Talk:French grammar

message: I was looking through the Spanish grammar article, and the authors have split the sections into separate articles:
# Verbs
# Nouns
# Adjectives
# Determiners
# Pronouns
# Prepositions
I think this is a very good idea, as it would cut down the enormous length of the article while allowing more information to be added to each, like specific external links (the Conjugator etc), example sentences, etc.
For example, in the Verb section: in addition to tenses and conjugations, one could go into specifics of savoir v. connaître, fully conjugate the irregular but often-used être, faire, and avoir (or possibly have a separate article for all non-standard verbs, like é->è (acheter), c->ç (commencer), etc).
Deus ex machina 02:17, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think splitting the article into sub-articles is a good idea, though I think the main article should give a bit more information than does Spanish grammar. (Also, I don't think the bulk of the main article should be a self-contradicting discussion of a minor point of English grammar, of all things, but yeah.) Ruakh 18:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

text: I've started the process: I've moved the info from the "Verbs" section to French verbs. BTW, I'm not so sure that full conjugation tables are exactly encyclopedic; they seem better suited either to Wiktionary or to Wikibooks. Ruakh 18:50, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't say Spanish grammar was perfect (but of course I'm biased), just that the information was more organized. I think that partial conjugation tables is encyclopedic, but not necessarily full ones. The article could give the stems and endings instead of writing out each conjugation. I'll work on separating and fleshing out ASAP. Deus ex machina 02:08, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Article split

message: (I apologize for forgetting the spaces between the opening guillemet + the first word and last word + the closing guillemet in an earlier edit.)
I believe that it is imperative that this article use French-style guillemets (quotes) when enclosing French example sentences.
Usage:
 « La phrase. »
Deus ex machina 22:20, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think it's imperative, but that is a good idea. I've noticed that you've already changed the current text to use that style; I'll make sure that my edits use that style, too. Ruakh 00:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: French-style guillemets

message: The rules in French on choice of auxiliary, agreement when using "to be" but not when using "to have", and several others are IDENTICAL in Italian. Almost spookily so. I'm wondering if this is worth a note in either language, but I want to ask the community before proceeding.
Even if it's not worth inserting a note, it could save us some work.  The Italian Grammar article is less developed than, and could easily steal many paragraphs from, the French, with the examples changed appropriately.  I'll be happy to do it.
Qu'est-ce que vous pensez? Steverapaport 12:01, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: French and Italian both took the basis for their rules from Vulgar Latin, and then French adopted some further details from Italian during the High Middle Ages, thereby increasing the similarity. I don't know whether that's worth a note, as it's not really relevant to explaining the modern grammar of either language, but definitely feel free to steal paragraphs for the Italian Grammar article, provided they apply. Ruakh 03:04, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Italian

message: Please explain the exact meaning of "s'est rompu" and tell which of the following it's nearest to, ranking the others by nearness: "broke" (what part of speech??), "is broken", "got broken", "became broken", "is being broken", "was broken", "has been broken", "broke itself", "is breaking itself", "has broken itself", "is getting broken". lysdexia 01:47, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Could you say it's an implicit middle voice?  I asked mainly because the se is on the est, rather than the rompu, which you didn't explain.  It's not ludicrous...  Anything can be quantified.  Look at the work I've done at elision. :) lysdexia 20:30, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry Theloniouszen, but your newspaper headline example is invalid. s'écraser is the correct and only translation for to crash. The verb s'écraser has a meaning completely distinct from écraser (to crush, pressure on, etc.). It has nothing to do with the plane not being shot. "L'avion est touché par un missile est s'écrase." (The plane is hit by a missile and crashes) is semantically perfectly correct. S'est rompu is the "passé composé" of the se rompre; the particle "se" (roughly equivalent to "oneself" or "itself") becomes "s'" for reasons of pronunciation when placed before a vowel. Thus, the only reason we have "s'armer" (to arm, equip oneself) instead of "se armer" is to avoid a hiatus. To take the example at hand, "le bâton se rompt" (roughly the stick becomes broken) and "le bâton s'est rompu" (the stick became broken) are both instances of the verb "se rompre". Reflexives are very tricky in French... Phils 15:25, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Did you mistake et for est? lysdexia 12:00, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In the example above ("La verre s'est rompu"), shouldn't the past participle agree with the subject ("La verre s'est rompue") ? 161.24.19.82 12:35, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it should. —RuakhTALK 15:19, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it should... if "verre" was feminine but actually is masculine so in this case it will remain "le verre s'est cassé". So better example would be "la bouteille s'est brisée".--Overkilled (talk) 08:52, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

text: Calm down. Nobody here is responsible for you having to deal with incompetent teachers. By the way, I am a native French speaker with 7 years education in francophone schools (although no longer now). If anything, my English is lacking. Phils 18:41, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a common trait of translators anywhere to give up before finding perfect translations; and there are perfect translations for anything.  People still think that "ce" means "this" or "that".  lysdexia 19:12, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The notion of "perfect translation" is absurd. You completely ignore context. How would you translate "Ma mère habite Fort-Bellau, ce château sur la colline" without using "this" or "that"? Phils 16:34, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: (I've been on lots of other sites, which is why it takes so long for my replies.)  Phils, why do you ask me such an absurd question when I already answered it at the link I'd given in my last reply?  And how do I ignore context? lysdexia 01:26, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: (1) Note that être is only used with a few intransitive verbs. The vast majority of intransitive verbs, like all transitive verbs, use avoir. (2) The passé composé can have a wide range of different English translations depending on context, because the distinctions that French makes are not quite the same as the distinctions that English makes. "Je l'ai déjà fait" is "I've already done it" (present perfect), but "Je l'ai fait hier" ("Je le fis hier") is "I did it yesterday" (past), and due to the French use of historical present where English would use the historical past, "Il l'a fait" can sometimes be "He had done it." (3) "La fenêtre s'est rompue" ("La fenêtre se rompit") is not (semantically) in a middle voice, as the emphasis is on the window, not the breaking. It translates to English "The window broke" or possibly "The window was broken," though the latter is ambiguous as it could also mean "La fenêtre était rompue." Ruakh 03:23, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I liked your reply the best; it was very deep.  (2) Well, sometimes English does that too: http://www.bartleby.com/61/90/H0219000.html. (3) In those English equivalents I see no emfasis on either the noun or predicate, so I can't see how leaving the "se" in would not make it a middle voice. lysdexia 01:26, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: a little help

message: (Zen, space your paragrafs.)  All of this chatting is nice, but I wanted my questions answered within the scope of the questions.  The lack of grammatical rigor in language lessons worries and bothers me.  When I looked for why être was used, I found a bunch of être verbs with the same quality of explanation as above.  Whenever a language explanation is given, only at the end if at all is the reason given: In this case, it was for intransitive verbs!  That I could fully understand, and in so much fewer words!  See, it isn't tricky if you know what you're talking about—nothing is.
When a foreigner uses so many sayings it blows my mind when one can't even conjugate the simplest.  In my third year of [precollege/university] French, I lost my trust in language teachers because of all the handwaving nonsense, mindless busywork, and sheer and lazy ignorance of the rules and teachings of each language.  Explanations were filled with foolish chattering, rather than considerations for parts of speech and their purpose.  The authorities claim that the passé composé is equivalent to any number of English constructions, which is flat-out wrong, or that it means a deed done in the past, which is also flat-out wrong.  The latter nonsense allows the former.  After looking at hinted source (french.about.com), I realised from the examples that it was equivalent to the present perfect, because it was done in the present, not to the past perfect or imperfect.. which would be the imparfait.
To answer my question, because only I could, "s'est rompu" = "has broken" and nothing else, because it's the present perfect intransitive middle voice.  However, because of French's and everyone's crude treatment of tenses, it also passes for "has been broken".  The different auxiliary, I guess, is that French is treating the intransitive verb as an adjective, which English also does but has a choice of whether to make the participle an adjective (by "be") or a verb (by "have").  Stop mistranslating!  If you check the correlations I made in the French section of elision, you'll see a great discrepancy between what you've learnt and what I've self-learnt, and that you've been lied to by the ignorant and incompetent. lysdexia 12:00, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Calm down. Nobody here is responsible for you having to deal with incompetent teachers. By the way, I am a native French speaker with 7 years education in francophone schools (although no longer now). If anything, my English is lacking. Phils 18:41, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a common trait of translators anywhere to give up before finding perfect translations; and there are perfect translations for anything.  People still think that "ce" means "this" or "that".  lysdexia 19:12, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The notion of "perfect translation" is absurd. You completely ignore context. How would you translate "Ma mère habite Fort-Bellau, ce château sur la colline" without using "this" or "that"? Phils 16:34, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: (I've been on lots of other sites, which is why it takes so long for my replies.)  Phils, why do you ask me such an absurd question when I already answered it at the link I'd given in my last reply?  And how do I ignore context? lysdexia 01:26, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: (1) Note that être is only used with a few intransitive verbs. The vast majority of intransitive verbs, like all transitive verbs, use avoir. (2) The passé composé can have a wide range of different English translations depending on context, because the distinctions that French makes are not quite the same as the distinctions that English makes. "Je l'ai déjà fait" is "I've already done it" (present perfect), but "Je l'ai fait hier" ("Je le fis hier") is "I did it yesterday" (past), and due to the French use of historical present where English would use the historical past, "Il l'a fait" can sometimes be "He had done it." (3) "La fenêtre s'est rompue" ("La fenêtre se rompit") is not (semantically) in a middle voice, as the emphasis is on the window, not the breaking. It translates to English "The window broke" or possibly "The window was broken," though the latter is ambiguous as it could also mean "La fenêtre était rompue." Ruakh 03:23, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I liked your reply the best; it was very deep.  (2) Well, sometimes English does that too: http://www.bartleby.com/61/90/H0219000.html. (3) In those English equivalents I see no emfasis on either the noun or predicate, so I can't see how leaving the "se" in would not make it a middle voice. lysdexia 01:26, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: deep incompetence

message: The article on the concept of a relative pronoun has been greatly expanded.  It is not meant to be about any one language, though not surprisingly the problems with the English pronouns fill the largest part of it.  Would any of you like to write a short section on "Relative pronouns in French" to put at the bottom of this page?  --Doric Loon 11:37, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: relative pronouns

message: French may not have a verb tense for the continuous aspect, but i believe "être en trainde faire qqchose" should be mentioned as an equivalent. --24.77.35.110 16:14, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Continuous aspect 

message: Nothing important, but the omission of accents on capital letters is only a bad habit caused by french keyboards not allowing to type them (easily) under Windows, or from newspapers who find they make the letters too tall. It is only tolerated and is absolutely not a rule. Besides, for A especially, A is an entirely different word from À. Any dictionary or simply fr:Typographie agree with me. Once again, it is not really important, but I wanted to point it out. → SeeSchloß 08:09, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: After reading up on the subject, I agree. My experiences in France (signs, billboards, etc) taught me that capital A never took an accent. Sorry for changing it. Deus ex machina 02:15, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A or À 

message: The information in this section is not accurate and in contradiction with the French verbs main article. In particular, I don't know what is meant by "participial" or "geundive" mood. CapnPrep 12:06, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, it looks like French verbs is in contradiction with itself. As it says in the first sentence of French verbs, French has three finite moods (the indicative mood, the imperative mood, and the subjunctive mood), and three non-finite moods (the infinitive, the participle, and the gérondif). Thanks for pointing out the contradiction; I'll take care of it. Ruakh 14:41, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Verbs

message: I just major-edited this section and I think these examples go into too much detail. They should probably wait until the day French negation becomes a separate article… 
Note that some of these negative words have positive meanings in other contexts (without the ne particle):
* Jamais — "ever":
**« Tu l'as jamais vu? » — "Did you ever see him/her?"
* Personne — "person":
**« Il y a une personne ici. » — "There is a person here."
* Plus — "more":
**« Il y en a plus. » — "There is more (of it)."
CapnPrep 12:12, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A big thumbs-up to your edit. :-) Ruakh 15:06, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Text removed from "Negation"

message: The list of verbs, conjunctions, and comparatives was removed from the article for "copyright violation," because I copied it from the About.com. Please note from official policy, Wikipedia:Copyrights:
:Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves.
This is a factual list. There's no way to reformulate it -- what do you want, to mix up the order of the list? To change the translations in English slightly? This isn't "creative expression" that About.com invented itself, it's a factual list that can't be claimed as copyright. To say that this is a copyright violation is like saying that List of Presidents of the United States is a copyvio because it took the list of presidents in chronological order from WhiteHouse.gov.
I'm restoring it; please discuss further if you still believe it to be copyvio. Dylan 08:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is always a way to reformulate the ideas so that the result doesn't look plainly "inspired" by another website. I have rewritten the restored section. CapnPrep 17:20, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The principle, though, is that not reformulating this list does not violate a copyright. Dylan 12:06, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

text: It's not exactly a factual list; about.com chose which expressions warranted exclusion, chose how to group those expressions, and how to order the expressions within each group. Such presentational decisions are definitely covered by copyright law. —RuakhTALK 16:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Ne" explétif 

message: "In French, as in English, a verb is the controlling element in most sentences, although it is more common in French than in English for a sentence to have no verb."
I understand what you are saying; however, by definition, a sentence must have a verb to be a sentence.  Maybe you can rephrase or something by saying something like, "However, sentence fragments are more commonly used in French than in English".  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.3.190.20 (talk) 11:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maybe rephrase? 

message: Hi! I can't see any section about how interrogation is produced in French. Is it a miss or a temporary lack?
Do you need some help?--Overkilled (talk) 09:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interrogation 

message: We need a list of adjectives that come before nouns just to clarify the adjective section. --Komitsuki (talk) 19:14, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs a list of adjectives that come before nouns 

message: There seems to be something missing. I made that mistake myself (seeing that I come from the English grammar world). In French, it is allowed to say Hier, je me suis senti très mal. In English, you MUST say: Yesterday, I was feeling real sick. (rule of "key word"). It's strange that I can't find anything about this issue anywhere. -andy 77.7.114.40 (talk) 08:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Difference in usage of imparfait in French vs. past tense in English 

message: An  ergative  analysis  of  French  valency  alternation  (by Edit Doron of Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Marie Labelle of Université du Québec à Montréal). Anybody have any insight on this article related to French grammar? Komitsuki (talk) 16:35, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  An  ergative  analysis  of  French  valency  alternation  

message: Where is it?
There's no punctuation section in here. It's part of grammar, isn't it?
Lincoln J. (talk) 10:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Punctuation? 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
* New-Map-Francophone World.PNG
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:38, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion