Conjugation of verbs, when using pronoun "On".

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Permalink Reply by stella on June 21, 2009 at 12:56am

hello!
"On" is used to talk about several persons, or a person alone.
You can translate it by "we", "he/she", or "they".
for example :
On sort ce soir = we go out tonight
On m'a demandé de répondre = (for example, many possibilities) they asked me to answer
On m'a coupé les cheveux = he cuts my hair
you can translate "on" by the passive form in english.
on peut le faire = that can be done
But you have to conjugate like il or elle
so you say on marche, and dit-on.

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Permalink Reply by Claude S Poliakoff on June 21, 2009 at 2:57am

Donc la conjugation singulier plutôt que le pluriel, bien que le même pronom est utilisé comme singulier et pluriel. Très curieux
Merçi
Claude

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 21, 2009 at 4:03am

Claude -- it actually turns out to be quite common for pronouns to "take" a verb form other than the one you'd logically expect, partly because of the way these pronouns sometimes derive, and partly just because grammatical categories don't always follow the logic you might expect.

Even in English, when somebody (in admittedly slightly formal language) says "How are we today, Sir?", they don't change the verb form just because "we" refers only to a single person.

Neil

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Permalink Reply by Claude S Poliakoff on June 21, 2009 at 4:48am

Actually it sholdn't come as much a surprise. The pronoun "on" probably was never blessed by the Academie Francaise. As rigid as the Academie may have been, french continues to evolve. I just received and email from a french cousin, in which I was surprised by her use of "slogan". A new addition to "weekend" and the far older bifteck.
BTW what stirred you to set this french linguistics site up? I like the idea, and will bookmark you!

Claude

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 23, 2009 at 3:14am

Claude -- there are arguably one or two (very limited) things that the Académie Française, or indeed any deliberate decision-making, can possibly influence. But verbal inflection really isn't generally one of them!! (And I think even the AF realise they won't suddenly get people to change their verb endings even if they asked them to!!)

Although most of what the AF does is largely ridiculous and pointless, to be fair to them, they're not actually trying to prevent the language from evolving per se. They're largely trying to shape certain aspects of how it evolves, which they believe (often falsely) are controllable, and where they believe (largely without grounds) that there's some need to control them. Just occasionally, what they're trying to do could actually be accomplished and would be useful-- e.g. minor spelling reforms-- although in the last case of spelling reform they in fact made a complete hash of it.

"Slogan" is actually a fairly normal French word nowadays, by the way-- and indeed most of the "new" English loanwords actually turn out to have been around for a lot longer than you think.

As for the site, it's actually existed for over 10 years. As I recall, it started with a (then much smaller) version of the dictionary which I'd compiled and which was going to be released for whatever the equivalent was of a Palm back then. But that was more or less at the time the Internet was becoming popular outside academia, and so I decided to just make the dictionary available on the net. The site has gradually grown since then.

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Permalink Reply by Claude S Poliakoff on June 23, 2009 at 8:42am

Thank you for your generous and knowledgable efforts. Your site fits right in to my fascination with every day offering a learning opportunity.
à bientôt
Claude

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Permalink Reply by Frank on June 23, 2009 at 11:06am

Indeed, "on" is supposed to be singular, but it's very commonly used as plural.

In fact, native speakers almost never say "Nous", except in very formal speech. For some reason, "On" is almost always used in place of "Nous". If you say something like "Nous allons au parc", everybody will understand, but it will sound a bit snoby. It might depend on locations, but in Paris this is definitely the caes. OTOH, in written french, "On" might look a bit strange, whiile "Nous" is very common. Go figure...

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 23, 2009 at 5:12pm

I think the predominance of "on" in the spoken language probably extends to most of France at least-- I must admit I'm less sure about other countries, though I've not read of a difference.

On possible way to look at things is the "nous"/"on" distinction is tending towards an honorific/non-honorific distinction, similar to the "vous"/"tu" distinction-- though applied to the 1st person. Such a distinction actually does exist in various languages.

One factor that has probably influenced the predominance of "on" is that it simplifies the verb system: verbs end up having fewer forms, and, for example, with a verb such as "donner", the single form "donne" predominates in the present tense (remember the endings -s and -nt are just spelling complications-- the actual form is the same for je, tu, il/elle/on and ils/elles). Similar with most other verbs and in some other tenses.

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