FLUCTUAT NEC MERGITUR Welcome to the Helcave! (Have Frogs. Will Travel) French. Batracian. Geek. Scholar. Nerd. Obsessed. Practically Victorian, minus petticoats. Come hither to be lectured on MCU!Asgard in lengthy fashion and pompous prose! (Also: ranting! fangasms! randomishness!) Warning: severe Anglophilia. Dwell at your own risk.
En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.
Yeah, sure. Standard French has retained three numbers from the Gaulish base twenty system that survived the Middle Ages and an impressive portion of the Modern era, because of popular use, versus the Roman imposition of the base ten system.
So, sixty-ten, four-twenty, and four-twenty-ten in standard French, whereas regional versions, especially in the South, as well as the Swiss do use 'seventy' (septante), 'eighty' (octante) and 'ninety' (nonante).
Everyone does count using a base ten system, though, at the very least since the late 18th century. Only the number names remain in the language. So, no, English does not enjoy un système de numérotation fonctionnel, juste un vocabulaire lissé dans un domaine extrêmement précis, ce qui est fucking rare for English otherwise, you'll have to admit.
Culture-toi, @fidget-sinner et cesse de ricaner bêtement ou je t'attache à une chaise de dentiste pour t'obliger à épeler tous les mots anglais qui finissent par [ˈnɑjt].
If you thought the French language was fucked up because we give a gender to everything, oh boy get ready :
We says “le coronavirus” (M) but “la Covid-19” (F)
IT’S NOT ALL ! The whole French speaking community started by saying le covid and said it for months before the Académie Française (like the CEOs of French Language) decided that since the “d” in “coviD” stood for “disease” which translate to “maladie” in French which is a feminine noun we should now say la covid !
It’s pure chaos. Some people refuse to say “la covid”, the doctors say it correctly, the journalists and politics forced themselves to say it but they often forgot because they said lecovid for months !!!
We don't 'give a gender to everything', French is one of several Romance languages stemmed from Latin, and further from Indo-European idioms, which already possessed grammatical genders. A great many languages around the world have got a lot more than two or three genders, mind you.
And apart from words referring directly to people or animals, the grammatical 'masculine' and 'feminine' genders have nothing to do with body parts, for fucking fuck's sake and the last time—they're only morphological. Neutral plurals that ended in -a in Latin turned into feminine nouns in French or Spanish for instance because they looked a lot like so many feminine nouns looked in Latin following the first declension, like rosa > la rose or tabula > la table. That's all.
The correct appellation of Covid-19 in French is actually maladie à coronavirus. Maladie, 'disease', is, indeed, a feminine word, like all nouns created with suffix -ie (from Latin -ia, feminine, or -ium, neutral) which indicates the state of something, its condition: philosophie, Russie, arythmie.
Many people when speaking of le covid think of the virus itself anyhow, SARS-Cov-2, virus being a masculine word by its virtue of looking like a masculine when proto-French lost its neutral, but most loan words are masculine in French by default (structurally, the masculine and the neutral have fused for the most part), apart from nouns that were explicitly feminine in their original language, or which looked very much like feminine nouns.
Technically the French fucked up the American name/originally their own name for it… at any rate it’s beautiful
(ftr there are other cases of words coming back Wrong to the French language – apparently the English word “to flirt” comes from (now old-fashioned) French “compter fleurette”, but we took it back and now we made the verb “flirter”.)
Those kinds of doublets are so much fun! I also like it when English borrowed one word from medieval French a thousand years ago and then re-borrowed something direct from Latin five hundred years later with a distinct meaning – like priest/Presbyterian, or army/armada.
‘Arkansas’ comes from Algonquian term akansafor the Quapaw Nation and the noun Akansa was first used to refer to the river in a 1573 diary entry by French-American Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. The final s probably got stuck there as a mark of the genitive (Arkansa’s) whilst in all likelihood the r ended up being added to prevent English speakers from pronouncing it ey-kansa… So, little to do with the French in the end, phonetics-wise.
Back when the French first wrote down the nameIllinois, they wouldn’t have pronounced it Eeleenwa like we do today: rather, they tried their best to transcribe an Ojibwe term (maybe in the Ottawa dialect, linguists surmise) derived from verb irenwe·wa, ‘he speaks the regular way’, which was ilinwe. Which could exactly be transcribed in Middle French (from the late 16th century) as Illinoi(s) since the -oi- digram was pronounced \we\ at the time. (The ‘wah’ sound appeared in popular Parisian dialect around the 18th century and definitely found its way in contemporary French after the 1789 revolution, largely for political reasons. Same thing happened with the r sound, which in Classical French was rolled like a whiskyed Glaswegian’s…)
Reaching the Wisconsin River in 1673, Father Jacques Marquette transcribed the local appellation as Meskousing in his journal. Unfortunately, the original name has grown obscure and specialists aren’t certain about it, but they’ve notably suggested an Algonquian term Meskonsing,‘it lies red’, referring to the reddish sandstone of the riverbank. In any case, the initial w appeared because explorer Rene Robert Cavelier misread Father Marquette’s handwriting and subsequently caused the river’s name to be printed as Ouisconsin. Eventually, native English speakers adapted the spelling and by the mid-19t century the modern Wisconsin name was definitely adopted.
As for Michigan… It derives from another Ojibwe-Chippewa word, mishigami (spellings vary, evidently, I’m pretty sure you won’t find it written this way in modern studies; I’ve seen it spelt as meicigama, as well as misshikama…) meaning ‘great water’. I’m only venturing a hypothesis here but I suspect the -gam would have morphed into a -gan because of the French pronunciation, or temptation thereof, as \mi.ʃi.ɡɑ̃n. The thing is, the only French word ending in -am (especially in the 17th century, now we’ve borrowed a few, like imam) at the time would be Adam, which happens to be pronounced \a.dɑ̃\, and even though most French speakers these days will say \mi.ʃi.ɡan\, some graphological confusion may well have occurred in the meantime…
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Dear @sazandorable, flirt doesn’t actually comes from French, although many have been mistaken before. It does resemble Middle French (16th century) verb fleureter, ‘to go from flower to flower’, in speaking of a bee or a butterfly initially, and it’s basically pronounced in the same way, but flirting only came to refer to courtship by the early 19th century, and is unrelated to 17th century French expression conter fleurette, ‘to woo’.
And beware: it’s not compter, ‘to count’, but ‘to tell’, conter, as in telling a tale (conte), raconter. A fleurette is a small flower, but the term in the Renaissance was used to speak of a love letter. ‘Telling flowerlets’ meant to be telling small nothings in a gallant context, then.
A far cry, actually, from the initial sense of flirt in Early Modern English, ‘flick’, ‘darting motion’, ‘sudden jerk’, presumably of onomatopoeic origin. To flirt a fan in the 1660s was to snap it open or closed with a brisk jerk and as a vital part a coquette’s arsenal, it might have contributed to a sense shift; but in any case, it seems that around the middle of the 16th century several words merged into one: flirt (’to flick’), flurt (’to mock’) and flirt/flurt, a giddy, flighty girl. The meaning of ‘person who plays at courtship’ appears to be from the 1730s.
No, if you want an actual French term that was borrowed from English after English nicked it in the first place, look no further than a challenge! From Old French word chalonge, ‘to defy’ (pronunciation: pretty close to the English), which stemmed from Latin calumnia, ‘calumny’, derived from verb calvor/calvi, ‘to deceive’, ‘to intrigue against’—one of the ensuing meanings of calumnia was ‘accusation’, hence the medieval senses of chalonge, ‘challenge to a duel’, ‘reclamation’, ‘litigation’, ‘calumny’. Chalonge completely disappeared from modern French, replaced with a number of legalese terms and other more specialised words in everyday language, until it returned from English in the second half of the 19th century, in a sportive context, as challenge, pronounced just like in English, which has most people assume it’s a very cool English word, when in reality, cocorico, motherlikers.
2) Okay, I won’t lie, I’m heartbroken to learn to flirt does not actually come from conter fleurette ;w; although I’m not sure why you say the respective original meanings are so distant — a bee fleuretant would indeed be darting around in jerky motions?
(2.5) woopsies for the “compter”/“conter” mistake, even though I think I have already been corrected on that… it really is not commonly used huh)
3) HOLY SHIT re: challenge, that’s hilarious. (And I assumed it reappearing in French daily use was a much more recent development!)
You’re most welcome, and please know that I’m all here for the hugs needed because of linguistical revelations, I reckon we’ve all had our sour moment with flirt in our lives and it is utterly crushing.
Speaking of which, I was pointing out the fact that the origins of fleureter and flirt are remote, so that even then comparisons are easily made and indeed particularly tempting, the sad fact remains that it’s all coinkydincial.
Now, as a manner of consolation, we can try to list the words which, just like challenge, have made their prodigal return to the mothertongue after a exile in Albion:
bacon (Anglo-Norman bacun ‘ham, flitch, strip of lard’, via Frankish, from Proto-Germanic °bakkô, ‘back’)
bar (Old French barre , ‘beam’, ‘barrier’, from Gaulish °barros)
budget (Old French bougette, the diminutive of bouge, ‘leather bag, wallet’, from Gaulish °bulga via Late Latin. The etymology denotes something inflated)
caddie (’supermarket cart’, borrowed from golfing lexicon, from French cadet, student officer)
car (Norman car, ‘cart’)
cash (Middle French caisse, a box containing money, from Old French casse, from Latin capsa, ‘box’)
charter (‘charter flight’, from Old French chartre, from Latin chartula, diminutive form of charta/carta, from Ancient Greek χάρτης (khártēs), ‘papyrus, paper’)
coach (‘instructor, trainer’, Middle French coche, from German Kutsche, from Hungarian kocsi... According to historians, the coach was named after the small Hungarian town of Kocs, which made a livelihood from cart building and transport between Vienna and Budapest. As for he meaning ‘instructor/trainer’, it’s from Oxford University slang (c.1830) for a tutor who ‘carries’ one through an exam; the athletic sense is from 1861.)
denim (in English a phonetic transcription of de Nîmes, since the cotton fabric was originally made there)
express (Old French expres, from Latin adjective expressus stemming from verb exprimo, ‘to squeeze out’, which ultimately led to a savant usage of the adjective to mean ‘clearly said’... It’s a long story.)
fuel (Old French foaille, ‘firewood’, via Middle English fewell, etymology is French feu, from Latin focus, ‘fire’, ‘hearth’; the etymology is a bit obscure but a IE root meaning ‘to shine’ has often been proposed)
gentleman (Middle English gentil, ‘courteous, noble’ was borrowed from Old French gentil, ‘high-born’, from from Latin gentilis, ‘of the same family’, from gens, ‘clan, household’. ‘Gentleman’ is copied and adapted from gentilhomme, ‘man of noble birth’)
hall (Old French hale, from Frankish halla ‘crowd, gathering’, ‘place of assembly’, ultimately from an Indo-European root in °ḱel- meaning ‘to conceal, to hide’, which parallelly evolved into Latin cella, ‘room, cell’.)
hobby (Old French hobin, a small trotter horse for the ladies trained to amble, hence his nickname, stemming from verb hober, ‘to hobble’—the latter English verb sharing a Germanic root meaning ‘to hop’)
humour (Old French (h)umor, ‘moisture’, from Latin (h)umere, ‘to be moist’. Initially a medical term, pertaining to the humoralist tradition, hence a later sense of humeur in French as a ‘natural disposition towards irritation’ (reinforced in expression mauvaise humeur, ‘bad mood’), whereas a parallel evolution of humour in English retained a ‘natural disposition towards gaiety’. By the 18th century, humour had come to refer in English to an ability to present reality under its most pleasant aspects, and sometimes its most absurd, always with a certain detachment. In French, on the other hand, humour, which coexisted with humeur, had a meaning close enough to ‘wit’. After the Revolution, a number of surviving French aristocrats emigrated to England, where they got acquainted with the English definition of humour: those who returned to France after the monarchic Restoration imported the concept, never quite losing the idea that this humour was something of a British speciality, often referred to in fact as humour anglais)
interview (entrevue, literally)
magazine (Middle French magasin, ‘warehouse, store’, from Italian magazzino ‘storehouse’, stemming from Arabic مَخَازِن (maḵāzin), plural of مَخْزَن (maḵzan), ‘storeroom, storehouse’, from خَزَنَ (ḵazana), ‘to store, to stock, to lay up’)
marketing (Old French marchié/marchiet, ‘deal’, ‘market’, from Latin mercatus ‘trade’, ‘market’, from verb mercor ‘I trade, deal in, buy’, itself derived from merx, ‘wares, merchandise’—this rare form hailing from an Italic root °merk-, of presumable Etruscan origin, referring to various aspects of economics)
mess (military term, a dining room for officers; Old French mes, ‘dish’, from Late Latin missum, from verb mitto, ‘to put [on the table]’)
pedigree (Anglicisation, via Norman pé de grue, of pied de grue, ‘crane feet’, alluding to the shape of the signs indicating filiation in family trees)
penalty (Anglicisation of pénalité)
poney (Old French poulenet, diminutive of poulain, ‘foal’, which came from Late Latin pullamen, from pullus, ‘young of an animal’, with the same etymology as puer, ‘young child’, and Ancient Greek παῖς (pais), ‘young child, boy’)
socquette (francisation of socket, which stemmed, via Anglo-Norman soket, from Old French sochet, diminutive of soc, ‘plowshare’, from Late Latin soccus, of probable Gaulish origin)
spleen (‘melancholy’, a meaning coined in the 19th century; Old French esplen, from Latin splen, ‘milt’, from Ancient Greek σπλήν (splen), the spleen)
stress (both from Old French destresse, ‘distress’, and estresse, ‘narrowness’, ‘narrowing down’, ‘rigour’, discomfort’, ‘poverty’, from Latin stringere, ‘to tighten, constrict’)
suspense (Old French suspense, ‘uncertainty, perplexity’)
tennis (Middle French tenez !, imperative form of tenir, second person of the plural, something that the jeu de paume players would cry before throwing the ball)
test (Old French test, a clay pot used by alchemists to test gold...)
ticket (Anglicisation of étiquette, which first appeared as estiquette with the sense of sense of a ‘small pole used as a goal in certain games’, then ‘small panel where is inscribed the contents of an object’; derived from Old French verb estechier/estiquier, ‘to stick, to attach’, of Frankish etymology)
toast (Old French toster ‘to grill’, from Latin tostus, ‘grilled, burnt’, from Indo-European root °ters, ‘dry’, ‘thirst’)
tunnel (Middle French tonnelle, ‘net’ or tonel ‘cask’, diminutive of Old French tonne ‘cask’,from Late Latin °tunna, ‘recipient’, from Gaulish °tonna, ‘skin’—evidently a wine skin, and the meaning slipped to include other types of containers)
Technically the French fucked up the American name/originally their own name for it… at any rate it’s beautiful
(ftr there are other cases of words coming back Wrong to the French language – apparently the English word “to flirt” comes from (now old-fashioned) French “compter fleurette”, but we took it back and now we made the verb “flirter”.)
Those kinds of doublets are so much fun! I also like it when English borrowed one word from medieval French a thousand years ago and then re-borrowed something direct from Latin five hundred years later with a distinct meaning – like priest/Presbyterian, or army/armada.
‘Arkansas’ comes from Algonquian term akansafor the Quapaw Nation and the noun Akansa was first used to refer to the river in a 1573 diary entry by French-American Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. The final s probably got stuck there as a mark of the genitive (Arkansa’s) whilst in all likelihood the r ended up being added to prevent English speakers from pronouncing it ey-kansa... So, little to do with the French in the end, phonetics-wise.
Back when the French first wrote down the nameIllinois, they wouldn’t have pronounced it Eeleenwa like we do today: rather, they tried their best to transcribe an Ojibwe term (maybe in the Ottawa dialect, linguists surmise) derived from verb irenwe·wa, ‘he speaks the regular way’, which was ilinwe. Which could exactly be transcribed in Middle French (from the late 16th century) as Illinoi(s) since the -oi- digram was pronounced \we\ at the time. (The ‘wah’ sound appeared in popular Parisian dialect around the 18th century and definitely found its way in contemporary French after the 1789 revolution, largely for political reasons. Same thing happened with the r sound, which in Classical French was rolled like a whiskyed Glaswegian’s...)
Reaching the Wisconsin River in 1673, Father Jacques Marquette transcribed the local appellation as Meskousing in his journal. Unfortunately, the original name has grown obscure and specialists aren’t certain about it, but they’ve notably suggested an Algonquian term Meskonsing,‘it lies red’, referring to the reddish sandstone of the riverbank. In any case, the initial w appeared because explorer Rene Robert Cavelier misread Father Marquette’s handwriting and subsequently caused the river’s name to be printed as Ouisconsin. Eventually, native English speakers adapted the spelling and by the mid-19t century the modern Wisconsin name was definitely adopted.
As for Michigan... It derives from another Ojibwe-Chippewa word, mishigami (spellings vary, evidently, I’m pretty sure you won’t find it written this way in modern studies; I’ve seen it spelt as meicigama, as well as misshikama...) meaning ‘great water’. I’m only venturing a hypothesis here but I suspect the -gam would have morphed into a -gan because of the French pronunciation, or temptation thereof, as \mi.ʃi.ɡɑ̃n\. The thing is, the only French word ending in -am (especially in the 17th century, now we’ve borrowed a few, like imam) at the time would be Adam, which happens to be pronounced \a.dɑ̃\, and even though most French speakers these days will say \mi.ʃi.ɡan\, some graphological confusion may well have occurred in the meantime...
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Dear @sazandorable, flirt doesn’t actually comes from French, although many have been mistaken before. It does resemble Middle French (16th century) verb fleureter, ‘to go from flower to flower’, in speaking of a bee or a butterfly initially, and it’s basically pronounced in the same way, but flirting only came to refer to courtship by the early 19th century, and is unrelated to 17th century French expression conter fleurette, ‘to woo’.
And beware: it’s not compter, ‘to count’, but ‘to tell’, conter, as in telling a tale (conte), raconter. A fleurette is a small flower, but the term in the Renaissance was used to speak of a love letter. ‘Telling flowerlets’ meant to be telling small nothings in a gallant context, then.
A far cry, actually, from the initial sense of flirt in Early Modern English, ‘flick’, ‘darting motion’, ‘sudden jerk’, presumably of onomatopoeic origin. To flirt a fan in the 1660s was to snap it open or closed with a brisk jerk and as a vital part a coquette’s arsenal, it might have contributed to a sense shift; but in any case, it seems that around the middle of the 16th century several words merged into one: flirt (’to flick’), flurt (’to mock’) and flirt/flurt, a giddy, flighty girl. The meaning of ‘person who plays at courtship’ appears to be from the 1730s.
No, if you want an actual French term that was borrowed from English after English nicked it in the first place, look no further than a challenge! From Old French word chalonge, ‘to defy’ (pronunciation: pretty close to the English), which stemmed from Latin calumnia, ‘calumny’, derived from verb calvor/calvi, ‘to deceive’, ‘to intrigue against’—one of the ensuing meanings of calumnia was ‘accusation’, hence the medieval senses of chalonge, ‘challenge to a duel’, ‘reclamation’, ‘litigation’, ‘calumny’. Chalonge completely disappeared from modern French, replaced with a number of legalese terms and other more specialised words in everyday language, until it returned from English in the second half of the 19th century, in a sportive context, as challenge, pronounced just like in English, which has most people assume it’s a very cool English word, when in reality, cocorico, motherlikers.
Roughly speaking, it's pronounced 'kuh' and it means 'tail'.
The typical qu graphem (normally pronounced as /k/ but some French speakers will actually say it as /kw/ in certain words) comes from Latin, where it was written as qv and pronounced /kw/ (whereas the /k/ sound alone was written with c, like in Cicero).
In the Middle Ages, more often than not, monks copying manuscripts wrote qu into words that didn't use it in Latin (unlike, say, quoi, stemming from quid). It's exactly what happened with queue, evolved from Classical Latin cauda via popular Latin coda, then Old French coe/cue. The reason why the intervocalic d was dropped (coda>coa>coe) is entirely due to pronunciation, because the stress bore heavily on the first syllable (ko.da), so that eventually the consonant wasn't heard, and therefore not written, anymore. (In Old French, by the way, the final e would be pronounced, and coe would sound a lot like 'ko-uh'.)
In passing, the 'uh' sound of graphem eu is a consequence of a reduction of a mediaeval diphthong. Queue first appeared as such in a manuscript around 1220. It would have sounded a bit like 'kuh-wuh', if you will.
P.S.: coward stems was borrowed from French couard, which has an identical meaning; the etymology is another variant of coe, coue. The coward is the man who lowers his tail, like a fearful dog...
How to make a french representative react for sure : bring on the pain au chocolat/chocolatine discourse™.
Hello, it’s me, coming with another lame french joke. ‘Cause I can’t spend a damn week on tumglr without hearing about this discourse. (And it’s pretty sure still going on in Ow’s timeline.)
Technically, the Académie also is a 'descriptivist' organisation, as its Dictionnaire registers a state of the language which is contemporary; only, what they register is French as a whole, not regionalisms, not sociolects, and they wait until they can be certain that a word has entered the common idiom to stay, rather than vanish after two years of use.
Most especially, the Académie is a warden of the cohesion of French syntax and morphology, meaning that its unique role in normalising the tongue means that there can be a common language spoken by everyone who learns it, without distinctions of class or geography.
As for the ouiaboux... However hilarious and clever it may be, isn't the weeb(oo) supposed to be a non-Japanese obsessed with Japanese culture? I fear we've got to go for homophony rather than sense, here. But more importantly: @tubaterry, @b0ytemper, oi, it shouldn't be ouiaboux in the first place, but ouiabous.
There are only seven (7) words in French ending in -oux in the plural instead of -ous, and this is a remnant of an older singular in -ou(i)l, which by the way is still visible in the associated verbs, like verrouil (lock) > verrouiller (to lock) > verrou, -oux (since 1762). The x in mediaeval scriptures was a common abbreviation for plurals in -us.
The mnemonic phrase: « Ne fais pas joujou avec mes bijoux, mon chou, mais viens sur mes genoux, et jette des cailloux à ce hibou plein de poux. »
French prompt! How does one look at être and arrive at fut? (I know "verbs of being" are notoriously unruly, but this was a mystery for me, even though my own language cobbles the tenses from two separate verbs, neither of which have all tenses.) Broader prompt: what used to be the point of passé simple and how did it become "the storybook tense"?
One of my mother’s favourite puns is the following: On ne peut pas naître et avoir été (’One cannot be born and have been’), a play on an old saying, On ne peut pas être et avoir été (’One cannot be and have been’) meaning that one simply cannot live at once in the past and in the present. Grammatically speaking, this isn’t entirely true, though: the French passé composé, like its equivalent the English present perfect, is trying very hard. When you think of it, ‘I have been doing this for the last five minutes’ is telling exactly that: one is performing a continuous action that began some time in the past and is still going at the moment. Every single French pupil learning English was subjected to the example of the vase thatone has broken, and is consequently still broken at present. French has one time like this, known as the ‘compound past’, which technically works in the exact same way, except it has come to be used everywhere, replacing even the French equivalent to the preterite, or past simple, to the point that no one uses the French preterite anymore aside from the only people who may get away with reading as highly literary, which isn’t a lot of people nowadays. Children’s books rarely do contain verbs conjugated in the past simple anymore; in (junior) high school, students are only taught the third person of the singular and of the plural for ‘important’ verbs, and a number of people have been pushing for the complete eradication of a tense which they deemed ‘elitist’ for being more complicated than the compound past, which only requires one to know the present-simple forms of auxiliary verb avoir, ‘to have’, plus the past participle of the verb concerned by the action.
Of course, French students used to have no particular difficulty in learning conjugations, no matter how detailed; only, for a few decades now people deeming themselves progressists have imposed new teaching methods based on a supposedly ‘intuitive’ approach to knowledge as well as a downright utilitarian idea of the language itself—what isn’t useful in everyday life will never be of use, and can therefore be dropped altogether. French isn’t taught systemically in French school anymore, grammar rules are generally glossed over and since learning by heart is strongly frowned upon conjugations are more than imperfectly mastered, not to say anything about the basic principles of syntax. Today, it is estimated (by international tests also) that about one third of students enter junior high school (at age 11) without knowing how to read, or write, their own language. Parents usually riot if teachers seek to correct children’s spelling or enunciation, and after each national exam now students take to Twitter to complain about the difficulty of the exceedingly simple tests. In this context, it is very hard to know whether or not the passé simple is meant to fall out of usage definitely—but I suspect it won’t before long, as a matter of fact, as it already serves, along with other grammatical notions, to separate those who do master their own idiom from those who don’t.
In any case, concerning the structure of the simple past and its meaning, I’m reminded of a remark that famous French linguist Émile Benveniste made about the simple past: like narration, in which it is almost exclusively employed, the simple past is non-deictic, whereas discourse as well as the tenses used in it are deictic, meaning they are anchored in the ‘situation of enunciation’, the frame of the dialogue. Being outside the deixis, the simple past operates somewhat remotely from the event which it describes, inducing an impression of temporal and/or spatial distance with it. Quite frankly, it’s hard not to make a parallel here with the postmodern obsession with immediacy and its deep-rooted hatred of the long term...
Speaking of long-term things!
How does one look at être and arrive at fut? Well, that is a splendid question, reaching far into the history of the French language, and in truth all Indo-European languages since they all have the quirky habit of mashing up the conjugations for several verbs expressing slightly different aspects of an action and deciding that they are to be only one verb now—usually, an auxiliary, and the results are just wild. But let’s get a closer look at the conjugation we’re dealing with, here:
You’ll note that I didn’t include (amongst other things) the four tenses of the subjunctive mode, to avoid being too long as I only aim to draw a few explanatory comparisons with Latin, but just in case, I’ll remind you that the present goes que je sois (sois, soit, soyons, soyez, soient) while subjunctive imperfect goes que je fusse (fusses, fût, fussions, fussiez, fussent). And now, hoping you didn’t run away screaming and flailing, I propose a little comparison with the equivalent Latin tenses:
Please fawn over my pedagogical abilities. Once that is over, please note how the conjugation of être was mostly constituted in Old French (from the 9th century onwards), bar a few interesting exceptions, such as the concurrent forms in the future: the older stem, er- or ier-, directly evolved from Latin. Linguists theorised that the stem that ended up in modern French, in ser-, is actually a syntagmatic construction taken from the Latin infinitive (es)sere to which were added special endings borrowed from the conjugation of auxiliary avoir, to have. Romance languages all form their future synthetically. For instance, ‘we will love’, nous aimerons, is literally nous aimer-(av)ons. (Compare to Spanish cantaré, ‘I will sing’, which is cantar + hé.) Where être is concerned, the ser- stem replaced the original infinitive after too many speakers dropped the beginning of infinitive essere, especially in the first person, and a full tense ended up being constituted from that model (hence the ‘syntagmatic construction’ I was mentioning earlier: it didn’t evolve so much as it was reshaped to accommodate usage).
If you know a bit of Latin, you might have frowned upon the infinitive essere, since the classical verb is esse. Esse was a pretty archaic form to begin with, although it was actually conjugated regularly; the -s had mutated to an -r between two vowels in most other verbs pretty early in the evolution of the language, and that is where the French infinitives (-er, -ir, -re) come from. But esse remained unchanged, probably because of its particular role as an auxiliary. On the other hand, in Vulgar Latin, which was Latin as it was spoken by regular people, the strange infinitive got hypercorrected, ‘regularised’, into essere, after getting mistaken for a stem. And since Romance languages are mostly stemming from popular, late-era Latin, rather than the literary language... In Italian, the infinitive is still essere. In Spanish, it evolved into ser. In Occitan, into èser. The t of estre is, as you can see, a French particularity; it’s purely epenthetic, meaning it was only added to ease the pronunciation of the word, in this case after one of the vowels dropped: esre > estre.
The participles of être, however, both in the present (étant) and the past (été, ayant été) don’t come from any version of esse, any more than the imperfect tense, since its Latin equivalent was eram. They come, instead, from an entirely different verb: stare, which evolved into Vulgar Latin estare, which in turn became Old French ester, and which meant ‘to stand, to stay’. Well, it’s actually the origin of verb ‘stay’ in English, which was borrowed from the Old French. In modern French, you’ll find its descendant as rester, ‘to stay, to remain’.
And this is where we come to our strange Latin stem in fui-, and its French equivalence in the simple past. Now where does that come from?! Well, my dear Tatty, it is the last remnant on an archaic verb issued from an Indo-European root °bheu- meaning ‘to grow’, ‘to become’. It’s why the auxiliary in English is ‘to be’, actually! (Proto-Germanic °beuną > Old English bēon > Middle English been). In most languages this Indo-European root gave words beginning in b-. The exceptions are Sanskrit (bh-, with a strong aspiration), Hellenic languages (Ancient Greek φύω, phúô) and Italic languages, whereit ended up being pronounced as an f, hence fui. In passing, the original meaning of the Indo-European root, ‘to grow’, has been preserved only in Greek φύσις, phúsis, ‘nature’—hence ‘physics’. Morphologically, though, the root is present everywhere in Indo-European languages, starting with the word ‘future’ itself.
A major difference between Latin (and Greek) and Germanic languages, however, is that fu- in Latin possessed in its meaning the idea of veering towards the completion of an action, but that was expressed differently in the future (participle) and in past-tense narration; eventually, the future aspect was dropped from the language altogether, and all that remained was the stem’s perfective value (the idea of accomplishment, of a done and over thing), which serves to explain how the fu- root came to be specialised in Romance languages as a form destined for the simple past/preterite/perfect tense. (In Germanic languages, the past is defined by the idea of staying in one place, whereas the enunciation is characterised by a general idea of ‘aiming towards’.)
In guise of a conclusion, I heartily recommend the Wikipedia article onthe Indo-European copula, which is long and bountiful and makes a few salient points on the topic of this fixture in all Indo-European languages that is a weird, weird little verb corresponding to the English to be, and it tells a lot on the way languages get shaped.
I am haunted low by the sentiment of failure. I keep thinking about it. My Nonny never said which Ask about French language I was supposed to answer. I have none at hand in my Askbox. Why? How? Who?
Ooh, I can make you up an ask? Okay . . . *coughs* . . . here it goes: "Parlez-vous Francais?"
HA
And you thought I’d get stuck on that? re-HA!
So, yes, it’ll be français, with a small f and with a cédille, otherwise you’d have to pronounce it like ‘frankeh’. You need the cedilla to make a c sound like an s before the letters a (façade), o (leçon) and u (un reçu = a receipt). The other vowels bring only [s] sound. The reason why there’s a ç instead of an s is only etymological. In the case of words where there’s a cedilla before a u, like déçu (disappointed) for instance, the infinitive form is décevoir, so the various forms of the verb use the cedilla to retain the letter as well as the sound of the stem.
The tail, or hook, as the cedilla is commonly named in English, originated in Old Spanish as the bottom half of a miniature cursive z. The word cedilla literally means ‘little zeta’ (ceda in Old Spanish). It stems from a Visigothic letter which was meant to be pronounced as [ts] (a voiceless alveolar affricate, for the phonetics freaks out there). Nowadays you find it in Portuguese, in Galician, in Catalan, in French of course, in Occitan, and in Friulian as a ‘soft c’.
And as for the rest... It’ll be français because languages don’t take a capital, nor do adjectives, even if they pertain to a nationality: a Frenchman will be un Français,I’ll introduce myself saying je suis Française, but one will have to write un touriste américain, as well as la langue anglaise, l’espagnol and so on.
Finally: parles-tu français ? rather than parlez-vous, maybe—the vous, the second person in the plural is the equivalent of ‘you’ when there used to be a thou. Online, a relative familiarity is permitted, at the very least on social networks.
I might as well remark, in addition to all of this, that parles-tu/parlez-vous is getting arguably archaic these days, at the very least in the spoken language, and people will often favour est-ce que tu/vous parles/parlez, which is clunky but grammatically correct, or the excessively familiar tu parles français ? Not phrased like a question, but it’s all in the tone... Same goes for English, as a matter of fact. Apparently people are just not educated anymore.
Gésir does have full conjugations, only they're not used in Contemporary French anymore, where this rare, archaic verb only survives in expressions fixed by usage, such as ci-gît..., 'there rests...' found on tombstones.
Middle French (late 15th to early 17th centuries) used the simple future forms as well as the subjunctive; mediaeval French used more, like the simple past. Personally, nous geûmes makes me weak in the knees.
Weird question maybe, but do you recommend any online French dictionaries? Not like French to English translation, but where the definitions themselves are in French?
Weird? Dictionaries??! Stay me with flagons!!!!
Ahem. I actually have a dictionary collection, my dear Nonny, so you sure knocked on the right door today.
Let me start by pointing out that France has this particularity, vis-à-vis language: the existence of a State organism reserved to the study of French, and the constitution of what is basically the ultimate dictionary---gigantic, meticulously documented, it takes many years to complete and that is part of its appeal, as its aim is to provide a review of the most stable version of the written language: the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. The Academy was created under Louis XIV and has a complex, interesting history, but in spite of all the bad jokes about its aged members and the politics around their election, the institution's work on the French language is impeccable, not only where lexicography itself is concerned, but on grammar as well. Crucially, the Academy depends on funds allocated to scientific research in general, so by rule it is apolitical: its recommendations, unlike the Ministry of Education's, do not depend on whomever sits on the throne that day. On the other hand, what it states is right becomes official in French institutions' writs.
My all-time favourite dictionary, however, remains the 'historical Robert'---an etymological dictionary, where all 50,000 entries comprise the history of each word. Overall, the dictionaries published by editor Dictionnaires Le Robert are great; the main one is Le Grand Robert (100,000 words; 350,000 meanings; 25,000 expressions) but a somewhat less intimidating recommendation would be, of course, Le Petit Robert (60,000 words; 300,000 meanings, expressions, conjugations, phonetics, etymology, synonyms...). Honestly, it's the best. The Robert is a modern dictionary, too: it aims to be inclusive of regional variants and slang, even verlan. The first edition was published in 1967, already under the supervision of lexicographer Alain Rey (and his late wife Josette Debove, who was the very first female lexicographer in France) who is a bundle of joy rolled in delicious cinnamon and a lot of leftism. Special recommendation: the Robert Junior, for kids, it is downright adorable.
Now, most people would recommend the quite respectable Larousse, which also comes in different sizes, not to mention a large array of specialised dictionaries. I like them less, but it is mostly because they were insufficient for my usage in university, and even today. For normal human beings, I reckon the Petit Larousse is more than alright, indeed. However, know that in Québec the smaller Robert is known as 'Mini-Bob'.
the big mans a lad i have fuck all, he lets me have a kip in a field he showed me a pond
beautifultoastdream-deactivated
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just “Wait, what?” You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
Well, it would be Norman grammar and not French, to be perfectly pedantic and imperfectly accurate.
Although, in case it be any consolation to the modern English speaker, you could also spot in French* the moment when a drunk Frank warrior came crashing into a Gallo-Roman brothel with a mighty need for headache drugs that hadn't been invented yet.
It is an import from Manouche, Gitan & Yéniche dialects, who are historic Travelling populations in French territory, although the expression in French is quite new; its usage appears to be exclusive to popular neighbourhoods.
It is *intensely* vulgar because 'go eat your dead' is probably the most offensive thing Manouche people could say to one another: it ties into old curses concerning the cult of the ancestors and is practically taboo.
I find Tumblr quite hypocritical to toy with such ideas to make them the butt of very bad jokes, to be frank.
In French we don’t say you “to stand someone up” we say “poser un lapin (à quelqu’un)” which literally means “to pose a rabbit (to someone)”, which makes no sense but sounds cool.
Poser un lapin(“to leave a rabbit”—not showing up at a rendez-vous)
The expression originates in a comparison between the tiny cages in which rabbits are traditionally kept (rabbit hutches) and hackney cabs in the late 1700s. “Rabbit” by 1783 colloquially referred to a voyager boarding a full public transport carriage in excess.
During the 19th century, “boarding as a rabbit” was said of a voyager getting on a cab without the driver noting down his transport on the registry, and pocketing the journey’s fee of six pennies... (1876)
This expression is now completely outdated, but it is the source of an old locution: faire cadeau d’un lapin à une fille, literally “to give a girl a rabbit as a present” (fille here referring to a prostitute, in the 19th century “public girl” was a common expression), meaning that a client wouldn’t pay the prostitute for her services (1878). This expression became poser un lapin (first attested in 1811), a variant that spread into popular usage and came to mean, finally, “not showing up at a date or rendez-vous” (1888).
