Diacritiques

From the Guardian Unlimited front page, today, 19:35 Western European Daylight Saving Time.

Another lexical creation in French, which Jean Véronis could have caught had he fished for neologisms in the RSS feeds of Libération: blog-bouler, adj. (and past participle) blog-boulé/e.

A junior high school girl has nearly been blog-boulée, i.e. “blog-balled”: expelled from her school for having slandered her maths teacher on her (less than one month old) blog. Unlike twelve of her fellow-students (according to Libé), she was let off with a suspended sanction, but her teacher has filed a complaint with the police (and her father is reported to have claimed to give her a thorough thrashing).

Not to go to deeply into the matter itself, I’m glad she got off (esp. since the reported insult is rather mild, in my book), and hope that the schools and teachers will get a handle on educating the kids about speech on the internet soon.

Blog-bouler is of course a blend of blog and blackbouler. The latter is a borrowing — half calque — from English blackball. Not a recent one by any means — TLFi has a citation of 1834 with the spelling blackbull (no relations to bulls, I’d think), and of 1837 with in the contemporary form.

(Explanation of the post title: avoir les boules, i.e. “have the balls”, is an idiom that means “be extremely angry”. Usually, a declaration that one a les boules is accompanied by a gesture, a movement of the open palm towards the front of one’s neck. Where the putative balls are supposedly situated.)

At Technologies du Langage, Jean Véronis provides a stunning visual of words he picked out of RSS feed of Le Monde, but which are absent from what is certainly the best French online dictionary, TLFi. The Trésor de la langue française, he reminds us, took 30 years to compile until it was completed in 1994. Among the neologisms, “internet” looms large, of course, but there’s also “pédophile”, “homophobie”, “hutus” and “tutsis”, “teknival”, “anti-tabac”, and the newest addition, “droitiser”.

Let’s note that these new additions to the journalistic lexicon are far from being all anglicisms. The presence of “assurance-maladie”, “directeur-général” and “porte-parole” are a bit surprising to me, but maybe they actually do appear somewhere under a dictionary entry, but are just not deemed important enough to get their own lemmata.

A previous post already talked about dictionaries from an unusual angle: by not looking at the new words that enter but those that are dropped by the publishers of mid-sized tomes for the general public.

Found among the gems on the wonderful Arte Radio site: a clip entitled “Chirac disco” which, in the typical fashion of the Arte team, mixes some (in)famous snippets of the French president’s speeches with, well, you could call it music. For the bit alone where he says “overdose” (of foreigners, by the way) it would […]

Slugger O’Toole tells the story of an Irish citizen who tried, and failed, to use the web site of the French national train company SNCF to pay for a ticket. The problem: Ireland is absent from the list of pre-defined country names on the address form of the payment site. Asked about this, the […]

Ça y est, j’ai décidé de me mettre à la collection des z superfétatoires, ces lettres à valeur plus ornementale que grammaticale, qui s’accrochent, sorties d’on ne sait pas bien où, à la fin de mots et ponctuent les panneaux publicitaires et autres écrits de l’espace publique. Si vous me connaissez vous savez que je n’ai […]

It has brought to my attention that a small clarification might be in order: Given that this blog is not monolingual, comments are welcome in any language that I may be able to decipher. In addition to the English languag, French and German are particularly welcome. If a post already has comments in a language that […]

Found it on Glaukôpidos, via caelestis at sauvage noble, so here it is, as promised: the original Greek version of the “new” Sappho poem found on an University of Cologne papyrus. ῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες, σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλἀοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν· ἔμοι δ᾽ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ᾽ [ἔ]ο̣ντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ […]

Special post for Firas, who needs the phonemic transcription of the word inflection on a website. Here the version with image files (I used this service; if nothing shows up below then it is down): or Second possibility, use an IPA font, which would also allow you to raise the schwa […]

Someone (God, Toutatis, or the magic wand, I don’t care) help France! The New York Times has discovered the Polish Plumber, the one that appears on an ad by the Polish National Tourist office in France. Now that episode is really something to be ashamed of.