Let's conjugation! :D

[blodeuedd]

Saviez-vous que le verbe "éclore" n'a ni passé simple, ni imparfait, ni imparfait du subjonctif? En plus, il lui manque les 1ère et 2ème personnes du pluriel au présent de l'indicatif et de l'impératif. Tu parles d'une affaire...

Translating "The Ugly Duckling" led me to look up éclore (to hatch), and I was once again amused at how weird some French verbs are. The great majority of them are first group ~er verbs, and super easy to conjugate (also any verb you make up or borrow from another language is by default an ~er verb: checker, downloader, gambarer, etc. XD), then there are the 2nd group ~ir verbs which also all follow the same pattern, except for the bunch of them that don't. It's with 3rd group verbs that things get interesting, because it's basically all the verbs that don't fit into the 1st or 2nd groups, and though they may have the same ending, ~re verbs, for instance, can conjugate any number of ways. Then you have the odd verb that has two accepted conjugations (like asseoir), impersonal verbs that can only be conjugated in the 3rd person (like falloir), and verbs that have fallen out of use or are so archaic they've been retained only in certain tenses and so are impossible to conjugate in say, the simple future, or the past subjunctive. Or maybe those tenses were never needed to begin with, who knows?

So, yeah. In French, you can't say "Let's hatch!", nor can you say, "They hatched" (but you can say "They have hatched").

Thus concludes your French lesson for this evening. *bows out*

Only one story left to translate! I'll do that tomorrow evening, proofread the two I translated today, proofread the last one Wednesday morning, then send them out and wait three months to get paid. ^_^;

Comments

[blodeuedd.livejournal.com]

You can say "l'oeuf a éclos", which is the passé composé, which has taken over the function of the passé simple in modern spoken (and much written) French ("J'ai mangé", for instance, can be translated as either "I ate" or "I have eaten", though technically it's really "I have eaten"). There's no passé simple for éclore, however. I looked it up in the first place because the standard tense for literary narration is the passé simple, and I was wondering whether it should be "Les oeufs éclosèrent" or "éclorent".

If I were to make up a passé simple for it, I'd say:

J'éclos
Tu éclos
Il éclot
Nous éclosâmes
Vous éclosâtes
Ils éclosèrent

Actually, to me the strangest thing is that there's no 2nd person plural imperative. You'd think that from time immemorial, farmers have been urging eggs to "Hatch, damn you!" XD

This site is really good: http://www.la-conjugaison.fr/du/verbe/eclore.php

As far as I can tell it's identical to the Bescherelle, which is the bible of French verbs. XD

And yes, éclosons! :D :D :D

Interesting fact: it seems that "traire" (means to pull, but it's usually used to mean milk a cow) has no passé simple either. ^_^

[nekonezumi.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, I'm so rusty. Since I've been teaching English grammar, we've been talking about the "simple past," so I swapped passé composé and passé simple in my mind. Doh!

Since passé simple is literary, a possible explanation for the lack of literary hatching and cow-milking could possibly have something to do with the fact that the farming class would not historically have been the subject of, nor the authors of, works of literature. So perhaps there would have been no real reason to use it in the literary sense. I can't think of many works of 19th-century French literature that feature farmers--best I can come up with is Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which is obviously not French, and Adam Bede...which is not French, either. So perhaps one could make a treatise about the relative importance of fictional farmers in the 19th-century French vs. English psyche. *geek out!* 8D

[blodeuedd.livejournal.com]

It's only literary because it's fallen out of usage, though. It used to be used commonly in spoken French as well, and other romance languages (well, Spanish I'm sure of; I'm assuming the others do the same) still use both the passé simple and passé composé equivalents. I'm guessing those mysterious missing ones were out of usage by the time the Académie was formed and declared itself arbiter of Proper French. XD When they say something doesn't exist or can't be said... people tend to believe them. ^_^;

As for 19th century French novels about farming... I studied French literature, and as far as I know, there's no real equivalent to Thomas Hardy. The best-known French novels of the 1800s are mostly about la bourgeoisie (Balzac, Maupassant, Zola, Stendhal, etc.), the poor/working class as exploited by the industrial revolution (Hugo's Les Misérables, Zola's Germinal) or are historical adventure-type stories (Dumas, anyone? :D) So yeah, farmers don't play that important a role, generally. *geeks out*