Created on 11/18/2024, finished on ??/??/202?
This article will deal with many elements I hate or never understood in French language. It will also serve as a way to compare and review what other languages do instead.
They're unnecessary complicated. In French, there are two kinds of pronominal verbs:
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Fully pronominal ones, which don't exist without reflexive pronouns, such as se souvenir (remember)
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the others, called partially pronominal verbs, like se laver (wash oneself).
The issue comes in when using composed past tense.
For fully pronominal verbs, no problem, you agree with the subject, but for partial ones it's another story.
It depends on the direct object complement. If there is one, agree the verb with it, or else with the subject.
Not intuitive for new learners, including young frenchies. The word pétale for example, is often heard as feminine (une pétale), while in reality it is maculine (UN pétale).
There are also double-gendered words, such as après-midi and hymne. Another particular one is espace. When masculine, it means an undefined environment, but if you want to tackle the typographic symbol, it's feminine.
What about neutral gender ? Ha.
Technically, there is no neutral gender in French. But masculine could sort of be considered that way in some cases (it's still a debate for linguists). What we can be sure of is that masculine is also used to express neutral statements.
"It's chilly today" => "Il fait froid aujourd'hui"
It becomes il, aka the masculine pronoun by excellence.
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In German you have neutral gender, but its application is weird. You may assume that a girl would be a feminine noun and table a neutral one. Well no! Das Madchen is neutral and der Tisch masculine.
Especially plural nouns. Un cheval => des chevaux BUT Un festival => des festivals
That said it also applies to verbs.
Dire => vous dites Prédire => vous prédisez
Transition to...
The adjective baba, bidon, chou, record and bien are unvariable (sometimes feu).
Other adjectives suffering from this uniqueness are colors. Long story short, composed color adjectives are unvariable, and for single ones, it depends of their origin.
Orange, rose, marron cannot vary.
This problem also affects English. In that case I prefer German and Esperanto rules, which are still faillible to my mind.
Aka words who sound similar but are written differently. Especially nettlesome when someone pronounces a sentence uncorrectly.
You can call them variants. A well-known example are clé and clef, both meaning key. Same applies for fantasme and phantasme.
Clef and phantasme are accurate variants, as they respect etymology.
The letters "ss" are always pronounced /s/. But how is written "French" in French ? Français. "ç" is literally a duplicate solution to a bootless problem. Actually, it's just a remixed z from catalan.
Valoir and équivaloir have the same root and close meanings, yet one is transitive and the other is not.
I don't hate French.
All of them are French sadly. May find interesting articles in English. Who knows.