this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Silent letters make boys grow into men! Or something. You can know how to pronounce those if you read them, but you definitely can't know how to write those if you hear them.
Thankfully informal French gets rid of a few of the examples you gave by always using the composed form. Je mange, j'ai mangé, je vais manger, ils auraient mangé. All the tenses you actually need (don't mind the irregular forms of être/avoir). And we still fuck up and write mangé and manger interchangeably anyways.
Fun socio-linguistic fact: Mangerai and mangerais are distinct in Belgian (and I think Swiss?) French (é vs è ending) but not in France French (è in either case). There are a few other archaisms like this such as the Belgian/Swiss distinction between the pronunciation of "brun" and "brin" that the French don't make either.
I do wonder about the history of that. Presumably they used to be pronounced distinctly and at some point the language evolved the habit of dropping ending sounds? L'academie would never go for this, but it seems like French would benefit from some spelling reform. What's wrong with je mange, il mange, ils mange‽
I'll admit one of the examples I gave was passé simple, which I recall my teacher saying is the "literary tense" and can be safely ignored; I included it only to make up the neat 3/3. But were any of the others rarely used?
The tenses I was told to care about were present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, conditional, futur simple, and futur proche. And tbh I still don't really understand the difference between those last two, so in practice I'd either think about whether in English I want to say "I'm going to" or "I will", or just default to futur proche 'cos it's easier. And I know you can do some fun stuff like the "past in the future" and "future in the past" by applying different tenses of the auxiliary verbs in perfect & futur proche tenses, even if those aren't especially useful to know very often. But yeah, I thought that apart from the passé simple my examples were pretty standard. Is that not so?
That is fun! My favourite fun French dialect fact is about septante, nonante, and huitante/octante being used in Swiss French and maybe Belgian and non-Quebec Canadian French instead of soixante-dix, quatre-vingt-dix, and quatre-vingt. I'm not sure of the history there, but I like it.
Nothing in theory, but my native ass recoiled in horror at "ils mange". I know it's literally equivalent and I shouldn't care, but French is culturally very attached to its written form, even moreso than English (the reasons why being outlined at the end of my comment).
In the written form, yes. In the oral form, it depends. Futur proche has evolved to be used quite generally.
French conjugation is incredibly complex by any standard, and especially compared to English. There are tenses (e.g. imparfait du subjonctif) that are so archaic they're a complete meme and they shouldn't be used even in the most formal literary setting.
Sarkozy (well-known for being a feisty classist right-wing money-laundering asshole) using it as an obvious flex made the news at the time and everyone made fun of him. To this day I'm not even sure if he actually conjugated that correctly (and neither are the people in the comments lmao). That video is absolute gold, the eyebrow raise he does as if to say "and there" tells you everything you need to know about his character.
The Celts! No, seriously. They used a vigidecimal (base 20) system and since they counted in "twenties", "four twenties" is an artifact of that. So are 'single digit' numbers up to 20 (quatorze/quinze/etc). In that way "Quatre-ving-quatorze" is arguably correct base-20, but "quatre-ving-dix-huit" is not (because there is no dedicated number for 18 anymore so the whole thing is clunky, but "quatre-ving huitorze" would be fine conceptually).
I wonder if the germanic "eleven/twelve" is related or if it's an equivalent but unrelated evolution for counting scores.
Regarding the history of the language and its lack of reform, I am not a specialist but this guy and his colleagues are (if you're willing to go through half an hour of French with admittedly very good auto-generated English captions). But generally the idea is that the Académie and the system which created it have worked together since the early 19th century (which not uncoincidentally had the last major reform of the French language) to turn language into a very strong marker of social status. Like, very.
French people (and esp. Parisians) have a reputation for being assholes who will get mad at foreigners for mispronouncing words or using the wrong grammatical gender. That's asshole behavior but there are assholes everywhere, so why the French in particular? Because the French are taught from the age of 5 that their mastery of the French language (both written and spoken) will be the main thing for which they will be judged in life. As the middle class rose in the 19th/early 20th century, they got access to more/longer education where grammar/spelling was very heavily emphasized. Proper grammar/spelling then became a huge indicator of a good education and predictor of social mobility.
This fundamentally classist idea persisted well beyond the industrial revolution and it remains a very big talking point. "Young people can't write anymore" is probably the most common/recurring moral panic, and the idea that children age 6-12 should do mandatory daily (!!) graded spelling bees again is a regular conservative talking point because that's how they grew up (and it's still the policy with more... catholic-conservative teachers, I had some of those).
We don't usually even have spelling bee competitions (in all my schooling there was only ever one that I knew of), because stellar spelling is the expectation, not the over-achievement.
I'm sure that happens to a lesser degrees for English speakers, but now consider how much harder French is to write. I hope I got across how incredibly neurotic the French are over these matters.
Oh interesting. That's not a conjugation I've ever learnt. In formal language are those kinda similar the same way je vais manger and je mangerai are at least mostly the same thing, or is it similar to what their more literal English translation looks like "I would eat" vs "I would have eaten", which have quite different meanings?
Oh yeah, no, I understand that. What I'm curious about is where septante etc. came from, and what process lead to their use in most other French-speaking countries apart from France.
Haha, unfortunately my French grammar is pretty decent, but my vocab is abysmal. Put it down to an entirely academic introduction to French in school, with almost no exposure to natural French.
Thanks for all that history/cultural information. I already knew that l'Academie was incredibly conservative (I feel like that's so well-known that even people with no interest in language are at least vaguely aware of it—I often see references to l'Academie in the western tech press, for example), but I didn't know anything about the wider cultural context surrounding that.
But anyway yeah, it was really just a hypothetical. I'm fully aware that in the real world there's zero chance of it happening. Even in English, without that level of cultural baggage or institutional oversight, there have been many proposals for spelling reform, none of which ever go anywhere.
I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, "Je mangerais" == I would eat, "J'aurais mangé" == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It's very much not a complete transition, but "vous allez manger" and "vous mangerez" are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.
To say "you will do as I say", an angry mother will say to her kid "tu vas faire c'que j'te dis!" but an angry boss will say "vous ferez ce que je vous dis". Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. "You will have done as I say" implies another causal event between "now" and "you will have done", and French doesn't have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.
I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren't always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).