The new French: tortured by work?
The
Economist (7/21/07, p.
51) reports on responses to Nicolas Sarkozy's call for the French to
get down and
WORK. "Sweating in Sarkoland: Coping
with the irksome notion of hard work" comments:
Reconciling the French with hard work
could prove ambitious. The low Latin root of the French word travail is tripalium, an instrument sometimes
used for torture.
We are asked to suppose that modern French speakers using
travail call to mind a torture
instrument of the Inquisition. This is the Etymological Fallacy
in full bloom, and in fact we've
looked
at travail and its
etymology here on Language Log, only a couple of weeks ago.
On the other hand, it's not entirely implausible to think that some
speakers of French might see an unpleasant penumbra around
travail 'work', given the existence
of
travail 'pain,
suffering'. But maybe not. How would we find out?
Note: "Just ask them" is not a good plan of research. If you just
ask people to rate
travail on
a scale from negative to positive, how do you know which word
travail they're rating? (They
might even be thinking of the count noun
travail 'a literary work' or one of
the other items
travail.)
And if you ask them if the painful
travail
affects their feelings about the merely work-a-day
travail, you're inviting positive
responses, by juxtaposing the two words. So a cleverer and more
indirect approach is called for.
And how would we distinguish attitudes towards words from attitudes
towards their referents? After all, speakers of English might --
probably do -- have somewhat negative attitudes towards work that would
show up in responses to the word
work,
even though English has no
work
'pain, suffering'.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 25, 2007 02:18 PM