User:Bouvierjr
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About me
[edit]I live in Noyarey, close to Grenoble in the French Alps. My contributions to Wikipedia include Biviers and some pictures of Belledonne and Chartreuse. While I have a user page in my native language, I only contribute to the English version of Wikipedia.
Why no contribution in my native language
[edit]The main reason I contribute in English is because of its universal appeal. English is the current lingua franca of the world. Furthermore, the English version of Wikipedia is better protected against opinions and of a much higher quality than its French equivalent.
I also love the English language and think it is clearly superior to French, being terser, more powerful, and much more precise. With respect to my first claim, simply compare any translation of a non trivial English text, say over 200 words, with its French equivalent, and count words or letters.
While English is more concise, it is also more powerful, with its ability to combine verbs with prepositions to create subtle variations that require a new verb in other languages. For instance:
- He sat on the bed,
- He sat down on the bed,
- He sat up on the bed, and
- He sat up onto the bed, all translate in French as "Il s'assit sur le lit", unless you use much more complex forms.
French has no simple way to convey such differences in meaning. To translate the second sentence, you would have to write "D'abord debout, il s'assit sur le lit". For the fourth sentence, this would be: "Il se hissa sur le lit pour s'y asseoir".
As for English being more precise, consider the French "Claude mis la main dans sa poche"; it has at least 6 very different English equivalents:
- Claude put her hand in her pocket → we can guess that Claude is female and she's putting her own hand in her own pocket (if we want to be precise we can indeed use the word own, the French has a similar word — propre — but it would not give the slightest indication about Claude's gender).
- Claude put her hand in his pocket → we can guess that Claude is female and she's putting her hand in the pocket of a man, e.g. she's a pickpocket or she's close to some boyfriend. Again if we want to be 100% sure, we can contrast 'Claude put her own hand in his pocket' as opposed to 'Claude put her hand in his own pocket'. Adding propre in French to la main or to sa poche would convey no additional information.
- Claude put his hand in his pocket → male equivalent of the first translation
- Claude put his hand in her pocket → we guess Claude is male and putting his hand in the pocket of a woman.
- Claude put the hand in her pocket → we guess Claude got hold of some hand (e.g. that of a corpse) and she is female.
- Claude put the hand in his pocket → Claude is a man and he got hold of some other hand that he puts in his own pocket.
Despite having a gender for all nouns, French is incapable of hinting at the gender of a person in this most simple sentence.
To give another example, we can translate the French sentence "Elle est venue ce matin" as:
- She came this morning'
- She has come this morning'
Both versions are valid, but again, we get much more insight from the English. In the first case, we can determine that the morning is over when the speaker utters the sentence, and that the person who came most probably left already. While in the second case, we know it is still morning when we speak, and we also know she is still there.
However, English presents some issues for native French speakers.
OpShACOM
[edit]OpShACOMis a clue to remember the order of adjectives. It stands for: Opinion, Shape, Age, Color, Origin, and Material. While the clue is not absolute, it generally helps putting adjectives in the right order. A more general rule includes other types of adjectives.
For instance using the following adjectives for a bag,
- Opinion
- beautiful
- Shape
- large
- Age
- vintage
- Color
- brown
- Origin
- Italian
- Material
- leather
will yield a beautiful large vintage brown Italian leather bag. Try putting the adjectives in a different order:
- a
leather beautiful bagisn't beautiful, - a
vintage large bagisn't either, - an
Italian brown bagmeans there is a color called Italian brown, - an
old beautiful bagisn't as good as a beautiful old bag, the former might have been beautiful before becoming old…
The opshacom mnemonic is actually incomplete. A better list is:
- Quantity or number
- many
- Quality or opinion
- beautiful
- Shape or size
- large rectangular
- Age
- vintage
- Color
- brown
- Origin
- Italian
- Material
- leather
- Purpose or qualifier
- computer
applied to bags yield many beautiful large rectangular vintage brown Italian leather computer bags. Granted, there are way too many adjectives here.
Remember also that adjectives are always invariable, and so are nouns when used in an adjectival sense: you can have two brown leather bags, and be six-foot tall and standing on a 4000 meter high mountain, and neither leather, nor foot, nor meter will need an s.
Plurals
[edit]Remember that where the French would use plurals in all words of a phrase, the English typically use the singular form except for the most significant word.
- a five-foot tall person (not five-
feettall) - many five-foot tall persons (only person is plural — people is another possibility, but the rest of the phrase can be considered an adjective, hence no "s")
- a link reset procedure (not a
linksreset procedure) - different link reset procedures (only procedure is plural)
Also remember that many English words are either uncountable or infrequently used in a plural form.
Mass (or collective) nouns are nouns that have a collective meaning and require a singular verb. They would typically translate into a plural in French. Collective nouns have a singular form but require a plural verb.
Conversely, some plurals act as a singular noun, e.g. means is both singular and plural and means something entirely different from mean ;-)
| English | French | wrong | right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advice | conseils | advices | |
| Data | données | datas | |
| Feedback | retours | feedbacks | |
| Functionality | fonctionalités | functionalities | |
| Hardware | matériels | hardwares | |
| Information | informations | informations | |
| messages | mails | ||
| Means | moyen | mean | |
| Performance | performances | performances | |
| Revenue | revenus | revenues | |
| Software | logiciels | softwares | |
| Training | formations | trainings | |
| Travel | voyages | travels |
Note that mean (without an s) means unfair, shabby or average, while the collective noun means is the proper translation of the French "un moyen"or "des moyens".
Some nouns can be uncountable for a given meaning and countable for another meaning. For instance:
- material is uncountable when meaning information or documentation such as in training material
- material is countable when it refers to physical items such as in construction materials
An other example:
- performance is countable when you talk about the performing act of an artist or the rendering of piece of art (Don Giovanni had many performances since 1787 ≃ représentations sur scène); it can be countable when you talk about employee performance, but only if you are talking about the variation of performance across employees.
- in all other cases, performance is uncountable, i.e. it does not take a plural mark.
In doubt, assume these words are uncountable and dismiss your French habits. For instance it is always safe to use material as an uncountable noun and in business apart from show business, it is always safe to use performance as uncountable.
To create the plural of abbreviations, do not use an apostrophe, simply append a lowercase s: NEPs are network equipment providers (and not NEP's are networks equipments providers).
When creating search indexes, remember that the singular and plural forms are often used. Hence, for systems that do not equate them (e.g.wikis), create both entries and redirect the plural to the singular form.
Faux amis
[edit]A faux ami is a word that looks the same in English and French but means a different thing in each language.
We list here the most common faux amis, feel free to add to the list!
To keep things simple, we ignore subtle meanings and differences. For instance, an estimation is actually a valid alternate word for an estimate. However, the latter is more common and less prone to double meaning. Similarly, coherent can also mean consistent, but the latter is much more frequent. Another example is assume: one can indeed assume responsibility.
| French | proper equivalent | don't confuse with | comment for French speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abaque | graph | abacus | |
| Accélérer | accelerate | fasten | |
| Actualiser | ap-/depreciate | actualize | |
| Actuel | current | actual | |
| Affluent | influent | affluent | |
| Assumer | handle, undertake | assume | |
| Automatiser | automate | automatize | |
| Cohérent | consistent | coherent | |
| Condamner | condemn, sentence | condone | |
| Conjointe/jointe | joint | joined | |
| Délai | lead time | delay | |
| Demander | to ask | to demand | |
| Estimation | estimate | estimation | |
| Eventuellement | potentially | eventually | |
| Farter | to wax (skis) | to fart | |
| Influent | influential | influent | |
| Nyctalopie | night vision | nyctalopia | |
| Phrase | sentence | phrase | |
| Ponctuellement | occasionally | punctually | |
| Préjudice | harm | prejudice | |
| Sanctionner | to punish | to sanction | |
| Supprimer | to remove | to suppress | |
| Synthétiser | to summarize | to synthesize | |
| Trépasser | to die | trespass | |
| Versatile | fickle | versatile |
Use a spell checker in all applications, and set it to English only so that you can clearly see (red wiggle underline) words that do not exist. E.g. fiable does not exist (the English equivalent is reliable).
Look and feel
[edit]Feel free to adopt my vector CSS. Here's a redlink, please don't create it! If you use my CSS, it will appear in red, embedded between a ⟦ and a ⟧.
And here is a color palette I'd like to test:
Sandbox
[edit]I typically use my sandbox to experiment.