Tag: French

Navigating Nabokov: A Companion Glossary for “Lolita” | April 08 2026, 11:24

I have finally finished the book The Reader’s Glossary – essentially a 5200-word dictionary for “Lolita” by Nabokov, but organized not alphabetically, like regular dictionaries, but in order of the occurrence of complex words, divided by chapters and indicating the context of the word or phrase. The website – readersglossary dot com (see the first comment). It is expected to be used, among other things, as a companion book while reading the original. Yes, it’s twice as thick 🙂

The dictionary turned out quite thick – 600-700 pages. It is available in four languages – Russian, English, French, and German. Moreover, the translations (RU, FR, DE) or clarifications (in ENG) are not abstract but contextual, taking into account how Nabokov himself translated the fragment from English (“Lolita” was first written in English, then translated into Russian).

On my website, there are huge fragments of these dictionaries RU, FR, DE, EN available for review (each about 1/3 of the total volume).

There is also a full-fledged interactive dictionary on the site, where you can enter a word and see its translation or explanation. The dictionary mainly contains complex words, but we know that complexity has its own definition for everyone, so all words are divided into three categories and highlighted with different frames. Probably for a well-read Anglophone, the first category (dotted) is completely useless (about 50% of the dictionary), for the less-read, maybe 20% are useless. But I decided not to cut it further, because the book is not only for Anglophones but also for those for whom English is a second language, and there those dotted frames are very handy.

Overall, I did this “for myself and friends,” just for fun, not as a commercial project. Therefore, I am quite sober in understanding that it has a super niche audience, and if even once a week someone finds it useful, it’s already nice.

Although it was something like a hobby, the book took a lot of time. To achieve what I did, I developed a dozen applications/scripts, a couple of which have their own interactive UI, in which I spent many hours over two months of work. And of course, I learned a lot in the process, which is actually the main fun of it.

So, come to the website – readersglossary dot com. Link in the comments

P.S. In Russian – only as a PDF for now. Amazon doesn’t allow selling books in Russian, only in a small number of European languages in addition to English. The French and German versions of the dictionary will be released on Amazon about a week from now.

Navigating the Lexical Complexity of Nabokov’s “Lolita” | April 02 2026, 15:56

I’ve finished the first version of a dictionary-style book on Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The chart shows how the complexity of vocabulary is distributed across the pages of the book. The lower chart averages 25 sentences, displaying the number of complex words on the vertical axis, with colors indicating their complexity/rarity (purple – the most complex, red – less complex, yellow – even less so). But I have already removed two levels, and overall, for a foreigner, all five levels are challenging. In the book, level 3 is marked with a dashed line, level 4 with a simple frame, and level 5 with a double frame. Currently, there are 5794 words, of which 541 are fifth level, 1070 are fourth, 1883 are third, 1393 are second, and 54 are first (the simplest ones). Considering that the first version ended up being 1148 pages, the dictionary will need to be significantly streamlined by removing what can be dispensed with. This mainly pertains to the first and second levels, and some from the third and fourth. The rarity of words is calculated in three ways: through LLM, and through two lists of word frequencies in the English language corpus (300K words).

Not all words are complex. For instance, in the sentence “With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.” someone well-acquainted with English might not know the words ebb, abet, drabness, while everything else is familiar, but lower the requirements for the reader, and the dictionary might not be very useful for such cases.

Or consider the sentence:

Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.

My browser even highlights four words here.

I have definitions of words in English, German, French, and Russian. I’ve encountered the issue that different words from the text are considered complex in different languages, yet they are unified for me. So, I’ll have to mark, for example, French words in the English text separately, so they are not included in the French version, since there, the reader knows, for instance, what quel mot means.

Overall, this weekend I’ll be manually removing about half, and then I can make the cover and list it on Amazon.

Exploring Multilingual Vocabulary in Nabokov’s Works with Apple Books | March 15 2026, 23:20

Man, it’s really convenient. Just sitting here reading.

The usage pattern is as follows: I hold the phone in my hands. There, in apple books, this and that book. You see an unfamiliar word – it will likely be in the word list of the chapter. The definition takes into account the translation by Nabokov himself. Then you look a couple words ahead, put the phone down, continue reading. You encounter those words, and they are still in your short-term memory, and hooray, you understand. During a break, you load the next couple of words into your brain. You have to hold the phone and flip through, each page contains 4-5 definitions.

Now, every word has definitions in English (interpretation), French, and German. Consequently, I can publish four books.

Overall, my level of English matches what my app predicts about which words will be challenging. But someday I’ll need the same for French, and it will require an assessment of the difficulty level for each word because even some basic words will be unclear to me. I’m not sure that a book with basic words will be handy. With rare ones – definitely handy.

Crafting Nabokov’s Dictionary: A Multilingual Lexical Journey | March 15 2026, 18:30

I’m reading Nabokov and decided to take a break to create a convenient app “Nabokov’s Dictionary” and am considering selling it on Amazon as a book. Essentially, it looks like this (see screenshot) – definitions of complex words in English, Russian, German, and French, in the same order they appear in the original book.

Would you buy such a book?

To accurately make their definitions, I also wrote an aligner – a program that matches sentences and paragraphs in English with their translations (Nabokovian) into Russian. And when a word’s definition is created, it uses not only the knowledge of LLM but also the Russian translation by the author. It’s worth separately discussing how the algorithm works (I invented it myself because everything I found online did not work as I needed). It first finds long sentences and matches the longest sentences with their pair through cosine similarity of embedding vectors created through the multilingual e5 model. These sentences become anchors. Then, assuming that for long sentences the error is almost excluded, the longest sentence between anchors is found, and everything repeats recursively. There are many situations where a sentence in Russian has no equivalent in English and vice versa, where a sentence is split into two, or conversely two are merged into one. The algorithm handles this as best as it can. The result is quite a good quality of alignment. To such an extent, that errors in alignment can hardly be found (but they are likely still there). Either way, it is only needed for the context for translating words, even if there are rare errors, it’s not a big deal.

Would you buy such a book?

The Curious Etymology of the Turkey: Naming Perceptions Across Languages | March 09 2026, 21:36

I wondered why turkey is called turkey here and what it’s called in Turkey. In Turkey, it’s called hindi – turkey! Decided to see what it’s called in India. Haha, in Hindi, it’s called Turkish (टर्की). Let’s see in other languages. Portuguese – Peru. That means, for them, it’s Peruvian. In Spanish – pavo, which refers to peacock 🙂 “pavone” in Italian – peacock. In French – dinde, because this bird came from the West Indies (America). Comes from poule d’Inde – “hen from India/West Indies”. Greek – “Γαλοπούλα” “French bird”.

From Camels to Bishops: The Fascinating Evolution of Chess Pieces | February 14 2026, 16:24

It all started with a question – why does the elephant ♗ have this notch? And in general, where is the elephant, and where is the bishop, and is this notch about the elephant or the bishop? Anyway, listen to what I dug up, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.

Chess originates from India. There, this figure was initially called a camel. And their elephant was what we call a rook – which if you think about it, a rook is basically a boat – or in English, rook, which if you think about it in Persian, it means chariot.

The name “Tura”, which we often hear in colloquial speech, is a pure import from Europe. In French – tour. In Italian – torre. In Latin – turris. All of these mean the same thing: tower. When chess arrived in Europe, knights and monks didn’t really understand what a “battle chariot” was (they were out of fashion by then), but they knew very well what a siege tower was.

So, returning to the elephant and the notch.

The short answer – to distinguish it from a pawn. But there’s a long answer.

When chess came to Europe, the Indian camel was switched to the Catholic bishop, and thus the piece was named bishop. The notch supposedly symbolizes a miter – the high headgear of clergymen. That’s precisely why in English the piece is called bishop. Though to me, it’s just a mouth from the Muppet show.

Interestingly, in French, it’s le fou – the jester. In German, it’s Läufer – runner. In Greek – officer (Αξιωματικός). Why officer? I don’t know, but I dug up that in Chinese chess, xiangqi (象棋), the “elephant” piece is indicated and pronounced as xiàng (象). This character indeed means “elephant.” However, in Chinese history, there was a high state office called xiàng (相), usually translated as “chancellor,” “prime minister,” or “chief minister.” This is a different character, although the pronunciation coincides. Probably, the officer comes from here too.

The chess knight is almost a horse in all languages, only in English and a few others, it’s a knight (although, in German, for example, it’s Springer – jumper, and in Sicily – donkey).

So, in German, there is a jumper and a runner. And a little horse in German is actually a king.

I also learned that there are ready-made solutions for ANY chess endgame in which there are seven or fewer pieces on the board, regardless of the position, the composition of the remaining pieces, or possible moves. This information, known as endgame tables, currently occupies 18.4 terabytes.

from the comments: “The most interesting thing is that this week a multi-year work was completed, and there is now a ready solution for any position with 8 pieces or fewer (7 pieces was already about 12 years ago, but there’s a very big difference)”

In-Flight French: Building a Language App on the Fly | December 01 2025, 15:45

By the way, yesterday morning, while waiting at the gate for my flight to Miami, I quickly wrote a French language learning app using Gemini based on an idea I sketched out to a friend while driving to the airport, and then used this app during the flight.

The idea is that in an unfamiliar foreign language text, the user first marks unknown words and then sees their translations — but without the original text, and then returns to the text itself — but no longer seeing the translations. It’s as if the “dictionary was in the next room.” The hypothesis is that this method helps better memorize than when the translation is shown immediately upon clicking on a word, and when no effort is needed.

I am pleased that creating the app from scratch to the finished version took only about 35-40 minutes, and then I used it for some time during the flight, without the internet. Since all translations of all words/phrases were already made in advance.

I just deployed it on Render. It’s also nice that demonstrating the code in action was free and took another 10 minutes.

https://readandlearn.onrender.com/

Misguided Lessons with Grok: A Bilingual Blunder | August 19 2025, 23:43

Today Grok blew my mind. I say, teach me French. He says, ok, how do you say “book”? I say “le livre”. He says “wrong! la livra”. 😳The car drives itself anyway, decided to record the dialogue. He’s not convinced. At all, insists on his point. La livra and that’s it. I’m afraid Grok will teach the bad stuff in his Language Tutor mode.

I remembered a story from “Memoirs of Pushkin” by M. E. Yuzefovich, dating to 1829:

he had several books with him, including Shakespeare. One day in our tent, he translated some scenes to me and my brother. I had once studied English, but having not fully learned it, I subsequently forgot it. However, I still recognized its sounds. In Pushkin’s reading, the English pronunciation was so distorted that I suspected his knowledge and decided to test it. The next day, I invited his relative, Zakhar Chernyshev, who knew English as his native language, warned him what was going on, and called over Pushkin with Shakespeare. He willingly started translating for us. Chernyshev burst into laughter at the first words read by Pushkin: “First tell me, in which language are you reading?” Pushkin laughed in turn, explaining that he had taught himself English, and therefore he reads English letters like Latin ones. But the fact is that Chernyshev found the translation completely correct and the language understanding impeccable.”

Anna Derevenitskaya