Book Review: The Cambridge French-English Thesaurus by Marie Noëlle Lamy

 

Every serious student of a foreign language knows that stage of learning a language very well when she has acquired a reasonable proficiency of the syntax and grammar of the new language she is learning, but is yet to have command over a vocabulary large enough for comfortably reading a newspaper article. The best friend of the language learner at this stage of learning when she desperately needs to add words and more words to her arsenal, is a thesaurus, preferably a bilingual thesaurus, that deals with two languages, one of which the learner knows well. But such a lexicon is a rarity and seldom found or discussed in the field of lexicography.

For English-speaking learners of the French language of the intermediate or advanced level, Marie Noëlle Lamy’s The Cambridge French-EnglishThesaurus is an excellent handbook. This bilingual thesaurus is arranged thematically with two alphabetical indexes: English-French and French-English. The entries include not only words but analogous phrases and expressions. A number of synonyms are included in each entry with their translations which will give the user an idea of where to use them.

If you look up ‘wood’ in the English-French index of this thesaurus, you’ll find two entries:

wood (forest) 18.8-18.9

wood (material) 26.3

The first group have words such as forêt (forest), bois (wood), bosquet (grove) under the heading Arbres poussant ensemble (Trees growing together) as well as words like bourgeon (bud), branche (branch), brindille (twig) and tronc (trunk) under the heading Parties de l’arbre (Parts of trees).

In the second group under the heading Matériaux (Materials), you have bois (wood/timber), bois tendres (softwoods), bois durs (hardwoods).

These two entries illustrate that the English ‘wood’ and the French ‘bois’ are not always equivalent in meaning. Let’s consider a few simple examples of how a subtle distinction is made between two words that mean almost the same:

habiter (to live)

demeurrer [same meaning as habiter but more official term] (to reside)

AND

sauôl (drunk)

ivre [more formal than sauôl] drunk

The thematic arrangement of the words will help both the language student and  the translator who appear to be the target users of this book, to find words around an idea and discover their subtle variations. This arrangement creates several layers of vocabulary around an idea and the user can thus chose from a fairly large and flexible stock of words and expressions. It is always easier to remember a new word in a foreign language when you associate it with an idea. The entries also contain idiomatic uses, metaphors, proverbs, famous quotations and usage notes, although none of these are exhaustive.

Yet, with all its helpful features, The Cambridge French-English Thesaurus remains a limited resource. Simply, it leaves out far too many words of both the languages. For example, you will find ‘wood’ and ‘bush’ but if you want to look up ‘thicket’ (fourré), you won’t find it in the index. You won’t find Sylve (forest), or futaie (cluster of tall trees) either.

This reviewer has no doubt that the Cambridge University Press has the talent and the resources to make this bilingual thesaurus a more thorough and inclusive tome in its future editions. In its present form, it is an excellent lexicon for the English-speaking learners of French but, if you are at an advanced level, you need to use it in conjunction with a good French thesaurus like Larousse’s Le Dictionnaire des Synonymes et des Contraires  or Le Robert’s Dictionnaire des Synonymes, Nuances et Contraires and a good bilingual dictionary (Oxford Harrap or Collins-Robert).

The conceptual world evolves differently in different languages as a result of cultural and other differences between two countries or two areas where the languages are used. Marie Noëlle Lamy’s TheCambridge French-English Thesaurus makes an intelligent and pioneering attempt to bridge that cultural gap. We will be happy to see more such attempts in other languages too.

© Subhamay Ray 

Book Review: Packing My Library – An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel

 Alberto Manguel's Packing my Library is a delightfully serendipitous journey for the bibliophiles. The real story, dismantling his library of thirty-five thousand volumes in France when he had to move to a modest apartment in the United States, is only an excuse for him to stray once more into the books he had read and enjoyed, retained and cherished. Packing and unpacking of books give the author an opportunity to reminisce as he takes an expedition in that ocean of experiences, others' experiences, that became his own, through reading.

Alberto Manguel calls his book an 'elegy': '......if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary.' His history as a reader is the history of his life. His life story can be traced in his readings. The author can easily find an analogy of every sentiment, every emotion, each fragment of his thoughts in the larger corpus of texts he carries in his head — or his recollection. Or perhaps in his notebook that he lugs around for jotting down 'certain lines' from his readings?

Alberto Manguel is a disciplined reader who takes notes and preserves them. The experience he thus gathers from his readings reinforces his own life's experiences. This writer's erudition is as 'punctilious' as that of Callimachus, the Greek poet and critic and one of the earliest scholars to work at the famed library of Alexandria. Alberto Manguel remembers minute details of what he read and is a master in applying the information that he gathered from reading, where it is the most appropriate.

But Packing my Library is not merely a record of the author's experiences as a reader. It is also a journal of his observations on various aspects of reading, writing, authorship, book collection and libraries. He delineates his ideas about the translator's art and while writing on dreams, he indirectly touches upon the art of fictional writing while narrating if dreams can be described.

 The most splendid of all his thoughts are those on dictionaries and the art of lexicography. Dictionaries are the 'guardian angels' of his library and he explains the indispensability of them in a wonderfully matter-of-fact manner when he asserts: 'For my generation (I was born in the first half of the previous century) dictionaries mattered.' Alberto Manguel describes the dictionaries as 'our talisman against oblivion' as if he is relying on the magical powers of those venerable tomes to bring back words and languages from the darkness of permanent obscurity.

Alberto Manguel has written other books, A History of Reading or The Library at Night that showcase his love of books. Packing my Library is a great addition to that list. Will books and the habit of reading contribute to make the world a better place? The author's conviction that books and literature are 'perilously effective' against the dictatorial powers that rule the world shines throughout the book. A very good read!

© Subhamay Ray 

Looking Death in the Face

                                                              Jeune homme

De vingt ans

Qui as vu des choses si affreuses

Que penses-tu des hommes de ton enfance

Tu connais la bravoure et la ruse

Tu as vu la mort en face plus de cent fois

Tu ne sais pas ce que c’est que la vie

Transmets ton intrépidité

À ceux qui viendront

Après toi

--- Bleuet (Guillaume Apollinaire)

 

Young man

Of twenty

You, who have seen such terrible things

What do you think of the men from your childhood?

            You know what bravery is and cunning

You have looked death in the face more

than a hundred times and you don’t

know what life is

Hand down your fearlessness

To those who shall come

After you

Despite a serious head injury that forced him to wear a metal band around his head, he had survived fighting in the war. He was the inventor of the word surrealism and, already, one of the finest French poets. But on November 9, 1918, he lay on his deathbed, his skin covered with a dark blue tint. Overcome by fever, suffocating and gasping like an asphyxiated, Guillaume Apollinaire died that day in his apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. German bullets and shells had left him alive. The Spanish flu did not spare him.

Two days later, his friend Blaise Cendrars, another celebrated poet, attended Apollinaire’s funeral. As they followed Apollinaire’s coffin towards Père-Lachaise, an exuberant crowd surrounded them, uttering howls of joy: it was November 11, the day of the armistice. The streets of Paris resounded with the cries of ‘À bas Guillaume!’(Down with Guillaume!)  An ironic coincidence since the shouts was in response to the abdication of the German emperor Wilhelm II, the hated Kaiser (Guillaume II in French).

Cendrars was shocked, no doubt so. The people were celebrating a victory at the end of the massacre but another terribly destructive force was already at work of which people spoke little, even as the number of dead continued to rise. It was a destruction perpetrated by an invisible enemy, even more deadly than the German troops. It would eventually leave behind more casualties than the battles of the Great War.

The brilliant poet, who had survived a shrapnel and a trepanation, had just succumbed, at the age of thirty-eight, to the Spanish flu. While he lay cloistered at the top floor of 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, looking on the rue Saint-Guillaume, he perhaps thought, in his delirium, that the people on the streets were demanding his head! It was a cruel end at the young age of thirty-eight, for one who had fought so furiously, and whose skull still housed a German bullet when he died.

The 1918 flu, wrongly named the Spanish flu, was caused by a particularly virulent and contagious strain of H1N1 that spread during that pandemic. The flu killed 20 to 40 million people, 30 million according to the Institut Pasteur, or even 100 million according to certain recent reassessments. It was the deadliest pandemic in history.

The inaccurate name of Spanish flu seems to come from the fact that only Spain — which had not engaged in World War I — freely published information relating to this epidemic and in particular that concerning the disease of King Alphonse XIII. French newspapers therefore spoke of the Spanish flu which was ravaging Spain without mentioning the French cases which were kept secret so as not to let the enemy know that the army was weakened. Sounds familiar?

In 1918, the war ended in Europe. The belligerent governments censored the press. Only in Spain, which did not take part in the conflict, there was talk of the pandemic which made people believe that the flu only affected the Spanish. In fact, in two successive waves, one banal in the spring, the second disastrous in the fall, most countries on the planet suffered from the scourge.

Faced with that ordeal, science appeared disarmed. It was known since Louis Pasteur that the culprit is a microbe. But no one could identify, even less isolate, the virus, which microscopes of the time could not detect because of its size, which is much smaller than that of a bacterium. We don't even know, for the most part, what a virus is, yet we know that the flu is an immortal disease.

Its first known occurrence can be traced back to antiquity, when the inhabitants of Périnthe, at the edge of the sea of ​​Marmara, were coughing and sneezing and some of whom died of fever. It is a Greek doctor who gave a brilliantly precise description of it. His name thus gathered a certain notoriety. He was Hippocrates. While the ancients attributed epidemics to the vengeance of the gods (sounds familiar again?), Hippocrates was convinced that the source of the scourge was something earthly, and he tried to fathom it. Yet, he made the mistake of creating the ‘theory of humours’, the origin of so many medical aberrations (remember Molière's physicians?). We had to wait till the 19^th century for the discovery of the microbes.

 The flu had existed since the dawn of mankind. But the hunter-gatherer societies, fewer and detached from each other, easily survived. It was the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, and the multiplication of human-animal contacts, that favoured the epidemics. Over the centuries, such outbreaks have struck all human societies through the same mechanism: transmission of the virus from certain animal species (birds, bats, etc.) to farm animals and then to humans. Sometimes the consumption of certain wild animals caused direct transmission. It is believed that this is the case with the coronavirus, although one can not be sure until it is proved.

I began this article with a vision of Guillaume Apollinaire in his deathbed. Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, returned to Paris for the Armistice and died in December of the same disease. Strangely, there are few traces of that pandemic in literature. Perhaps the flu was too common a disease and attention was deflected to the war that had just ended. Dying from the flu was not heroic; it did not attain the status of tuberculosis celebrated by the Romantics! There is no artistic memorial to this pandemic. In France, there are over 36,000 monuments to the dead of World War I, but not a single one that recalls the devastation caused by the Spanish flu.

© Subhamay Ray 

Book Review: How English became English by Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin's 'short history' of the English language presents a concise and lucid history of the language. This small but incredibly witty book deals with the origins of the English language and its roots, the numerous authorities who, over the ages, prescribed about right or wrong usages as well as the many dialects and varieties of the language used from the ancient to modern times all over the world. The book also includes interesting descriptions of elements of electronic communications in this digital age although it is difficult to determine why they are unique to the English language and turned out to be rather misplaced considering the focus of this book.  

 The early chapters that deal with the origin and development of the English language are fascinating reading. The later sections, notably those that handle the various forms of English including its different dialects, may appear tedious to many other than the most meticulous of linguists. Several pages on non-standard or corrupt forms of English spoken especially in parts of Asia and Africa and are explained with examples may be the domain of the specialists but, for the general reader, a shorter account would have made the book more satisfying. 

 When it comes to grammar, the rules of construction and usage and the prescriptivism versus descriptivism binary, Horobin appears to take sides. He obviously has a grudge against the pedants and prescriptive grammarians but doesn't come up with a solution to the problem. We may have different opinions about what is correct but if you do not prescribe any rules at all, the result may be incomprehension, misunderstanding and even anarchy. Those who opined that a movement away from formal grammar teaching in schools is responsible for social ills may have exaggerated but it is the exaggeration of an underlying truth. An intelligent study of grammar does not merely mean 'rote learning and formal examination'. It may also mean being careful and respectful of what you are learning. If those values stay relevant when you learn a musical instrument or a sport, why should they be different when it comes to language learning?

 It is the same inexplicable grudge against rules governing a language or grammar which prompts Simon Horobin to say that one 'further reason why people continue to care about good grammar' is because 'it sells'! Now, that is preposterous! If selling is your motive, do grammar or even books on anything under the sun seem to be a very appealing proposition in the modern world?

 Elsewhere, the author writes at length on the 'language' of electronic communication. Are 'emoticons' or 'smileys' part of the English language? Do they deserve their rightful place in this book? Even if they are forms of expression, what makes them unique to the English language? Neither are they essential elements of formal written or spoken language anywhere in the world. Those 'aspects of electronic discourse' seem ill-suited to this book. 

 Yet, How English became English remains a very good read for the most part. Considering the sheer amount of information it has, the size of the book is deceptive. There is a bibliography for further reading as well as a word index which only adds to the value of this book. Recommended.

This reviewer received an electronic copy of the book from Netgalley. 

© Subhamay Ray 

 

Crumbling under the recipes of happiness

 “By Joy… I shall understand that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection” (Baruch Spinoza)

In the moral philosophies propounded by the 17th century Dutch philosopher, we detect three dominant elements of 'the good life' or happiness. These three items are development of reason, love for 'God or Nature,' and freedom. Long before Spinoza, Aristotle was of the view that happiness consists in achieving, through the course of an entire lifetime, all the goods that lead to the perfection of human nature and the enrichment of human life. 

Four years after the damages of the English Civil War in 1655, the polymath Samuel Hartlib thought the culture of the silkworm was an invention capable of bringing humanity ‘infinite wealth and happiness’. Three hundred years later, mankind was profoundly transformed by the effects of industrial and scientific revolutions. At least in the ‘developed’ countries, despite the fears expressed by Malthus in the 18th century, material comfort and longevity had leaped forward, children no longer died in infancy, and, incidentally, the epidemics seemed to have been brought under control.

In 1974, however, economist Richard Easterlin put forward a curious paradox. According to his surveys, the happiness expressed by Americans had remained stable in previous decades, though marked by continuous growth. The Easterlin Paradox concerns whether we are happier and more contented as our living standards improve. Easterlin drew attention to studies that showed that although successive generations are usually more affluent than their parents or grandparents, people seemed to be no happier with their lives. 

This result has since been confirmed by numerous other studies. As lawyer Derek Bok points out in a book entitled The Politics of Happiness, the surveys even show that the level of happiness declared in different countries is not correlated with increasing prosperity. We do not declare ourselves happy if we do not have a minimum of control over our existence, but, beyond a certain threshold of prosperity which is quite low, additional means or goods have no effect on declared happiness. Studies show that, in a given individual, the level of happiness declared is generally constant: after a serious event, divorce, physical impairment, etc., it returns to its original level, its ‘point of equilibrium’.

This balance point is clearly determined by our genes, which perhaps justifies a certain pessimism. Behavioural geneticist David Lykken said that ‘trying to be happier is like trying to be bigger’. Those who are wise have known this for a long time. Witness Edith Wharton: ‘There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.’

This wisdom is unequally shared. Our consumerist society constantly invites us to let ourselves be caught up in games that resemble Pascalian ‘entertainment’. Among recent examples, the dismaying success of TikTok, a Chinese video sharing application that has become the most downloaded app in the United States. Its billion users, mostly pre-teens, are fed with ultra-short videos with particularly hollow content and a teenaged girl, Charli D’Amelio, whom the New York Times described as the ‘reigning queen of TikTok’ boasts of 61 million subscribers!

That compulsive quest for distraction is often an attempt to escape the wretchedness of life. Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French mathematician and physicist, diagnosed the malaise. In his Pensées (‘Thoughts’) he writes: ‘Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it?’ Pascal provides the answer. He says:

“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .”

Thus distractions and diversions cannot be our recipes of happiness. In the long run, they make us terribly unhappy. Again, in the words of Blaise Pascal: ‘I have often said that the sole cause of man’s happiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room’. Distractions are only a means of passing our time and imperceptibly bring us closer to death. Pascal unmasks distractions completely when he says: ’Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.’

To think as we ought when we are surrounded by gadgets that offer a plethora of stimulations? Are we crumbling under our recipes of happiness? 

© Subhamay Ray