an answer for Blake

As posted here earlier, Terrence Blake wrote as follows:

“Harman vaunts the ‘lucky feature of the English language’ that authorises the invention of the word ‘overmining’ as one side of the conceptual coin whose other side is undermining. He claims that this feature is not available in French. I am a little puzzled by this claim, as undermine can be translated as ‘sous-miner’, which already exists in French, and this immediately suggests the coinage of ‘sur-miner,’ which doesn’t exist – but neither does overmine.”

I am now myself even more than “a little puzzled” by Blake’s remarks, after receiving the following response from my French translator, a graduate of the École normale supérieure who was chosen for the translation of the book due to his outstanding philosophical and literary sensitivity:

“I have never heard nor read the word ‘sous-miner.’ It seems to be an old technical word that is not used in modern French anymore and, as a consequence, is unknown by most of contemporary French readers (as well as by modern dictionaries). Apart from a definition and an example given in the Dictionnaire Littré (I guess it is the source that brought this American guy to ask for explanation), I could not find any evidence of someone using that verb either recently or in the past.”

So, the word is unknown to most contemporary French readers (including my extremely well-educated translator) as well as to modern dictionaries. My translator could find no evidence of anyone using the verb sous-miner either recently or in the past, other than the one technical example in the 19th century Littré.

There seem to be two possibilities here:

(a) Blake has a preternaturally subtle ear for the resonant nuances of archaic French vocabulary, to such an extent that the highly educated native speakers Dubouclez and Meillassoux might have benefitted from some tutoring in their own native language on his watch.

(b) Blake doesn’t know what on earth he’s talking about, and simply went on a hunt-and-peck French internet dictionary tour in a wild effort to score a public point.

My money is already down on one of the options.