4 ms·
I would consider it an awkward and redundant turn of phrase but not "extremely bad french". It's on the same level as "monter en haut" (to <go up> up) or "desce
by simias 7y ago
I would consider it an awkward and redundant turn of phrase but not "extremely bad french". It's on the same level as "monter en haut" (to <go up> up) or "descendre en bas" (go <go-down> down).
Wiktionary[1] says that the expression has existed at least since the 18th century, adding this interesting note:
> À noter aussi que durant ce siècle, la notion de « lumière » était une représentation métaphorique de la « connaissance » (cf. : siècle des lumières). Cette expression peut donc aussi se traduire de la façon suivante : « à la connaissance d’aujourd’hui » ou « au savoir d’aujourd’hui ».
Roughly translated it says that light could be used metaphorically to imply knowledge, so "au jour d'aujourd'hui" could be parsed like "to the light of today" and from there "to the knowledge of today". Now whether that's a justification after the fact or the real origin of the expression, who knows...
[1] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/au_jour_d%E2%80%99aujourd%E2%80%99hui https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/au_jour_d%E2%80%99aujourd%E2%...
- StavrosK 7y agoIsn't "descendre en bas" just "to descend down"?
- newleaf 7y agoI imagine it’s redundant because down is the only way you can descend.
- StavrosK 7y agoYes, I mean that's a more accurate translation that carries the redundancy better.
- simias 7y agoI considered it but I thought that "to descend" was too rare and formal in English to really carry over how the phrase truly feels in French. "I descend down" decidedly feels much more awkward than "je descend en bas" to me, if only because I've heard the latter a lot and the former probably never. "I climb up" might give a somewhat better impression of how "je monte en haut" sounds in French, although I suppose that you can very much "climb down" in English so it's not a perfect match.
- sum_of_zeros 7y agounless you're trapped in some escherian[1] world? [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher
- skoob 7y agoSure, although to descend feels a lot more formal than descendre does in French.
- matt_the_bass 7y agoYes but “descendre” and “monter” can mean other things in other contexts. So I feel the redundancy is from poor translation.
- shean_massey 7y agoExactly! Translation is tricky business.
- geofft 7y agoI missed something, where does "light" come from? How did we get from "jour d'aujourd'hui" to "connaisance d'aujourd'hui" - where's the intermediate "lumière d'aujourd'hui"?
- perthmad 7y ago"Jour" is polysemic, it literally means "day", but metaphorically it also means "light". For instance, "voir quelque chose sous un nouveau jour" means "to see something under a new light", rather than "a new day".
- emiliovesprini 7y ago> It's on the same level as "monter en haut" (to <go up> up) or "descendre en bas" (go <go-down> down). The same thing happens in Spanish ("subir arriba" and "bajar abajo"). It became a serious pet peeve after someone pointed it out to me, until I noticed that people only make this "mistake" in either very noisy places or very time-sensitive situations. It's more a desired redundancy (even if not conscious) than the accidental redundancy in the case of au jour d'aujourd'hui. Writing about this reminded me of how some people will try and make conlangs that compress as much information into as few sounds as possible, only to render them unusable - whereas within a rounding error all natural languages have the exact same information density and Signal To Noise ratio. Edits: grammar, formatting.