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

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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