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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That 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.

back 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...

No one says "je m'osef".. :roll_eyes:

Never heard "je m'osef" in my whole life :)

"Je m'en zef" is a more popular way of saying so (even if 'zef' is mostly used for slang on other contexts)

>reflective

reflexive

This is known as PNS Syndrome.

Hopefully it won’t grow into eTLA acronym.

RAS (Redundant Acronym Syndrome) syndrome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

Pin and P.I.N. (spelled out) are two different words in reality.

That's fine if you're chatting via a written medium. I think the point the GP was making was when it's used in spoken language.

Where does pin the word come from in this context?

JFYI:

http://www.acronympolice.org/

http://www.acronympolice.org/?page_id=90

>3.2 Multiple Repeat Violations: A section 3 paragraph 2 offence occurs when multiple redundant acronyms are used in the course of a conversation. An example of a section 3 paragraph 2 violation would be “Honey, what is your PIN number, I need to take some money out of the ATM machine. If I have to go into the bank, they are going to ask for my SSN number and I can’t remember it”.

It might not help that "PIN" sounds exactly like of of the numerous slang synonyms for... well, just ask any French guy ;)

Then again, if your usual corner distributeur is asking you for this other PIN, authentication methods have certainly gotten a lot more creative!

> I don't know if au jour d'aujourd'hui sounds horribly redundant in French

No, we use it to emphasize that what we're talking about is as of today, but we can't make projections on the future.

You would use it in a sentence like : au jour d'aujourd'hui there are 'only' 300 deaths from the Chinese virus (implying that you don't know if it's going to get much worse or not).

Agree. It’s like a bad translation of “as of today”. It is kind of ugly though and to me it sounds awful, especially when you consider that you can replace it by the much more simple and elegant “à ce jour”.

“Au jour d'aujourd'hui” is most definitely bad grammar, or at bad least style, and thus I'm pretty sure it's wrong in the eyes of linguists, the Académie Française, etc.

But I'm sure the French are not the only ones to elevate some bad grammar/style to a level of consensus. Proof that languages are living things!

> I don't know if au jour d'aujourd'hui sounds horribly redundant in French

It varies from community to community. Some say it all the time, others laugh as soon as someone says it, and everything in between.

> I don't know if au jour d'aujourd'hui sounds horribly redundant in French

To me it does, it's irritating, like "to go up upstairs" (“monter en haut”). But most people evidently don't care, journalists do it all the time now.

I think it comes down to familiarity with expressions (or acronyms), as you explain. The more you internalize what a conjugate thing is, the more it becomes its own — and grammar be damned on the way, as logic evidently isn't the only path to understanding/speaking (perhaps not even the most common).

I really don’t like the example of “monter en haut”. Certain verbs, like “monter” can have very different meanings without the noun.

Monter en haut: to go up (not specifically stairs, contextually maybe, could just as well be an elevator or a tree house ladder for example)

Monter a cheval: to get on a horses back

Monter un meuble: to assemble furniture (think ikea)

The noun here is not irritating, it’s essential.

I agree with the sentiment, but it's logically redundant since you cannot possibly “monter en bas”, so you should really just say “je monte”. In context, everybody knows if you're talking about the elevator or a horse (right?), and otherwise you may specify. And you're likely to add something, like “je monte chercher blabla” or “elle est montée depuis une heure”, which usually removes ambiguity.

Also, there are proper ways to say “monter en haut”! — monter à l'étage, monter l'escalier, monter dans sa chambre, etc.

Speaking of which, I find that it's particularly important to speak properly around kids, it reinforces good logic, thoroughness I think. My parents were like that, I've always been like that, and I guess I'll do the same to my kids, haha.

> otherwise you may specify

thanks your majesty, queen of fuckin england was it, yea?

> That seems similar to the way people say PIN number even though PIN itself means personal identification number.

At least in Germany/German language, if you use such a redundant wording, you are often considered to be not very knowledgeable. In the 90s, some people even loved to point out that SMS is the name of the service - the message is an SM (oh, the funny puns that can be constructed from this fact).

TTL logic

What's wrong with PINumber?

It's not like "RIP in peace"

> 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.

And 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.

On 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

Thanks, that made my day :).

Sociétal is mostly about values and social is about the community.

Hence why we say sécurité sociale et non sécurité sociétale.

When you create words that don't exist you can put any meaning behind them I guess.

I 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.

<sarcasm>That's exactly what the populace was saying in Middle Ages, when the word aujourd'hui was a novelty.</sarcasm>

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%...

Isn't "descendre en bas" just "to descend down"?

I imagine it’s redundant because down is the only way you can descend.

Yes, I mean that's a more accurate translation that carries the redundancy better.

I 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.

Ah, I see, and both "climb up" and "climb down" are used, so it's not equivalent, you're right.

It's idiomatic to say "I rise up" or "I raise X up" in English, which are analogous though not translations. English just loves prepositional verbs.

unless you're trapped in some escherian[1] world?

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

Sure, although to descend feels a lot more formal than descendre does in French.

Yes but “descendre” and “monter” can mean other things in other contexts. So I feel the redundancy is from poor translation.

Exactly! Translation is tricky business.

I 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"?

"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".

> 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.

I take "aujourd'hui" to mean "today" and "au jour d'aujourd'hui" to mean "to this day", which is not the same.

aujourd'hui = today

jusqu'a maintenant = to this day

au jour d'aujourd'hui is just too awkward to use, it even sounds bad.

I understand it to be slightly different, but I am not trying to argue for its use.

Sort of like the English phrase "in a few moments from now", also beloved of broadcasters.

Came here to say that, thank you mon bon ami !

> extremely bad french, so it is pretty much only used by ignorant journalists

I wouldn't say that, it's still debated whether it's correct or not.

I'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 ?".

You can just say « Qu’est-ce ? » as well which is literally "what is it" ;) (written form rather than colloquial)

You could, and it would be correct. But few would understand at first. It sounds like "caisse", like in "caisse de vin" (crate of wine).

It could also be used by an "homme de lettre" in a very pompous way.

It's much more understandable if you add "donc" after "Qu'est ce". I don't really know why, it just adds extra weirdness :)

Can you say "Quoi est-ce?" and avoid that ambiguity (and correspondingly, "Qui est-ce?")? Or would that be wrong?

You can't, the "liaison" is mandatory between "quoi" and "est".

"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.

And the famous "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette chose là ?", meaning "what is this thing", but literally "what is this that this is that this thing there?"

I'm a little confused, why is the second "que" there? Why can't it just be "Qu'est-ce que c'est cette chose-là?"? (I'd expect it to be the equivalent of "What is it that it's that thing there?")

It's decorative, it has no meaning.

Similarly you have "les choses que l'on voit" and "les choses qu'on voit" with the "l'" being there for prettyness.

Oh huh, merci!

As a French-3rd-language learner (first English, then a little Spanish) I was (and am still) really confused about why "qu'est-ce que" is a thing. Spanish doesn't do that, at least as far as I recall. In many respects the languages have similar vocabulary (at least, coming from an English-speaking perspective).

I 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-francai...

Give this expression another hundred years, and it will become a common word.

In a shortened form.

But it won't enter the dictionary before additionally passing through verlan recomposition at least once.

Joursa?

I was secretly hoping for jours-au-au.

This 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.

This 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.

> 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).

> English for instance would never ever do something like that

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".

My favorite is still "laxadaisical" for those situations when neither "lax" nor "lackadaisical" are enough.

Or exonerative tense:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative

In which journalists use the passive voice to excuse, e.g., police shootings. "The victim was shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting." Rather than: "the officer shot and killed the victim."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14mistakes.htm...

> This rampant prescriptivism

really threw me off when learning French. I went from the mostly benign and spelling-only prescriptivism of Spanish to the complete and utter anarchy that is English to this weird situation French is in where it's the worst of both worlds: it has all of the rules and all of the exceptions.

In some situations following all of the rules ('course a pied' over 'running' type stuff) will make you positively odd, and in others ignoring some specific rules makes you sound uncultured.

Au jour du jour d'aujourd'hui, I beg to differ.

Not 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).

The word meuf is not used? It's very common...

It 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 :)

It is not used in everyday language, but it's used by journalists and PR.

"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".

I 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.

I 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?)

This phenomenon is called a "Jespersen's cycle" according to Wiktionary.

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

> 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.

> It has absolutely nothing to do with pas as in a step.

"Pas" as in the negation originally came from "pas" as in a step, through expressions like "I will not walk another step".

You're mentioning the current, disconnected meaning, while the original author showed a possible origin of those expressions. I dont know if they're valid but they're certainly interesting and potentially right.

> - je ne me bat _guerre_ (I do not fight _any war_)

This is not 'guerre' here but 'guère', which is a homonym but has no relation to 'guerre' (war). 'Guère' comes from an old French word that means 'a lot'.

Taking this into account it is clearer that "je ne me bat guère" means "I don't fight much"/"I hardly fight".

You could have picked any verb instead of 'to fight'. I suspect your other examples are equally contrived.

When speaking or even writing non formally, the "ne" are sometimes dropped. It's incorrect of course but perfectly understandable most of the time (dropping the "pas" instead is really weird but still understandable). My uninformed opinion is that this must just be a redundancy, which helps makes sure the negation is well heard, since missing it is generally catastrophic for the meaning as it generally means the opposite. Actually, in English negation can also add 2 words (do not), which also helps hearing it IMO. It also tends to be contacted. BTW I always have a problem with can vs can't, and often have to ask which one it is :)

Unintuitively, informal speaking often skips the ne but the pas is mandatory.

Je mange pas ça - I don’t eat this.

Also the second part can add nuance to the negation, fe.

Je ne mange plus ça - I don’t eat this anymore.

*Not a native speaker so there’s definitely more to it than I know.

In 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)))?

> 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.

It feels like some Germans invaded over the border and brought some compound word rules.

is backward slang common over there ?

The day than never ends.

Au 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 which is stupid, because it reveals the plot.

They could have called it "Chandeleur" instead...

Which happens to be today (aujourd'hui) ;-)

Does 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.

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