Terrence Blake on English/French

Terrence Blake writes:

“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’d never actually heard sous-miner in French, only miner and saper. If possible, this would have been the obvious solution.

All I can say is that Meillassoux and Dubouclez had a long and detailed and painstaking debate about the proper translations of undermine and overmine, and that sous-miner/sur-miner was never even raised as a possibility. Given that these are both very linguistically capable native speakers of French, I would assume that there’s a reason they never considered it, and that Blake’s condescension (“vaunts,” “a little surprised”) is therefore unwarranted. I’ll ask those two about the point and post the answer here when it comes in.