Hugh Schofield of BBC News reports on French lexicography:
Forty years after they began the task – and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission – sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary. The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Collège des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine. […]
“The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,” a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday. This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935. Work started in 1986, and three previous sections – up to the letter R – have already been issued. Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.
In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a “mirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,” and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version. But many of the “modern” words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date. And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in. Thus common words like tiktokeur, vlog, smartphone and émoji – which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries – do not exist in the Académie book. Conversely its “new” words include such go-ahead concepts as soda, sauna, yuppie and supérette (mini-supermarket).
For the latest R-Z section, the writers have included the new thinking on the feminisation of jobs, including female alternatives (which did not exist before) for positions such as ambassadeur and professeur. However print versions of the earlier sections do not have the change, because for many years the Académie fought a rear-guard action against it. Likewise the third section of the new dictionary – including the letter M – defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is. “How can anyone pretend that this collection can serve as a reference for anyone?” the collective asks, noting that online dictionaries are both bigger and faster-moving. […]
Among the “immortals” is the English poet and French expert Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond (undeep). “French needs it, because as every English student of French knows, there is no word for ‘shallow’,” he said. Sadly, he failed.
Discussions – lengthy ones — are already under way for the commencement of edition 10.
I confess I’ve never been sure what, or who, the Academy’s dictionary is for, but it’s a grand thing to be sure. (Thanks, Trevor!)
I too know nothing about the actual dictionary, but it is characteristic of a journalist’s idea of what a truly comprehensive dictionary is, that he should make a great fuss over whether the dictionary contains words like “tiktokeur” and “vlog” rather than whether its treatment of (say) “faire” or “maison” is adequate.
Michael Edwards is represented (perhaps wrongly) as thinking that a dictionary ought to contain words that one would like to exist, even if they actually don’t. Who’d be a harmless drudge nowadays?
For a dictionary whose previous edition was published nearly ninety years ago, 21,000 new lexemes seems like an astonishingly small number. Even if that is actually only the number in the most recent fascicle, it sounds pretty low.
(Auto-incorrect of the day: “winery” for correctly spelled “ninety.” How very French.)
Bah! Let the Rosbifs neologise to patch their ever-defective speech, but French had achieved perfection by the eighteen century. Since then, neologisms are mere placeholders, until a real French expression can establish itself and render them obsolete.
Actually, I imagine that it might be a matter of how much specialised technical vocabulary is regarded as suitable for inclusion. Even very large English dictionaries seem to see no need to include some of the more recondite vocabulary of medicine, for example.
I must admit to having no real idea how many totally new lexemes you’d actually expect over a winery year period. (And English may very well be an atypical case.)
21,000 new lexemes seems like an astonishingly small number
How about 53,000 in total?
Seems kinda few:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words
I don’t think that these numbers mean a lot without a lot more information about just what is being counted, though.
Having no French, I was unaware of the “no word for ‘shallow'” point, but the internet tells me (reliably? I dunno …) that one can replicate English “shallow” with French “peu profond.” I suppose “improfond” would be “a word” while “peu profond” would be “two words,” but c’mon man does that really evidence a lexical gap?
This article by B W Andrzejewski on R C Abraham’s Somali-English dictionary, gives no numbers, but is interesting on the impossibility of estimating “how many words” there are in a language (and also on the extremely difficult circumstances under which Abraham carried out his work on this dictionary.)
https://arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/bitstream/2307/2581/1/Reflections%20on%20R.C.%20Abraham%27s%20Somali-English%20Dictionary.pdf
Favourite bit is the envoi:
Preach it!
I know quite a few Kusaal words which appear in neither of the two fairly extensive dictionaries available, and encountered half a dozen more in the course of reading a single short newspaper article I rediscovered among my stuff a few months ago.
[Walter J Ong] was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher.
I don’t see ‘Linguist’. Was there ever a time a ‘Linguist’ would have “alleged poverty”?
OTOH “In 1978 he [Ong] served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.” The MLA seems not to be a collective of ‘Linguists’ so much as language teachers and literature students(?) Or am I being unfair? What are your achievements to get “elected president”?
I confirm peu profond and add it’s less of a stretch than quiet being pressed into service in English as the opposite of loud.
Also, there are ways to get neologisms (including resurrected words) into circulation. Basically, make them popular, and they’ll end up perfectly cromulent. Putting them in a dictionary will not help; not enough people read dictionaries to make that work.
Walter J Ong
I think his interests suffice to count him under “linguist” (after all, Linguistics is a very broad church.) But Andrzejewski actually only accords him the lesser title of “scholar.”
Ong seems, however, (on the scanty evidence I’ve seen so far) to have been prone to generalise about culture-in-general on the basis of a grossly inadequate and probably very atypical sample, but I suppose he’s in good company. Alas.
I think even actual linguists actually have tended to underestimate the size of the lexicon of until-recently-unwritten languages. But as Andrzejewski rightly says, the Right Answer is actually usually “alas, we just don’t know.” (As with so many interesting questions.) At least it’s a step forward to realise that we don’t know.
I tended to do this with Kusaal myself initially (not that I am an actual linguist.) One’s first impression is that a single Kusaal lexeme very often covers quite a range of different English words (like zab, “fight, hit, hurt.”) But you need to be a lot more familiar with the language before you can find out that the reverse is also true, and that Kusaal also makes many distinctions lacking in English. Definitely Part II of the language course, that …
Reminds me of a snippet from one of Bloomfield’s letters, cited by Charles Hockett in his introduction to the awesome The Menomini Language:
(As Hockett, who of course knew Bloomfield personally, remarks, Bloomfield’s usual dry-as-dust style in print gives an entirely misleading idea of what he was actually like as a person.)
I’ve spoken French since schooldays over half a century ago, and have been utterly amazed to learn there is no French word either for shallow or quiet (in the sense of not loud). And searching my ageing brain, I realise it’s true. I find myself wondering what other gaps there may be in other languages, and how such gaps come to be. My experience in French is that a suitable word or approximation comes out while speaking and then you’re away, without considering whether you forgot the proper word, never mind whether it may not exist in the first place…
Comparing Danish (den danske ordbog) and Spanish (diccionario de la lengua española), you could possibly expect more like 100000 lemmas. But I think it just says something about the scope of the dictionary, rather than the language.
https://ordnet.dk/ddo/fakta-om-ddo
https://www.asale.org/obras-academicas/diccionarios
English has no words for “maternal aunt”, “wife’s sister’s husband” or “early-ripening millet.” It has no word for “be deep” and has to express the concept with an awkward periphrasis; and (unlike French) it has no word for “not know” (which probably accounts for the striking lack of intellectual humility so characteristic of the English and Americans.)
Modern English even lacks a word for “thou”, no doubt because Anglophones have lost the capacity for true friendship and intimacy.
When I first started using English, I most missed words for ‘to not speak’ and for ‘not hungry’ (“sated” is not used in common speech.) No language I speak has a common word for ‘not thirsty’.
I was just lately reading a lexicostatistical study of some Mande languages, in which the author defended using the expressions for “yellow.” There is typically no “word for yellow” in West African languages, but as the author reasonably enough pointed out, language after language uses expressions which literally mean “like dawadawa.” I wasn’t convinced that this dodge didn’t undermine his statistics, but it struck me as a neat example of the fatuity of the “has no word for” theme. (He also defended counting “feathers” and “body hair” as two separate items in his Swadesh-y lists, despite the fact that all the languages in his sample used the same lexeme for both meanings – as is also the case in Oti-Volta. Hmmm …)
@David Eddyshaw: English has yawn as a lexicalized metaphor for “be deep.” However, it only seems to be usable for the physical sense of a deep opening (not for, say, deep water, nor for the other senses of deep that rhemsrlves originated metaphorically).
@Y: Slaked is more common with literal thirst that sated is for non-metaphorical hunger. However use of slaked is mostly in the true verb past tense, rather than as an adjectival, while the reverse seems to be true for sated.
“Sad” is from Old English sæd “sated”; presumably reflecting some kind of Anglo-Saxon bulimia. No wonder British food is so …
Perhaps we could start using ‘plumb’ intransitively for ‘be deep.’ That lake may look small but it really plumbs.
@Y: I think I’m missing some nuance. is ‘full’ not adequate for ‘not hungry’?
@David E.: the normal English word for “wife’s sister’s husband” is “brother-in-law-in-law,” innit?
@Mich: I was thinking about that after I wrote. There is an overlap, but it’s not the same. “Full” means you’ve eaten your fill, but doesn’t work for ‘not particularly hungry’ or ‘not hungry yet’.
“Sated” is close to “full”, but not as strong. “Sated” is more like ‘I have eaten and am satisfied’ whereas full is more like ‘I can’t eat anymore’. The Hebrew שָׂבֵעַ savea, which I’d been missing, is close to “sated”, but more common.
Danish had sat, which was already marked as only in dialects in 1939. The dictionary has it as a synonym of mæt = ‘full, no longer hungry’ but in my mother’s family it was specialized to mean ‘no longer thirsty’ which is admittedly a lacuna in the modern wordhoard, but one whose lack is rarely felt.
Come to think of it, I should have said “paternal aunt.” The Kusaal for “maternal aunt” is either makpɛɛm or mapit (making a distinction absent in the impoverished English language), but these are compound nouns, and therefore this is cheating.
Pʋgʋdʋb “paternal aunt” has, however, an unanalysable stem. Also, the word is clearly phonaesthetic. It immediately suggests an “aunt” concept by its very sound.
I loved my pʋgʋdʋbs! (Er, what is the proper plural of pʋgʋdʋb?)
Pʋgʋdnam. (All tones low, in both singular and plural. I am sure that you wanted to know, but didn’t like to ask.)
And now I have to worry about which to use in conversation. I mean, if I say “I love my pʋgʋdnam,” will my interlocutor smile tolerantly while thinking “What a poseur, using Kusaal plurals in English”? Whereas if I say “I love my pʋgʋdʋbs” I might be considered an ignoramus. Best to avoid discussion of family.
I’m all for using our productive pluralisation strategies for foreign loans.
One issue that actually does turn up when speaking English in those parts is “Kusaasi”, which is from the plural Kʋsaas (mediated or modified by the Mampruli equivalent Kusaasi) but which most people also use as a singular. You do hear people use the “correct” singular “Kusaa”, but it always sounded weird to me.
Come to think of it, people would actually be a lot more likely to say something like “He is a Kusaasi man” than just “He is a Kusaasi”, which goes along with the English potential for using plurals quasi-adjectivally as noun premodifiers.
the English potential for using plurals quasi-adjectivally as noun premodifiers I misunderstand? Scissor kick, trouser press, two man tent?
Clothes press, menswear …
Actually, a better parallel would be the use of ethnic adjectives without nouns as plurals, as in “the French”, “the Japanese.” By analogy, “the Kusaasi” could go the other way and get reanalysed as an adjective, helped along by the analogy of all those ethnonyms like “Iraqi”, “Israeli” and such. Similarly with “Mossi”, “Mamprussi” etc.
English-adapted ethnonyms with the other common Western Oti-Volta human-plural ending ba do seem to get used less as adjectives (as in “Dagomba man”) though that still does happen. “Dagbani”, which is properly speaking the name of the language, seems to be at least as common as an English adjective for the Dagomba people themselves.
@de
[epsilon]l = marry
pu’a[epsilon]ling = betrothed
yuod = flow
pu’ayua = daughter
di = marry
diem = relative by marriage
pugidib = father’s sister
Just have to explain the gi (or say it corresponds to the ‘a, because di begins with a consonant or dental or whatever). Come on, be bold!
Scissor kick, trouser press, two man tent
Those all appear to have become oddly singular…
Pu’a-ɛliŋ “fiancée” actually does contain an old verb stem ɛl “marry” (of a woman, marrying a man), though the verb itself is no longer used in Kusaal. So it’s more or less equivalent to “nubile” as far as etymology goes.
Your suggestion for the etymology of pʋgʋdʋb is not so off-the-wall as you may have meant, PP.
The “woman” etymon in proto-WOV was actually *pogwa, and Mooré uses pʋg- as the stem form of paga “woman” in noun compounding. Kusaal, too, has a couple of fossil forms with pʋ-, as in pʋkɔɔnr “widow” (Mooré pʋg-kõore); however, this is not a regular outcome for the proto-WOV root vowel, and is certainly due to the fact that bound noun stems are unstressed proclitics (stress regularly falls on word roots in WOV.)
Pʋgʋdʋb has initial stress, so the first element cannot be a combining bare stem. The d element is in fact common as a derivational suffix for nouns; in WOV, agent nouns are regularly and productively formed with it, and it does turn up in one or two other synchronically unanalysable nouns, like yugudir “hedgehog.” There’s no obvious candidate for an underlying verb pʋg-, though.
The second and third vowels in pʋgʋdʋb are in fact epenthetic; the insertion of such vowels is governed by very regular processes in Kusaal. Compare the Mooré pʋgdba “paternal aunt” (the orthography is actually misleading: the word also has epenthetic vowels to break up the consonant clusters, they’re just not written.)
Pʋgʋdʋb itself must go back to proto-Oti-Volta; it has cognates in Gurma and Eastern Oti-Volta, all showing (the equivalent reflexes of) the d suffix as well.
There are no regular processes in Oti-Volta which demote a full stem like *dɪ “eat, get” to suffix status (a different matter from the stem compounding that these languages abound in.) There are one or two isolated cases where this seems to have happened, though, mostly with the stem *bi- “child.”
I am struck by the BBC’s reference to the members of the Academie as “sages in Paris.” Is that just a bit of dry British wit with a slightly sarcastic undertone, or does current BrEng use “sage” unironically in reference to various worthy figures who are not safely dead?
Definitely sneery-ironic. I don’t think it qualifies as “wit”, dry or wet.
So far as Brits are aware of the Académie at all, it tends to figure as something between a those-wacky-foreigners thing and a cause to congratulate ourselves on our superior linguistic wisdom. Shakespeare will probably be invoked (possibly as having supposedly invented so many neologisms); and Brits who have actually heard of Racine will contrast him with the Bard, to his disadvantage.
This attitude is often on display from people who actually would agree about Language with the Académie, if they actually knew anything about it.
Also known as “the much-feared Forty Immortals.”
When I was very small I remembered knowing two Hebrew words which I had already then forgotten and which none of the grown-ups I asked were familiar with: a word for “wife” (as distinct from “woman”), and a verb for “to frown” (in the sense of turning down the corners of the mouth). These words don’t seem ever to have been recorded anywhere, but they exist and hopefully they’ll come back to me someday.
@de
Re pugidib, thanks for the elucidation. Re Racine, I thought the one who gets unfairly credited with word creation in French is Rabelais (there would be some cod-Latinisms and obscene portmanteau words, which he really invented and which are not more generally used).
Yes indeed: but Racine is the usual anti-Shakespeare invoked for the trope. It’s not generally done in aid of any actual good-faith examination of English vs French culture. Just a the-English-are-best theme.
TR: Is the second one זעף by any chance?
I can’t think of a common word for wife other than אִשָּׁה ʾiššâ ‘woman’.
No, not זעף. It was a specific word for making an upside-down smiley face (so even more specific than “frown”).
Are you sure you aren’t remembering a dream?
Was the ‘wife’ word רַעֲיָה?
No, that’s a formal word which a toddler wouldn’t know. The word in question was a normal, everyday equivalent to בעל “husband”.
Presumably what actually happened is that my brain identified a couple of odd gaps in the lexicon and either filled them in with its own inventions or else created a memory of an alternative Hebrew in which they were filled. I clearly remember my frustration that these words, which I knew existed, weren’t known to anyone else.
@PP:
[Because I never know when to stop when it come to comparative Oti-Volta. Do you see what you’ve done?]
There are actually what appear to be ablaut pairs in Oti-Volta where one member has an open vowel and the other has a closer vowel. Most of them can be explained away via umlaut phenomena, or perhaps by an opening effect induced by vowel nasalisation, but there is a small puzzling residue, as with e.g. *bag- “divination, diviner, idol” versus *bʊk- “divine (verb), cast lots, shrine.”
I don’t know what’s going on in cases like these. It may be pure coincidence. I’ve not come across any similar kind of ablaut elsewhere in Volta-Congo, and it seems somewhat lacking in parsimony to suppose that these are the last brave remnants of a once widespread pattern …
Anyhow, if this alternation is a real thing, it might help to finesse the fact that the vowel of “paternal aunt” doesn’t properly match “wife, woman.” The tones are wrong, but there are instances of derivational suffixes altering preceding root tones.
But it’s difficult to see the semantics. I mean, aunts are generally women, but that doesn’t really seem to help. I don’t think paternal aunts are particularly special culturally, unlike maternal uncles, who are supposed to take a distinctly supportive and close role to their sisters’ children. The senior wife of the groom’s family head (his father or father’s elder brother) looks after the bride in the days before the wedding, but of course she is anything but his paternal aunt. I suppose she might be the bride‘s paternal aunt sometimes …
(The fact that there is a distinctive word for “paternal aunt” simply reflects a feature which pervades the whole system: many basic terms, including those for siblings, are in themselves sex-neutral: the choice of term depends instead on whether the person is of the same sex as “ego” or different, and then, if they’re the same sex, whether they are older or younger.)
> Clothes press, menswear
But clothes has no singular, and menswear is using the possessive, not making an adjective of the plural. We say mancave, not mencave. For me it works to add man but not men. I could plausibly coin manburger or mancoat, but not meanburger.
I remember reading an article in which an employee referred to the Chicago Sewers Department, and feeling it sounded awkward to me. I might answer the phone “Sewers” but as an adjective it would always “Sewer Department” for me. Which means the plural is not productive for me, but it is for others, at least in the lect of publicly employed trade union members in the city of Chicago.
At some point — probably a decade or more ago — we talked about the change from (e.g.) “Yankee fan” to “Yankees fan” in common usage, but I can’t find the post.
CGEL cites (leaving aside those where the -s is historically genitive):
almshouse, clothespeg/clothespin
batsman herdsman huntsman swordsman
They make the same point as Ryan about those in the first line, viz that these are plural-only nouns, but do point out that even plural-only nouns usually drop the -s in composition (“trouserpress”, “pyjama-top.”) So it is not clear why these do not.
They say that the -s is historically plural in those on the second line, though it no longer has a plural meaning. Again they point out that there seems to be no reason why these words have the -s but not “boatman”, “doorman”, “rifleman.” Moreover, both types are actually still productive: “bagman” and “locksman” are both recent. “Lineman” and “linesman” both occur, with the same meaning …
The second line strikes me as an attempt to avoid [tm dm]; boatman is a counterexample, but boatswain is not…
I can’t recall hearing “lineman” (someone who works with outdoor electric infrastructure, such as the first-person narrator of “Wichita Lineman”) and “linesman” (an on-ice ice hockey official subordinate to the referee(s)) used interchangeably in AmEng, but maybe there were instances within my hearing that I didn’t register.
The OED has a couple of late 19th C quotations for ‘linesman’ for the Wichita sense, but the main meaning it seems to think is interchangeable is a forward in American football.
It occurs to me that “alms” as in “almshouse”, though construed as a plural now (sometimes, anyway), is actually not historically a plural at all: if there were a singular *alm, it could only have come about by back-formation, like “pea” and “cherry.” So it’s not very surprising that the -s remains there in compounds. (“Almsgiving”, too.)
“Clothes” is a genuine original plural, though.
“Goods”, as in “goods train”, does get forcibly resingularised sometimes by economists and People of That Kind.
@David Eddyshaw says
November 15, 2024 at 10:06 am
“I’m all for using our productive pluralisation strategies for foreign loans.
[…].
“Come to think of it, people would […].”
===
In my experience, “come to think of it” is American English and “come to it” is British English. Not surprizingly, therefore, so far as I can remember, you have hitherto used only the latter on this comment board.
How do you account for “come to think of it” this time? Recent American English influence? Older British English and not due to American influence?
@Jen in Edinburgh: Interestingly, Canadian football has both linemen (who are players, as in America) and linesmen (who are officials, as in hockey or soccer). I wonder how much confusion that causes with Americans, because besides the similarity in the words, it is a divergence in terminology between the two varieties of gridiron football.
@JeninEd: the way you zoom in on that alleged (American) football sense is to do a google ngram comparison of offensive lineman v. offensive linesman and/or defensive lineman v. defensive linesman. The s-including variants are vanishingly rare and have been for over a century.* The official-rather-than-player sense of linesman (presumably taken from soccer rather than ice hockey, which I suppose might itself well have originally gotten it from soccer) is as best as I can tell largely archaic in (American but not Canadian, per Brett) football because the relevant official is more technically called a “line judge” by people who care about such niceties rather than just calling the whole lot “the refs” or “the zebras” when only one of them is technically the “referee” and the others have other titles. I’m pretty sure “line judge” was already standard by the 1970’s when I first read books explaining the technical intricacies of the rules of football intended for a small-boy audience. I don’t know if there were persnickety prescriptivists on the American football scene in the late 1890’s insisting that a lineman was a sort of player** while a linesman was a sort of official, but I can’t rule it out.
*Same is true if you pluralize by swapping in -men for -man in all the variants.
**There are different more specific positions with different more specific titles that make up the line. One might be more likely to say that e.g. the legendary Mean Joe Greene of the Steelers*** “played defensive line” or “was a defensive tackle” than “was a defensive lineman,”**** although the last would not so much be unidiomatic as a slightly unexpected level of generality.
***It’s easy to google up “Best Defensive Linemen of All Time” listicles with Mean Joe as one of ten or a dozen names, but if you are an American in a certain age bracket you will also remember him from the tv commercial (1979, says the internet) in which he is limping off the field in a sour mood after a very tough game before he is cheered up by a small boy offering him a bottle of Coca-Cola.
****What was at the time (when it was an innovation) called the “two-platoon” system, where one set of players play offensive line and a different set play defensive line rather than the same guys being consistently up front regardless of whether their team is on offense or defense at a given point in the game, did not really arise much before the 1940’s and did not become completely universal for another decade or two after that, but is now so universal that referring to a player as a “lineman” without specifying offensive or defensive would be really weird unless context had somehow made it so obvious which it was that you didn’t need to be explicit.
@M:
“Come to think of it” is now, and always has been, part of my idiolect. No doubt this is due to an unconscious reminiscence of my previous Kusaasi life, and reflects a so-called “serial verb construction”, though in my current incarnation I regard this a faulty analysis of my previous L1. (Thus do we progress on the Path to Enlightenment. Soon I shall be invincible.)
“Come to think of it” is not synonymous with “come to it” in any variety of English whatever. (Without getting too technical, the clue is in the third and fourth words of the longer expression.)
It is possible that I have not hitherto been thinking before commenting, and therefore felt no need to mention any process of antecedent ratiocination. In hindsight, this would explain much.
What actually jumps out at me, JeninEd, is that while I understand why you might say an Am football lineman was a “forward”, it actually makes no sense at all of the situation.
“Come to think of it” is not synonymous with “come to it” in any variety of English whatever.
“Come to think of it” has always been part of my English (I’m a Brit). I certainly don’t regard it as specifically U.S. Wiktionary’s entry is unhelpful on its origins. Dictionary.com says First half of 1800s, but also no location. Collins has a quote attrib P.L.Travers Aus/Brit author of Mary Poppins. The phrase is perhaps rather informal, so maybe won’t show up so much in ngrams.
I’m rather doubtful there’s influence per @DE’s suggestion in my usage: I’ve had no other intimations of a Kusaasi former life.
Come to that, I’d go so far as to say bare “come to it” as a prefatory phrase is mildly ungrammatical/certainly unfamiliar to me. Can @M suggest a typical usage? (Let’s not count our chickens before we come to it.)
@DE It is possible that I have not hitherto been thinking before commenting, …
Aww we’ve all suffered that sort of comeuppance.
@Ryan: I think forward and lineman are synonyms in rugby, which may be what Jen in Edinburgh was thinking of. I’m not sure what is supposed to be linear about forwards in rugby,* but it is certainly nothing like the offensive and defensive lines in gridiron football, where, because of the down** system, the linemen line up, facing off, at scrimmage*** time after time.
* Australian rules football has yet different terminology, with groups of positions collectively called the “forward line,” “half forward line,” etc. Those of us Americans who occasionally watched ESPN late ar night in the 1980s could learn a smattering of the terminology from the Aussie football matches that the channel licensed for peanuts.
** The origin of this sense of down is transparent but illogical. I observed long ago that it would make more sense to to speak of “first [etc.] up,” rather than “first down.” After all, the ball has been downed on the previous play, and the snap marks when it is up off the ground and in play again.
*** The historical development senses of scrimmage was “affray,”**** then the gridiron sense, then “practice game played between members of the same team.”
**** A word I associate with Groo.
Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond
The noun improfondeur in the wild… from Idiotie, winner of the Prix Médicis (2018), by Pierre Guyotat, awarded the Prix de la langue française (2010) and the Prix Femina spécial (2018):