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Untranslatable Words and French Word Formation
Every language has words that seem to resist translation, and French is famous for a few of them: flâner and la flânerie, the art of wandering a city for pleasure, made a literary theme by Baudelaire and later writers; le dépaysement, the feeling of being out of one's element; les retrouvailles, the joy of meeting again; and l'esprit de l'escalier, the perfect reply you think of too late, which Denis Diderot described in the eighteenth century. In practice these words can always be explained, but rarely in one word. Much of French vocabulary is built from a small set of regular parts. Suffixes such as -age, -ment, -eur and -tion turn verbs into nouns; prefixes such as dé-, re-, in- and sur- change meanings in predictable ways. Learners who know the patterns can often guess a new word from its root, and native speakers coin new words the same way. French also borrows, despite its reputation: sérendipité, adapted from English serendipity, has entered French usage and several dictionaries. The bouquinistes, the secondhand booksellers whose green boxes line the quays of the Seine in central Paris, are themselves a Paris institution with a history going back centuries.