{"id":14427,"date":"2017-08-25T18:42:52","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T17:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=14427"},"modified":"2017-08-25T18:42:52","modified_gmt":"2017-08-25T17:42:52","slug":"les-noms-collectifs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=14427","title":{"rendered":"Les noms collectifs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night at the French conversation group one of the things we talked about was collective nouns or les noms collectifs<\/em>. <\/p>\n

There are plenty of these in English, like a flamboyance<\/strong> of flamingoes, a charm<\/strong> of goldfinches, a kindle<\/strong> of kittens, a cartload<\/strong> of monkeys, and so on.<\/p>\n

We couldn’t think of many in French, so I thought I’d investigate. Here’s what I found:<\/p>\n

– un amas<\/strong> de bois = a heap of wood
\n– un banc<\/strong> de poissons = a shoal of fish
\n– un banc<\/strong> de baleines = a school\/pod of whales
\n– une bande<\/strong> de copains = a group of friends
\n– une bande<\/strong> d’idiots = a bunch of idiots
\n– une brass\u00e9e<\/strong> de roses = an armful of roses
\n– un ensemble<\/strong> de dents = a set of teeth
\n– un essaim<\/strong> d’abeilles = a swarm of bees
\n– un essaim<\/strong> de beaut\u00e9s = a bevy of beauties
\n– une horde<\/strong> de lions = a pride of lions
\n– une horde<\/strong> de barbares = a horde of barbarians
\n– une meute<\/strong> de chiens = a pack of dogs
\n– une troupe\/horde<\/strong> de babouins = a troop of baboons
\n– un troupeau<\/strong> de vaches = a herd of cows
\n– un troupeau<\/strong> de mouton = a flock of sheep
\n– une vol\u00e9e<\/strong> d’oiseaux = a flock of birds<\/p>\n

I’m sure there are more. What about in other languages?<\/p>\n

By the way, are there collective nouns for linguists and polyglots? Maybe babble or Babel.<\/p>\n

Sources: Grammaire AIDENET<\/a>, Reverso<\/a>, Wiktionary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night at the French conversation group one of the things we talked about was collective nouns or les noms collectifs. There are plenty of these in English, like a flamboyance of flamingoes, a charm of goldfinches, a kindle of kittens, a cartload of monkeys, and so on. We couldn’t think of many in French, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,111,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-french","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}