Friday, August 14, 2009
French letters
Continuing to find much early morning diversion in the vaguaries of French vocabulary with respect to our own. So, for example, we learn that while the French have an entirely differant word for mole to ours, taupe, the meaning extends to the sort of cold war mole beloved by Le Carre, in the same way as ours does. A person burrowed into an organisation while really working for the opposition. Does this arise from the felicity of the usage, simple copying of the anglo saxon usage or a mixture of both? Or did the French use of the cold war sort of mole come before our own? I had rather thought that we were more into spy novels than they were and that the word would have come from us rather than them, but who knows?
I then moved onto phoques, which M. Littre told me were amphibious, hairy quadrupeds with very small feet. I shifted from amphibian to frogs and toads and was stuck to think of a hairy one. Had to resort to Harraps which told me that the thing was a seal. From all of which I deduce that the French have just one word for amphibious and amphibian, a word which can be applied to vegetables as well as animals. Perhaps the problem is having the little Littre rather than the big one. The big OED talks about aquatic carnivores with flippers, short tail and thick fur, which I think much more helpful. On the other hand, while we conflate seals with fur and seals for sealing Magna Cartas, the French have separate words.
Third and last we had the story of the daggers. We start with a murder weapon called a poincon. Which appears to mean variously a punch for punching holes, a bradawl, a graving tool, a tool for punching out coins and a stout vertical timber binding to together other timbers at the apex of a roof. Kingpost would be one English word for this last. And, appearing from nowhere, a sort of barrel. The Engish word puncheon has more or less exactly the same range of meaning, including the stray barrel. And there is another French word for dagger, poignard, which one might have thought more appropriate for a murder weapon. Perhaps poincon has extended into some modern bit of slang, not known to M. Littre or Harrap. Along the way we find that a poignard is an 'arme d'estoc', meaning a weapon which is mainly used for stabbing with the point, which leads us onto estoc and all kinds of other interesting complications. Closely related to our word stock.
All adds up to full marks for M. Littre. Much more fun using a good French-French dictionary when trying to decipher a French novel than using a French-English dictionary. French-French is open and leads you up all kinds of fascinating garden paths while English-French just give you a one word answer, quite often the right answer, and leaves it at that. No garden paths at all.
# posted by Jim @ 12:56 AM 
