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Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about french now

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Friday, May 24, 2002, 15:45
Kendra wrote:
>I was mostly mad, though, because our teacher tested us on passé compose >using etre (I don't know the e with circumflex code offhand :) and only >taught us the gender bit, not the agreeing in number part. So the entire >class failed miseably. Go us!
(At risk of exciting the wrath of Christophe.....:-)))) If it helps, try thinking of it this way: although the passé composé with être is _called_ a tense, it's actually equivalent to an etre-plus-adjective construction. In that case, the adj. has to agree in gender and number; therefore, so does the participle. Italian does its perfect tenses the same way-- avere for transitives, essere for intrans., with gender/number agreement of the participle. All praise to Spanish, which lost that particular bit of oddness.
>On another note, though, pairs like acteur/actrice and so on make me
nervous
>because I hate making THAT kind of gender distinctions in any language.
Well, if your language is going to have agreement, then obviously you have to distinguish M/F. Is there a problem with the "moon" being feminine in French? I'm sure it would curl a Frenchman's toes to hear "Catherine Deneuve est un acteur tres excellent ...."(pardon my spelling). English (at least most PC varieties) is losing most of its -ess forms, which had become mildly pejorative anyway (a "poetess" was not quite a real poet, e.g.-- though "actress" IMO never suffered that fate). Lawyers still insists on things like "executrix, testatrix" etc. but that's a private little world.
> >I wish my teacher corrected pronunciaton. There're people in my class STILL >saying "ill est trace bow," and it makes it hard for me to have any clue. >
C'est incroyable!. As Prof. Henry Higgins said, "The French don't care what you do, actually, as long as you pronounce it correctly."

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Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>