5 ms·

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/

by bambax 8y ago

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically. There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls). "Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.

ekianjo 8y ago
> It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche That says a lot about the quality of peer review at the NYT.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  That someone missed potentially a typo in a foreign language?
  - vinay427 8y ago
    Well, if the objective of the sentence is to teach the reader a word, it's more significant than missing any arbitrary typo in a foreign language.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    That could have been checked easily in like 5 seconds of review? Yes.
    - exergy 8y ago
      God forbid you ever make a mistake. Editing standards at NYT are MUCH better than virtually any newspaper that you would care to point to.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        I disagree. I find most of what the NYT publishes nowadays of a very low level, biased along with a lack of research. I think it used to be a much better newspaper, but that was a long, long time ago now. Note that this is not unique to the NYT, the (former) printed press has fallen enormously since the advent of online news (once you can measure what attracts viewers, your articles will tend to be more and more clickbaity and sensationalist by nature).
- FabHK 8y ago
  Peer review? I'd think the NYT has professional copy editors.
ido 8y ago
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up. As someone who learned German as an adult (which also has lots of homophones + gendered nouns etc) I assure you it's not hard to make such mistakes.
- bambax 8y ago
  I can't edit my parent comment anymore; I didn't mean that it would be hard for anyone to fail to make the distinction, esp. for people beginning to learn French. But the author has been in France for 15 years and by her own admission, speaks the language pretty well; so I doubt that she actually had a hard time discriminating between "les poux" and "le pouls" -- she probably thought this play on words was funny, but didn't experience the confusion herself.
baud147258 8y ago
> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” I'm French and I discovered that word today.
- tangue 8y ago
  Me too. As there are only around 602 000 results on Google I suspected it was only used in specific areas and according to the dictionary ("Petit Robert") it originates from Lille.
  - glandium 8y ago
    I'm from southern France and know it, fwiw (although my parents are from near Paris and from Picardie)
- astrobe_ 8y ago
  That's probably because you're not old enough. It was popularized by an ad in the mid 90': https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4
  - baud147258 8y ago
    It's true that if I heard it at that time, I wouldn't have remembered it.
pygy_ 8y ago
You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have. Bouloche has been corrected.
- rimliu 8y ago
  I still think it is weird to be that bad after 15 years in the country. Counter point — I think it was French ambassador or someone from diplomatic corpus who impressed me in their interview on the radio. I think they have been in the country for half a year only and spoke amazingly well. And I mean it. It was not amazing in the way bear dancing is amazing (e.g. it dance terribly, but the fact itself is amazing). She spoke genuinely very well. And Lithuanian is a very very difficult language.
- glandium 8y ago
  I don't know what foreign learners of french learn, but native speakers very early learn the complete list of words ending with ou whose plural is with an x instead of an s, which poux is one of (there are only 7 of them)
  - pygy_ 8y ago
    Keep in mind that her encounter with "pouls" was spoken, not written. The "poux" warning probably came with a written note. Regardless, @bambax said she should have known that, in a spoken context [lə pu] is the pulse and [lɛ pu] is lice. I argue that it isn't surpising that the author didn't have that knowledge. Lice exceedingly rare in adult life (if common for school kids). Pulse is specialized vocabulary.
- bambax 8y ago
  > Bouloche has been corrected. Indeed it has. But silently, which is surprising.
  - mi100hael 8y ago
    I don't think news outlets usually include spelling corrections in their list of corrections at the bottom of articles.
NotPaidToPost 8y ago
You could say the same about English: 'pulse'? Do you mean an unconscious person needs to eat more legume? This is as contrived as the example of the article's author.
sametmax 8y ago
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender. A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa. French is a difficult language to learn: - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent. - conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory. - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master. - we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural. - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well... - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice. - way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >French is a difficult language to learn For a native English speaker, it's one of the easiest languages to learn. https://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.g...
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    Here is a better resource: https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level. Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers. The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
A good way to get an idea of how your language sounds to a foreigner is to throw away every other word. Literally. Then randomly mix close sounds (depending on your accent it can be buck/bark or buck/book). Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"? Lots of fun!
cm2187 8y ago
And homonyms are not a french monopoly. Beach/bitch, sheet/shit, swan/swine are minefields for a non native speaker.
- robocat 8y ago
  I think you mean homophones (phonics sound same) not homonyms (one written word with 2 or more distinct meanings see https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.html https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.htm... ). Although your three examples are definitely not homophones in New Zealand English, but the vowel sound distinctions could be difficult for some non-native speakers. What accent are you presuming?

by bambax 8y ago

ekianjo 8y ago

> It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche That says a lot about the quality of peer review at the NYT.

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
That someone missed potentially a typo in a foreign language?
- vinay427 8y ago
  Well, if the objective of the sentence is to teach the reader a word, it's more significant than missing any arbitrary typo in a foreign language.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  That could have been checked easily in like 5 seconds of review? Yes.
  - exergy 8y ago
    God forbid you ever make a mistake. Editing standards at NYT are MUCH better than virtually any newspaper that you would care to point to.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      I disagree. I find most of what the NYT publishes nowadays of a very low level, biased along with a lack of research. I think it used to be a much better newspaper, but that was a long, long time ago now. Note that this is not unique to the NYT, the (former) printed press has fallen enormously since the advent of online news (once you can measure what attracts viewers, your articles will tend to be more and more clickbaity and sensationalist by nature).
FabHK 8y ago
Peer review? I'd think the NYT has professional copy editors.

ido 8y ago

"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up. As someone who learned German as an adult (which also has lots of homophones + gendered nouns etc) I assure you it's not hard to make such mistakes.

bambax 8y ago
I can't edit my parent comment anymore; I didn't mean that it would be hard for anyone to fail to make the distinction, esp. for people beginning to learn French. But the author has been in France for 15 years and by her own admission, speaks the language pretty well; so I doubt that she actually had a hard time discriminating between "les poux" and "le pouls" -- she probably thought this play on words was funny, but didn't experience the confusion herself.

baud147258 8y ago

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” I'm French and I discovered that word today.

tangue 8y ago
Me too. As there are only around 602 000 results on Google I suspected it was only used in specific areas and according to the dictionary ("Petit Robert") it originates from Lille.
- glandium 8y ago
  I'm from southern France and know it, fwiw (although my parents are from near Paris and from Picardie)
astrobe_ 8y ago
That's probably because you're not old enough. It was popularized by an ad in the mid 90': https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4
- baud147258 8y ago
  It's true that if I heard it at that time, I wouldn't have remembered it.

pygy_ 8y ago

You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have. Bouloche has been corrected.

rimliu 8y ago
I still think it is weird to be that bad after 15 years in the country. Counter point — I think it was French ambassador or someone from diplomatic corpus who impressed me in their interview on the radio. I think they have been in the country for half a year only and spoke amazingly well. And I mean it. It was not amazing in the way bear dancing is amazing (e.g. it dance terribly, but the fact itself is amazing). She spoke genuinely very well. And Lithuanian is a very very difficult language.
glandium 8y ago
I don't know what foreign learners of french learn, but native speakers very early learn the complete list of words ending with ou whose plural is with an x instead of an s, which poux is one of (there are only 7 of them)
- pygy_ 8y ago
  Keep in mind that her encounter with "pouls" was spoken, not written. The "poux" warning probably came with a written note. Regardless, @bambax said she should have known that, in a spoken context [lə pu] is the pulse and [lɛ pu] is lice. I argue that it isn't surpising that the author didn't have that knowledge. Lice exceedingly rare in adult life (if common for school kids). Pulse is specialized vocabulary.
bambax 8y ago
> Bouloche has been corrected. Indeed it has. But silently, which is surprising.
- mi100hael 8y ago
  I don't think news outlets usually include spelling corrections in their list of corrections at the bottom of articles.

NotPaidToPost 8y ago

You could say the same about English: 'pulse'? Do you mean an unconscious person needs to eat more legume? This is as contrived as the example of the article's author.

sametmax 8y ago

It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender. A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa. French is a difficult language to learn: - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent. - conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory. - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master. - we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural. - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well... - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice. - way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.

jdietrich 8y ago
>French is a difficult language to learn For a native English speaker, it's one of the easiest languages to learn. https://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.g...
- intertextuality 8y ago
  Here is a better resource: https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level. Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers. The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.
davidivadavid 8y ago

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

A good way to get an idea of how your language sounds to a foreigner is to throw away every other word. Literally. Then randomly mix close sounds (depending on your accent it can be buck/bark or buck/book). Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"? Lots of fun!

cm2187 8y ago

And homonyms are not a french monopoly. Beach/bitch, sheet/shit, swan/swine are minefields for a non native speaker.

robocat 8y ago
I think you mean homophones (phonics sound same) not homonyms (one written word with 2 or more distinct meanings see https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.html https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.htm... ). Although your three examples are definitely not homophones in New Zealand English, but the vowel sound distinctions could be difficult for some non-native speakers. What accent are you presuming?