Re: OT: Slightly OT: French as a second language

En réponse à Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>:

>
> Tell me about it!  It's the same with English, and even weirder,
> because
> English has only the most tenuous connection to Latin -- French is at
> least a Romance language, albeit the most non-Latinate of them all.
> So
> you have weird non-rules in English that come from mistaking it for
> Latin
> -- things like, "never split an infinitive."  There is absolutely no
> reason to forbid splitting an infinitive; sometimes it feels very
> natural
> and right to do so.  But Latin doesn't (can't) do it, so we're not
> allowed?  Oi.  I could go off on this for a good long time; once you
> teach
> English for a living, you start to realize how backward our
> descriptive
> grammars really are.
>
Well, French teaching is so much oriented towards the written material that
French grammars pretend that spoken French is identical to written French. So
according to those prescriptivists grammars, we would use the simple past when
talking about past events (but the simple past is simply and completely dead in
spoken French. We use the compound past instead), the conjugation of verbs
consists entirely of suffixes, most verbs having five to six different endings
at nearly every tense (well, it's true in written French, but in spoken French
they have nearly completely disappeared, and the conjugation relies heavily on
prefixes that the written language persists in considering them as separate
pronouns. They are not! It's impossible to use "je" or "tu" except in front of
a verb - the separate forms are "moi" and "toi" -), the plural is marked by an
ending on the nouns (totally false in spoken French where most nouns sound
exactly the same in singular and plural. Only the form of the article gives the
number in this case), and 'ne' is mandatory to make negative sentences! (except
that in spoken French, 'ne' has already disappeared for a long time now). In
fact, the situation in France is mostly the same as in Imperial Rome: there is
a written language about which all grammars talk about, and which is supposed
to be the norm, but has nothing to do with the spoken language, which schools
seem to completely disregard, despite the fact that everyone, including the
teachers, use it!!!

And I'm not talking about the fact that all schools teach an identical French,
whether it is in Paris, in Marseille or in Guadeloupe!

>
> Non!  Mes amis, il a decouvert le vrai.  Maintenant nous devons
> tuer-lui!
>
> :)
>
:))) OK, everybody really think in French, but they have trouble writing
it :))) . Correctly (I mean, even in spoken French :)) ), it should be:

Non ! Mes amis, il a découvert la vérité. Maintenant nous devons le tuer !

But your version was fair enough.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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