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. ^_^;