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Another pecularity of French is the tendency to supercomposition. Like the expression au jour d'aujourd'hui which means "the day of today", however, aujourd'hu
by sam_lowry_ 7y ago
Another pecularity of French is the tendency to supercomposition.
Like the expression au jour d'aujourd'hui which means "the day of today", however, aujourd'hui itself mean "the day of today", because hui is the Old French word for "today" and aujourd' is obviously the concatenated form of "au jour de".
But it does not end there: the Old French word hui evolved from "hoc diem", which means "this day" in Latin.
At the end, the best explanation of au jour d'aujourd'hui is
(the-day-of
(the-day-of
(this (day)))
which is fascinating.
- yodsanklai 7y agoI believe it's because people don't realize that "Aujourd'hui" originally meant "the day of today". Even though you hear people say "au jour d'aujourd'hui" it's considered incorrect and should be avoided [1]. It's better to say "A ce jour". [1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francaises/2018/04/10/37003-20180410ARTFIG00017-au-jour-d-aujourd-hui-ne-faites-plus-la-faute.php https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francai...
- sam_lowry_ 7y agoGive this expression another hundred years, and it will become a common word.
- bujak3000 7y agoIn a shortened form.
- usrusr 7y agoBut it won't enter the dictionary before additionally passing through verlan recomposition at least once.
- anticensor 7y agoJoursa?
- usrusr 7y agoI was secretly hoping for jours-au-au.
- xxyyxx314 7y agoThis is bad french used by clueless journalists. It's not fascinating but just degrading. French get their language botched by useless repetitions. Il est tout à fait regrettable d'oublier non seulement la répétition comme outil de communication mais aussi de l'employer de travers à des heures de grande écoute.
- simias 7y agoThis rampant prescriptivism among us frenchies is really tiring after a while. I blame the Académie. Modern French is botched Middle French which is botched Old French which is botched Vulgar Latin which is botched Classical Latin (this last one is a bit incorrect but you get the idea). "Aujourd'hui"'s ethymology is a proof of that. I agree that repetition for emphasis is an innovation of modern French though. English for instance would never ever do something like that. That would be completely, entirely, absolutely preposterous. I myself wouldn't stand for it.
- yodsanklai 7y ago> This rampant prescriptivism among us frenchies is really tiring after a while I dislike "Au jour d'aujourd'hui" because of the redundancy. There are shorter and more elegant ways to say the exact same thing. I don't know if we can talk about prescriptivism in that case. It just gives a negative impression on the author (like when you see an anti-pattern in computer code).
- dorfsmay 7y ago> English for instance would never ever do something like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless Or one that absolutely drives me nuts: "A great rate of speed" Which is a journalist way to say "I failed high school physics, but I'm still going to try to sound smart".
- ben509 7y agoMy favorite is still "laxadaisical" for those situations when neither "lax" nor "lackadaisical" are enough.
- aminebaloo 7y agoThe day than never ends.
- sam_lowry_ 7y agoAu jour d'ajourd'hui would make a funny translation of "Groundhog day". So far, the French translated this film as https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_jour_sans_fin https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_jour_sans_fin which is stupid, because it reveals the plot.
- UncleSlacky 7y agoThey could have called it "Chandeleur" instead...
- sam_lowry_ 7y agoWhich happens to be today (aujourd'hui) ;-)
- jgwil2 7y agoDoes it reveal the plot? To me "un jour sans fin" seems like it could just be figurative, like a day that seems to never end because it's boring or miserable... which is kind of what Bill Murray's life is like at the beginning of the movie.
- ekianjo 7y ago> au jour d'aujourd'hui This is typically known, even among french people, to be extremely bad french, so it is pretty much only used by ignorant journalists.
- johnchristopher 7y agoAnd politicians who heavily used this expression for two or three years. That trend is now gone. Pet peeve of mine, there also was the word "sociétal" used instead of "social". Which led me to use the locution "les réseaux sociétaux" because fuck.
- perthmad 7y agoOn that particular topic, I definitely recommend reading François Héran's 1991 article "Pour en finir avec « sociétal »" [1]. [1] https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsoc_0035-2969_1991_num_32_4_4079 https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsoc_0035-2969_1991_num_32_4_4079
- johnchristopher 7y agoThanks, that made my day :).
- mam2 7y agoSociétal is mostly about values and social is about the community. Hence why we say sécurité sociale et non sécurité sociétale.
- ekianjo 7y agoWhen you create words that don't exist you can put any meaning behind them I guess.
- K0SM0S 7y agoI didn't know I was old already at 37, but when I was young, the word societal was not even related to social: literally pertains to society, which without further qualification is the general group of "all of us" — whereas e.g. the "Audio Engineer Society" is the group of that field. Society is opposed to private, fragmented circles ("some" audio engineers, "some" people), subset communities contained in society. Externally, society as opposed to other societies i.e. countries or cultures. Then one day some r/Iamverysmart self-proclaimed intellectual heard "societal" and liked the word, emotionally, and began using it — that's how you learn words, right? By using them. Trial and error. So, so many errors. But others liked it too. And ever more. Lovely errors. And suddenly because people confused it with "social", it began an "umbrella concept" for "everything involving many people doing stuff together". Sure, that works for society and social matters. It's also as empty a concept as you can make. But in the Twitter age, it's OK to use 1 word to mean 20 things and never detailing any of it, because fuck. Agreed. The truth is so few people care, it's not even worth the time to delete -et-. Those who do care, speak with others who understand, and ignore the rest. Sad state of affairs, but I've grown convinced it's just human nature, and has been virtually forever.
- mysterypie 7y agoThat seems similar to the way people say PIN number even though PIN itself means personal identification number. I don't know if au jour d'aujourd'hui sounds horribly redundant in French, but I find that PIN number is perfectly acceptable in English, along with SSN number, UPC code, and many others. It takes mental energy to decompose PIN into its components and realize it contains the word "number", so I welcome the redundancy. When someone asks, "Do you remember your PIN?", I'm thinking about sewing needles or medallions for a second -- if they didn't add the word "number". On the other hand, the acronym ATM is so common that I don't feel the need to say "ATM machine" anymore; I'll say "Where's the nearest ATM?" and expect that most people will immediately understand it without having to think about what it stands for.
- croisillon 7y agoback to french you have the reflective verb "s'[en] foutre" (not to give a shit about [it]), which you use "je m'en fous" = i don't care, "tu t'en fous" = you don't care... you can acronym "on s'en fout" as osef for a general "no one cares" and then rebuild osef as a verb : "je m'osef", "tu t'osef" etc...
- 7y ago
- rvnx 7y agoNot used by French, don't believe Wikipedia :) It's among the jokes of uneducated French supposedly using "comme même" (like though) instead of "quand même" (even though).
- anonu 7y agoThe word meuf is not used? It's very common...
- rvnx 7y agoIt was about "au jour d'aujourd'hui", where the correct the version could be "à ce jour" :) meuf is indeed very much used but not very elegant. More gopnik/low-class style :)
- progval 7y agoIt is not used in everyday language, but it's used by journalists and PR.
- potatoz2 7y ago"Au jour d'aujourd'hui" is used to emphasize the "up to now" quality, kind of like "as of now". "Comme même" is just a spelling mistake. Kind of similar to "he is better then that".
- anonsivalley652 7y agoIt feels like some Germans invaded over the border and brought some compound word rules.
- agumonkey 7y agois backward slang common over there ?
- iodbh 7y agoI'm a native french speaker and only recently realized that "Qu'est-ce que c'est ?" ("what is it ?") literally translates to "what is it that it is ?".
- enz 7y agoYou can just say « Qu’est-ce ? » as well which is literally "what is it" ;) (written form rather than colloquial)
- yann63 7y agoYou could, and it would be correct. But few would understand at first. It sounds like "caisse", like in "caisse de vin" (crate of wine).
- julienfr112 7y agoIt could also be used by an "homme de lettre" in a very pompous way.
- forty 7y agoIt's much more understandable if you add "donc" after "Qu'est ce". I don't really know why, it just adds extra weirdness :)
- mehrdadn 7y agoCan you say "Quoi est-ce?" and avoid that ambiguity (and correspondingly, "Qui est-ce?")? Or would that be wrong?
- bdauvergne 7y agoYou can't, the "liaison" is mandatory between "quoi" and "est".
- jobigoud 7y ago"Qui est-ce ?" is correct. "Quoi est-ce ?" is not. "Quand est-ce" and "Où est-ce" work. "Comment est-ce ?" doesn't really work by itself but could work with something after it, like "Comment est ce film ?". All of these work and sound more natural in spoken language if you flip and say C'est quoi ? C'est qui ? C'est quand ? etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mikorym 7y agoI have long had a suspicion that the Afrikaans use of two negative words is due to the French influence. I might be completely wrong, but the ne ... pas construction is the only one in any language that influenced Southern Africa that comes close to the nie ... nie construction in Afrikaans. What is the reason for the French ne ... pas to start off with? By comparison, in an English negation you would just have not without any supporting word at the end.
- tduberne 7y agoI once heard that this used to be a way to emphasize, by adding the thing you do not do. Not very clear, bit here are some examples: - je ne marche _pas_ (I not not walk _any step_) - je ne me bat _guerre_ (I do not fight _any war_) - je ne coud _point_ (I do not sew _any point_) And then slowly disconnected. All those words are still used as negations, and I cannot think of any word of negation that cannot be interpreted this way, so that might be true (but I cannot really think of more than those 3 either). What makes me doubt is what words would have persisted (why _ step_ as the one most common?)
- jrsala 7y agoThis phenomenon is called a "Jespersen's cycle" according to Wiktionary. https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cycle_de_Jespersen https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cycle_de_Jespersen Also according to Wiktionary, "guère" is unrelated to "guerre" (war) and "ne ... guère" is therefore not the product of a Jespersen's cycle. https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gu%C3%A8re https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gu%C3%A8re
- Bayart 7y ago> je ne marche _pas_ (I not not walk _any step_) It merely means I do not walk. There's no particular connotation. It has absolutely nothing to do with pas as in a step. > - je ne me bat _guerre_ (I do not fight _any war_) Je ne me bat guère means "I hardly fight". No relation to war. > - je ne coud _point_ (I do not sew _any point_) Je ne couds point means "I don't sew". Again, no particular connotation. Point means the same as pas in this case and has nothing to do whatsoever with stitches.
- candeira 7y agoIn Spanish, if you ask "where from?" you'd say "¿De dónde?", which is also a triple composition. The adverb "dónde" already has the preposition "de" embeded in it, as it comes from a condensation of Vulgar Latin "de unde", already meaning "from where". But Latin "unde" already is a composed form meaning "from where", and where the "-de" ending is not the preposition "de" but it's still a particle making "unde" a composed form... So if you're Spanish and ask "¿De dónde?" you're asking ¿(from (from (where from)))?
- posterboy 7y ago> But it does not end there: the Old French word hui evolved from "hoc diem", which means "this day" in Latin. It doesn't. Try to explain without handwaving. You can't. The so called experts you are parroting don't actually know. Bet you didn't even know. It obviously means the day of he', here, the hey day. > hui evolved from "hoc diem" that's the mos'stu'ing I ever heard.