules de souche, I think they’re called.)  This is a specific weirdness of the word differentiate–it has a very word-specific relationship with the preposition into.  What to call that “specific weirdness”?  Here’s the best that I could come up with:

I was using the French word spécificité here.  La spécificité refers to a special feature of something.  You could translate it with the word specifics, but that wouldn’t go right in this sentence.  I could imagine using the word idiosyncracies here, but that has an implication of abnormality that wasn’t quite right for the context, either–as a linguist, I don’t think in terms of normativity where language is concerned.  Spécificité has no such connotation in French, as far as I know–for example, when people describe me in French in terms of my profession, they often say that one of my spécificités is that I work on biomedical language.

So: on my journey to learn to speak French, I’ve finally come upon one little thing that I know how to say in French, but not in English (my native language).  If you don’t mind, I’m going to think about this not as a reflection of my inarticulateness in English, but as a mark of improvement in my French.  Undoubtedly this bit of hubris will be retaliated for by the embarrassment of me not understanding a simple question about the location of the bathroom at some point in the course of the day, but I’ll live with that.

Want to try Sketch Engine?  Follow this link.

Want to irritate a linguist?  Caution: this technique will get you an immediate lecture, and you’re probably not going to find that lecture very interesting.  Here’s what you do: ask them how many languages they speak.  This will irritate the shit out of us.  We will respond something like this: “linguists are not people who speak lots of languages.  People who speak lots of languages are called polyglots.  Linguists are people who study the phenomenon of language as a system–not necessarily any particular language, but language in general.”  For example: my master’s thesis was about vowels and the evolution of the vocal tract.  My doctoral dissertation was about using linguistic field work techniques to test software programs.

Personally, if you push me, I will disappoint you by responding “one–English.”  I would never say that I “speak” Spanish, although I’m quite at home in it, or that I “speak” French, even though I’m reaching the point where I can use it professionally.  This is a guaranteed technique for irritating a linguist!  It’s not the only one, though–watch this space for others.

• Le/la polyglotte: polyglot.  Note that it can be either grammatically masculine or grammatically feminine.  This democratization of the grammatical gender of words for professions that don’t have explicit gender-marking is a hot topic in France right now, particularly in the case of Madame le ministre versus Madame la ministre for government ministers like Ségolène Royal.  (By the way: I just Googled her to make sure that I was spelling Royal correctly, and discovered that Google’s autocomplete suggestions are consistent with the hypothesis that people often look for naked pictures of her.)  The French Academy declines to endorse the Madame la ministre construction, but nobody listens to the French Academy much anyway.

Charlemagne (allegedly) said that “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” Countless people have expressed similar sentiments.  Fellini: “A different language is a different vision of life.”  Delacroix: “The individual’s whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.”

I’ve always thought that this kind of thing was bullshit.  However, on Christmas night, my (limited) French skills did, indeed, show me a new world.

At the Studio Galande, a tiny movie theater on a little back street in the Latin Quarter–almost across the river from Notre Dame (42 rue Galande, 75005)–you can see the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday and Saturday nights.  The movie has French subtitles (crappy translation, actually), and–more importantly–a highly rehearsed group of people who act out the movie, singing along with it and offering non-stop commentary, almost entirely in French.

Of course, there is the usual throwing of rice, although the water pistols of my teenaged years and their gentle sprinkle have been replaced by 2-liter bottles of water and some serious soaking.  When I was a teenager, going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show meant knowing a few things to shout in unison with the rest of the audience at appropriate times–today, that’s basically a semi-professional production, and that’s what the highly rehearsed group of people do.

In Paris, this was a far more surreal experience than it is in the US, and it’s pretty surreal in the US.  I’ll try to paint the picture.  Since it’s me that’s doing the painting, it’s mostly a picture of language.  Here’s what you have: (a) the movie, in English.  (b) The subtitles, in French.  (c) The performers (I’m not actually sure what to call them) doing their accompaniment in French.  (d)  The performers also doing their accompaniment in heavily accented English.

It’s an incredibly rich linguistic hodgepodge, and it all comes at you in this confused, non-stop torrent.  It was far too much for me to be able to retain very many data points for you, but here’s a nice example of a way that the humor combined English and French.  There’s a point in the film that shows a map featuring a city called Denton.  So, you’ve got “Denton” splashed prominently across the screen.  Now, if “Denton” were French, it would be pronounced like dans ton–“in your.”  Right at that point in the movie, one of the performers holds up a sign with the word cul right next to the name “Denton.”  Cul means “ass,” so now you have dans ton cul–“in your ass.”

If I may be permitted a bit of hubris: the thing that I was proudest of came during the Time Warp.  If you haven’t seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show: there’s a big dance number featuring–yes–the Time Warp.  (It’s just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right.)  At various points in this, it would not be inappropriate to yell “ooh-ah.”  So, at one of those points, one of the performers says Et maintenant, on va dire ooh-ah en verlan: ah-ooh.  What that means: “We’re going to say “ooh-ah” in Verlan now–“ah-ooh.””  Why I was so proud of catching that–it requires some cultural knowledge, which is: what is Verlan?  Verlan is the name of a kind of French slang that originated in the banlieus défavorisées (bad neighborhoods, mostly surrounding Paris) and has since become pretty broadly popular.  Words are formed in Verlan by reversing things–verlan is itself l’inverse, “backwards,” reversed.  So: what would ooh-ah be in Verlan?  It would be ah-ooh.

So, that’s my bit of hubris.  Hubris is always followed by a fall, and no doubt my hubris will be followed by me not understanding however it is that someone will say “good morning” to me tomorrow.  As Brad says in the French subtitles to his song in the floor show scene: ça me dépasse–“It’s beyond me.”

An evening at the Rocky Horror Picture Show would be an unforgettable and unique Parisian experience, and I recommend it highly.  I’ll leave you with two pieces of advice on the subject.  (a)  If you haven’t seen the movie before, the whole evening will mostly be lost on you, but if you have, this is an experience that you are unlikely to forget; (b) don’t, don’t, don’t sit in the front row (rang 1).  Trust me on this.

• le travesti : transvestite.  At one point in the movie, you are to shout Garçon, garçon, il y a un travesti dans ma soupe–waiter, waiter, there’s a transvestite in my soup.  In the context of the film, it makes perfect sense.
• travesti (adj.): disguised; in fancy dress; in costume.
• Ça me dépasse: it’s beyond me.