This article is a draft. It is not finished yet and might never be.
Created on 11/18/2024
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.
In French, there are four kinds of pronominal verbs:
They don’t exist without reflexive pronouns, such as se souvenir (remember), se fier (rely, trust). They evoke an action made by a single person, and may express its emotions (s’esclaffer, se marrer). They can also represent an action that can only be done to oneself (s’autoréguler, se suicider).
Full list here.
An action whose the reflexive pronoun indicates it is made on oneself, for instance se laver (wash oneself).
Used when two or more characters do an action impacting each other.
This can lead to confusing sentences that can’t exist in English.
For example, the sentence John et Sue se détestent has two semics, and you need context (or more explanations) to know which one it corresponds to.
If it’s reciprocal, you could say John et Sue se détestent l’un l’autre (John and Sue hate each other). If not, you’d say John et Sue se détestent eux-mêmes (John and Sue hate themselves).
Those verbs can replace the verb to be when using passive voice (se faire avoir).
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.
TODO: cite this source?
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 (space). 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.
In German you have neutral gender, but its application is weird. You may assume that “a girl” would be a feminine noun and “a table” a neutral one. Well no! Das Mädchen is neutral and der Tisch is 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 do you write “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. I might find interesting articles in English. Who knows.