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I was looking through the Spanish grammar article, and the authors have split the sections into separate articles:
I think this is a very good idea, as it would cut down the enormous length of the article while allowing more information to be added to each, like specific external links (the Conjugator etc), example sentences, etc.
For example, in the Verb section: in addition to tenses and conjugations, one could go into specifics of savoir v. connaître, fully conjugate the irregular but often-used être, faire, and avoir (or possibly have a separate article for all non-standard verbs, like é->è (acheter), c->ç (commencer), etc).
Deus ex machina 02:17, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
(I apologize for forgetting the spaces between the opening guillemet + the first word and last word + the closing guillemet in an earlier edit.)
I believe that it is imperative that this article use French-style guillemets (quotes) when enclosing French example sentences.
Usage:
« La phrase. »
Deus ex machina 22:20, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
The rules in French on choice of auxiliary, agreement when using "to be" but not when using "to have", and several others are IDENTICAL in Italian. Almost spookily so. I'm wondering if this is worth a note in either language, but I want to ask the community before proceeding.
Even if it's not worth inserting a note, it could save us some work. The Italian Grammar article is less developed than, and could easily steal many paragraphs from, the French, with the examples changed appropriately. I'll be happy to do it.
Qu'est-ce que vous pensez?
Steverapaport 12:01, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Explain how it's spooky when they both came from Latin? As a ton of this is not finished I will get to work on all the stuff on the bottom when I have time.
Theloniouszen 18:12, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Please explain the exact meaning of "s'est rompu" and tell which of the following it's nearest to, ranking the others by nearness: "broke" (what part of speech??), "is broken", "got broken", "became broken", "is being broken", "was broken", "has been broken", "broke itself", "is breaking itself", "has broken itself", "is getting broken". lysdexia 01:47, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Sometimes in French the reflexive is used in such a construction. The general translation for something like "La verre s'est rompu" would be "The glass broke" or "the glass became broken". In translation the first would work but what is important is that the agent of the breaking (whoever or whatever broke the glass) is not stated. If I said "Il a rompu la verre" that would be "He broke the glass". When an agent is not stated, often the reflexive is used.
The same construction also appears in an action which has no external agent. For example, "La bombe s'éclate" would mean "The bomb exploded", and I believe the reflexive is used because the bomb explodes itself, even though if someone used a remote control to blow it up, the bomb seemed to have no visible external agent.
I remember an account in a French newspaper about a plane crash and the verb "to crash" (which I can't remember now) in the headline was reflexive - "The plane crashed itself", meaning it was not shot down, or made to crash by a well-known specific agent, it just crashed. Ranking the possible [E]nglish translations by part of speech is ludicrous because you can't really quantify a translation like that.-- Theloniouszen 13:07, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
(Zen, space your paragrafs.) All of this chatting is nice, but I wanted my questions answered within the scope of the questions. The lack of grammatical rigor in language lessons worries and bothers me. When I looked for why être was used, I found a bunch of être verbs with the same quality of explanation as above. Whenever a language explanation is given, only at the end if at all is the reason given: In this case, it was for intransitive verbs! That I could fully understand, and in so much fewer words! See, it isn't tricky if you know what you're talking about—nothing is.
When a foreigner uses so many sayings it blows my mind when one can't even conjugate the simplest. In my third year of [precollege/university] French, I lost my trust in language teachers because of all the handwaving nonsense, mindless busywork, and sheer and lazy ignorance of the rules and teachings of each language. Explanations were filled with foolish chattering, rather than considerations for parts of speech and their purpose. The authorities claim that the passé composé is equivalent to any number of English constructions, which is flat-out wrong, or that it means a deed done in the past, which is also flat-out wrong. The latter nonsense allows the former. After looking at hinted source (french.about.com), I realised from the examples that it was equivalent to the present perfect, because it was done in the present, not to the past perfect or imperfect.. which would be the imparfait.
To answer my question, because only I could, "s'est rompu" = "has broken" and nothing else, because it's the present perfect intransitive middle voice. However, because of French's and everyone's crude treatment of tenses, it also passes for "has been broken". The different auxiliary, I guess, is that French is treating the intransitive verb as an adjective, which English also does but has a choice of whether to make the participle an adjective (by "be") or a verb (by "have"). Stop mistranslating! If you check the correlations I made in the French section of elision, you'll see a great discrepancy between what you've learnt and what I've self-learnt, and that you've been lied to by the ignorant and incompetent. lysdexia 12:00, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Just want to let know that I've commented on this article on Peer Review. — mark ✎ 12:55, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
And here are the comments the listing on Peer Review generated:
Quite a list... but that's it for now. — mark ✎ 09:01, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The article on the concept of a relative pronoun has been greatly expanded. It is not meant to be about any one language, though not surprisingly the problems with the English pronouns fill the largest part of it. Would any of you like to write a short section on "Relative pronouns in French" to put at the bottom of this page? -- Doric Loon 11:37, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Would like to see some discussion on weak/strong pronouns in french, such as elle/la/l', and the relative contexts they can be used in (co-ordination, stress, accompanied by ostensive pointing, etc). A subject of much linguistic debate!
French may not have a verb tense for the continuous aspect, but i believe "être en trainde faire qqchose" should be mentioned as an equivalent. -- 24.77.35.110 16:14, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Nothing important, but the omission of accents on capital letters is only a bad habit caused by french keyboards not allowing to type them (easily) under Windows, or from newspapers who find they make the letters too tall. It is only tolerated and is absolutely not a rule. Besides, for A especially, A is an entirely different word from À. Any dictionary or simply fr:Typographie agree with me. Once again, it is not really important, but I wanted to point it out. → SeeSchloß 08:09, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
The information in this section is not accurate and in contradiction with the French verbs main article. In particular, I don't know what is meant by "participial" or "geundive" mood. CapnPrep 12:06, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I just major-edited this section and I think these examples go into too much detail. They should probably wait until the day French negation becomes a separate article…
Note that some of these negative words have positive meanings in other contexts (without the ne particle):
- Jamais — "ever":
- « Tu l'as jamais vu? » — "Did you ever see him/her?"
- Personne — "person":
- « Il y a une personne ici. » — "There is a person here."
- Plus — "more":
- « Il y en a plus. » — "There is more (of it)."
CapnPrep 12:12, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
The list of verbs, conjunctions, and comparatives was removed from the article for "copyright violation," because I copied it from the About.com. Please note from official policy, Wikipedia:Copyrights:
This is a factual list. There's no way to reformulate it -- what do you want, to mix up the order of the list? To change the translations in English slightly? This isn't "creative expression" that About.com invented itself, it's a factual list that can't be claimed as copyright. To say that this is a copyright violation is like saying that List of Presidents of the United States is a copyvio because it took the list of presidents in chronological order from WhiteHouse.gov.
I'm restoring it; please discuss further if you still believe it to be copyvio. Dylan 08:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
"In French, as in English, a verb is the controlling element in most sentences, although it is more common in French than in English for a sentence to have no verb."
I understand what you are saying; however, by definition, a sentence must have a verb to be a sentence. Maybe you can rephrase or something by saying something like, "However, sentence fragments are more commonly used in French than in English". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.3.190.20 ( talk) 11:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi! I can't see any section about how interrogation is produced in French. Is it a miss or a temporary lack? Do you need some help?-- Overkilled ( talk) 09:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
We need a list of adjectives that come before nouns just to clarify the adjective section. -- Komitsuki ( talk) 19:14, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be something missing. I made that mistake myself (seeing that I come from the English grammar world). In French, it is allowed to say Hier, je me suis senti très mal. In English, you MUST say: Yesterday, I was feeling real sick. (rule of "key word"). It's strange that I can't find anything about this issue anywhere. -andy 77.7.114.40 ( talk) 08:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
An ergative analysis of French valency alternation (by Edit Doron of Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Marie Labelle of Université du Québec à Montréal). Anybody have any insight on this article related to French grammar? Komitsuki ( talk) 16:35, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Where is it? There's no punctuation section in here. It's part of grammar, isn't it? Lincoln J. ( talk) 10:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 09:38, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
![]() | French grammar received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
I was looking through the Spanish grammar article, and the authors have split the sections into separate articles:
I think this is a very good idea, as it would cut down the enormous length of the article while allowing more information to be added to each, like specific external links (the Conjugator etc), example sentences, etc.
For example, in the Verb section: in addition to tenses and conjugations, one could go into specifics of savoir v. connaître, fully conjugate the irregular but often-used être, faire, and avoir (or possibly have a separate article for all non-standard verbs, like é->è (acheter), c->ç (commencer), etc).
Deus ex machina 02:17, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
(I apologize for forgetting the spaces between the opening guillemet + the first word and last word + the closing guillemet in an earlier edit.)
I believe that it is imperative that this article use French-style guillemets (quotes) when enclosing French example sentences.
Usage:
« La phrase. »
Deus ex machina 22:20, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
The rules in French on choice of auxiliary, agreement when using "to be" but not when using "to have", and several others are IDENTICAL in Italian. Almost spookily so. I'm wondering if this is worth a note in either language, but I want to ask the community before proceeding.
Even if it's not worth inserting a note, it could save us some work. The Italian Grammar article is less developed than, and could easily steal many paragraphs from, the French, with the examples changed appropriately. I'll be happy to do it.
Qu'est-ce que vous pensez?
Steverapaport 12:01, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Explain how it's spooky when they both came from Latin? As a ton of this is not finished I will get to work on all the stuff on the bottom when I have time.
Theloniouszen 18:12, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Please explain the exact meaning of "s'est rompu" and tell which of the following it's nearest to, ranking the others by nearness: "broke" (what part of speech??), "is broken", "got broken", "became broken", "is being broken", "was broken", "has been broken", "broke itself", "is breaking itself", "has broken itself", "is getting broken". lysdexia 01:47, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Sometimes in French the reflexive is used in such a construction. The general translation for something like "La verre s'est rompu" would be "The glass broke" or "the glass became broken". In translation the first would work but what is important is that the agent of the breaking (whoever or whatever broke the glass) is not stated. If I said "Il a rompu la verre" that would be "He broke the glass". When an agent is not stated, often the reflexive is used.
The same construction also appears in an action which has no external agent. For example, "La bombe s'éclate" would mean "The bomb exploded", and I believe the reflexive is used because the bomb explodes itself, even though if someone used a remote control to blow it up, the bomb seemed to have no visible external agent.
I remember an account in a French newspaper about a plane crash and the verb "to crash" (which I can't remember now) in the headline was reflexive - "The plane crashed itself", meaning it was not shot down, or made to crash by a well-known specific agent, it just crashed. Ranking the possible [E]nglish translations by part of speech is ludicrous because you can't really quantify a translation like that.-- Theloniouszen 13:07, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
(Zen, space your paragrafs.) All of this chatting is nice, but I wanted my questions answered within the scope of the questions. The lack of grammatical rigor in language lessons worries and bothers me. When I looked for why être was used, I found a bunch of être verbs with the same quality of explanation as above. Whenever a language explanation is given, only at the end if at all is the reason given: In this case, it was for intransitive verbs! That I could fully understand, and in so much fewer words! See, it isn't tricky if you know what you're talking about—nothing is.
When a foreigner uses so many sayings it blows my mind when one can't even conjugate the simplest. In my third year of [precollege/university] French, I lost my trust in language teachers because of all the handwaving nonsense, mindless busywork, and sheer and lazy ignorance of the rules and teachings of each language. Explanations were filled with foolish chattering, rather than considerations for parts of speech and their purpose. The authorities claim that the passé composé is equivalent to any number of English constructions, which is flat-out wrong, or that it means a deed done in the past, which is also flat-out wrong. The latter nonsense allows the former. After looking at hinted source (french.about.com), I realised from the examples that it was equivalent to the present perfect, because it was done in the present, not to the past perfect or imperfect.. which would be the imparfait.
To answer my question, because only I could, "s'est rompu" = "has broken" and nothing else, because it's the present perfect intransitive middle voice. However, because of French's and everyone's crude treatment of tenses, it also passes for "has been broken". The different auxiliary, I guess, is that French is treating the intransitive verb as an adjective, which English also does but has a choice of whether to make the participle an adjective (by "be") or a verb (by "have"). Stop mistranslating! If you check the correlations I made in the French section of elision, you'll see a great discrepancy between what you've learnt and what I've self-learnt, and that you've been lied to by the ignorant and incompetent. lysdexia 12:00, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Just want to let know that I've commented on this article on Peer Review. — mark ✎ 12:55, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
And here are the comments the listing on Peer Review generated:
Quite a list... but that's it for now. — mark ✎ 09:01, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The article on the concept of a relative pronoun has been greatly expanded. It is not meant to be about any one language, though not surprisingly the problems with the English pronouns fill the largest part of it. Would any of you like to write a short section on "Relative pronouns in French" to put at the bottom of this page? -- Doric Loon 11:37, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Would like to see some discussion on weak/strong pronouns in french, such as elle/la/l', and the relative contexts they can be used in (co-ordination, stress, accompanied by ostensive pointing, etc). A subject of much linguistic debate!
French may not have a verb tense for the continuous aspect, but i believe "être en trainde faire qqchose" should be mentioned as an equivalent. -- 24.77.35.110 16:14, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Nothing important, but the omission of accents on capital letters is only a bad habit caused by french keyboards not allowing to type them (easily) under Windows, or from newspapers who find they make the letters too tall. It is only tolerated and is absolutely not a rule. Besides, for A especially, A is an entirely different word from À. Any dictionary or simply fr:Typographie agree with me. Once again, it is not really important, but I wanted to point it out. → SeeSchloß 08:09, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
The information in this section is not accurate and in contradiction with the French verbs main article. In particular, I don't know what is meant by "participial" or "geundive" mood. CapnPrep 12:06, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I just major-edited this section and I think these examples go into too much detail. They should probably wait until the day French negation becomes a separate article…
Note that some of these negative words have positive meanings in other contexts (without the ne particle):
- Jamais — "ever":
- « Tu l'as jamais vu? » — "Did you ever see him/her?"
- Personne — "person":
- « Il y a une personne ici. » — "There is a person here."
- Plus — "more":
- « Il y en a plus. » — "There is more (of it)."
CapnPrep 12:12, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
The list of verbs, conjunctions, and comparatives was removed from the article for "copyright violation," because I copied it from the About.com. Please note from official policy, Wikipedia:Copyrights:
This is a factual list. There's no way to reformulate it -- what do you want, to mix up the order of the list? To change the translations in English slightly? This isn't "creative expression" that About.com invented itself, it's a factual list that can't be claimed as copyright. To say that this is a copyright violation is like saying that List of Presidents of the United States is a copyvio because it took the list of presidents in chronological order from WhiteHouse.gov.
I'm restoring it; please discuss further if you still believe it to be copyvio. Dylan 08:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
"In French, as in English, a verb is the controlling element in most sentences, although it is more common in French than in English for a sentence to have no verb."
I understand what you are saying; however, by definition, a sentence must have a verb to be a sentence. Maybe you can rephrase or something by saying something like, "However, sentence fragments are more commonly used in French than in English". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.3.190.20 ( talk) 11:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi! I can't see any section about how interrogation is produced in French. Is it a miss or a temporary lack? Do you need some help?-- Overkilled ( talk) 09:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
We need a list of adjectives that come before nouns just to clarify the adjective section. -- Komitsuki ( talk) 19:14, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be something missing. I made that mistake myself (seeing that I come from the English grammar world). In French, it is allowed to say Hier, je me suis senti très mal. In English, you MUST say: Yesterday, I was feeling real sick. (rule of "key word"). It's strange that I can't find anything about this issue anywhere. -andy 77.7.114.40 ( talk) 08:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
An ergative analysis of French valency alternation (by Edit Doron of Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Marie Labelle of Université du Québec à Montréal). Anybody have any insight on this article related to French grammar? Komitsuki ( talk) 16:35, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Where is it? There's no punctuation section in here. It's part of grammar, isn't it? Lincoln J. ( talk) 10:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 09:38, 20 January 2019 (UTC)