Reading in different languages feels quite different, and Wikipedia makes this especially salient.[1] But I find it hard to articulate what these "national flavors" are, let alone communicate them. They become clearest in their characteristic failure modes:[2] German-flavored failure has to do with being so accurate that nothing is said. Spanish-flavored failure involves imitating French erudition and sounding like a fanboy. Oddly, Standard English doesn't have a distinct flavor for me, despite my not being a native speaker.[3] I think I have a lead on the French flavor, and this post is a first attempt to characterize it.[4]
Starting point: French has an expression with no literal equivalent in the languages I know: "il s'écoute parler", literally: "he listen to himself while talking (to others)". Languages often have semantically idiosyncratic but functionally equivalent structures, so I initially assumed this was just an idiom for something like "he is presumptuous" or "he's a poseur". I now think it points to something distinctively French.[5]
I recently came across a text that, for me, encapsulates the essence of listening to oneself. The rest of the post is a discussion of that text.
Grothendieck is arguably the most brilliant mathematician of the 20th century. In the passage below, he is making a very deep point about algebraic geometry and expressing it through two very beautiful metaphors. He is sure to have the audience's full attention, and he could limit himself to rewarding that attention with truth and beauty. But he doesn't, and next to the deep truth and beauty he adds some French-flavored listening-to-oneself:
“Je pourrais illustrer la ... approche, en gardant l’image de la noix qu’il s’agit d’ouvrir. La première parabole qui m’est venue à l’esprit tantôt, c’est qu’on plonge la noix dans un liquide émollient, de l’eau simplement pourquoi pas, de temps en temps on frotte pour qu’elle pénètre mieux, pour le reste on laisse faire le temps.[6]
The intense French flavor is concentrated in nine words:
un liquide émollient, de l’eau simplement pourquoi pas
or literally
a softening liquid, water simply, why not?
What is happening here? At least three things. Remember: this is a mathematician making a metaphor about algebraic geometry, not a discussion of chemistry.
What is the adjective émollient doing there? One could argue that some liquids wouldn't work —acid, for instance — and that precision is never out of place. This would be a reasonable reply if Grothendeick were classifying liquids by their nut-softening properties. But he isn't. There's no need to invoke the broader category of softening liquids and then filter acids; one could simply say water.
What is simplement doing there? It sounds as if Groethendieck had twenty liquids in mind before settling on water. It's a weird flex, but let's grant that this is how his mind works. Why make it known to the reader? My guess: it's not for the reader at all. Il s'écoute parler.
And finally: What is pourquoi pas doing there? Unlike a simple for example — which offers an example without drawing attention to the author's selection process — pourquoi pas pens a dialogue. But the reader cannot respond, so it's in fact a pseudo-dialogue in which the speaker himself takes a second role of applauding his decisions: "Should we use water as our example of a nut-softening liquid? What do you think, dear reader? [changes voice] It seems like wonderful choice! [normal voice] Great! Let's continue enjoying my wisdom".
Assuming we operationalize the definition of pseudo-dialogues, my falsifiable claim: French Wikipedia contains a much higher density of them than other European Wikipedias.[7]
By focusing on the French failure mode, I risk giving the wrong impression that the French flavor consists in having that failure mode. It consists in a proneness to have that failure mode, but the proneness is downstream of the thing(s) I can't articulate.
It might also convey that I dislike the French flavor, which I certainly don't. It's possibly my favorite.
I'm not sure whether this reflect something about me (the US has culturally colonized me) or something about Standard English (it has reached a level of neutrality not present in other languages).
This post's premise is that some things resist translation, so the English rendering is necessarily an approximation. Linguistic structures carry both a literal meaning and a functional role, and translation often can't preserve both, or does it through a new or uncommon turn of the phrase that evokes a sense of weirdness absent in the original.
I could illustrate the second approach with the image of a nut that one must open. The first parable that came to my mind earlier, is immersing the nut in an emollient, perhaps water, and rubbing it occasionally, so that the water penetrates better, and we let time do its work.
Epistemic status: Almost completely idiosyncratic
Reading in different languages feels quite different, and Wikipedia makes this especially salient.[1] But I find it hard to articulate what these "national flavors" are, let alone communicate them. They become clearest in their characteristic failure modes:[2] German-flavored failure has to do with being so accurate that nothing is said. Spanish-flavored failure involves imitating French erudition and sounding like a fanboy. Oddly, Standard English doesn't have a distinct flavor for me, despite my not being a native speaker.[3] I think I have a lead on the French flavor, and this post is a first attempt to characterize it.[4]
Starting point: French has an expression with no literal equivalent in the languages I know: "il s'écoute parler", literally: "he listen to himself while talking (to others)". Languages often have semantically idiosyncratic but functionally equivalent structures, so I initially assumed this was just an idiom for something like "he is presumptuous" or "he's a poseur". I now think it points to something distinctively French.[5]
I recently came across a text that, for me, encapsulates the essence of listening to oneself. The rest of the post is a discussion of that text.
Grothendieck is arguably the most brilliant mathematician of the 20th century. In the passage below, he is making a very deep point about algebraic geometry and expressing it through two very beautiful metaphors. He is sure to have the audience's full attention, and he could limit himself to rewarding that attention with truth and beauty. But he doesn't, and next to the deep truth and beauty he adds some French-flavored listening-to-oneself:
The intense French flavor is concentrated in nine words:
or literally
What is happening here? At least three things. Remember: this is a mathematician making a metaphor about algebraic geometry, not a discussion of chemistry.
What is the adjective émollient doing there? One could argue that some liquids wouldn't work —acid, for instance — and that precision is never out of place. This would be a reasonable reply if Grothendeick were classifying liquids by their nut-softening properties. But he isn't. There's no need to invoke the broader category of softening liquids and then filter acids; one could simply say water.
What is simplement doing there? It sounds as if Groethendieck had twenty liquids in mind before settling on water. It's a weird flex, but let's grant that this is how his mind works. Why make it known to the reader? My guess: it's not for the reader at all. Il s'écoute parler.
And finally: What is pourquoi pas doing there? Unlike a simple for example — which offers an example without drawing attention to the author's selection process — pourquoi pas pens a dialogue. But the reader cannot respond, so it's in fact a pseudo-dialogue in which the speaker himself takes a second role of applauding his decisions: "Should we use water as our example of a nut-softening liquid? What do you think, dear reader? [changes voice] It seems like wonderful choice! [normal voice] Great! Let's continue enjoying my wisdom".
Assuming we operationalize the definition of pseudo-dialogues, my falsifiable claim: French Wikipedia contains a much higher density of them than other European Wikipedias.[7]
I can see several reasons for this:
By focusing on the French failure mode, I risk giving the wrong impression that the French flavor consists in having that failure mode. It consists in a proneness to have that failure mode, but the proneness is downstream of the thing(s) I can't articulate.
It might also convey that I dislike the French flavor, which I certainly don't. It's possibly my favorite.
I'm not sure whether this reflect something about me (the US has culturally colonized me) or something about Standard English (it has reached a level of neutrality not present in other languages).
I welcome commenters to opine on it and on the flavors of other languages.
I'd be interested in equivalent phenomena in other languages
This post's premise is that some things resist translation, so the English rendering is necessarily an approximation. Linguistic structures carry both a literal meaning and a functional role, and translation often can't preserve both, or does it through a new or uncommon turn of the phrase that evokes a sense of weirdness absent in the original.
Here is one standard translation, where the French flavor is almost completely lost:
This is orthogonal to French Wikipedia's probably much higher than average quality.