What's your bête noire of French grammar?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by sudeh sabourian on January 12, 2011 at 3:51am

speaking french as poeple speak in France.

Permalink Reply by Ed la mouette on January 12, 2011 at 9:40pm

You mean, incorrectly ? :D

Permalink Reply by Rajalakshmi Iyengar on January 13, 2011 at 1:32pm

J'ai eu beaucoup de betes noires en francais.....je veux apprendre tous les sens pour le verbe "Faire" et je veux savoir si il ya un site pour donner toutes les conjugaisons de tous les temps pour chaque verbe........pouvez-vous m'aider?......But please do it in English not French...........please

Permalink Reply by Ed la mouette on January 13, 2011 at 3:34pm

Do it in english ? Ca va pas, non ? On est ici pour parler français !

Voilà ton trésor : www.leconjugueur.com

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 13, 2011 at 10:21pm

As with all verbs, this site's dictionary entry for faire has the conjugation of the most used tenses, and a link to a full verb table in case you need to see the conjugations of other tenses.

Permalink Reply by Rajalakshmi Iyengar on January 14, 2011 at 5:44am

Thanks Neil.....I guess I should go through this whole site first and then ask questions....It is unfair to ask questions and waste your time if the answers are already available in the site. And Ed....Je sais nous sommes ici pour parler Francais, mais je ne comprends pas toutes les choses que vous dites toujours.

Permalink Reply by Roman Alvan on January 15, 2011 at 6:55am

Thank you for give us the opportunity to share the doubts and also to learn more french. Im trying to do my best to learn and i think this was give me the possibility to overcome confussions like i had with "leur" and the clitiques. By the way, Which is the etymology of the term "clitique"? Thank you for your reply and greetings for you Neil and to all

Permalink Reply by Erwan on January 15, 2011 at 9:04am

Hello,

It seems that "clitique" comes from the english word clitic (http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/clitique).

I didn't find it in my dictionnaries and have many difficulties to find the eymology on internet (only one article). So, I hope that this answer is good.

 

 

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 15, 2011 at 5:46pm

What appears to have happened is that there already existed the word "enclitic" (French "enclitique"),based on the Latin word "encliticus" (which itself was a loan from Greek). This word appears to have been coined a good 500 years or so ago.

 

Then more recently, the word "clitic" was coined from "enclitic". This type of coining is sometimes called a "back formation", i.e. you take a word that looks as though it is made up of a prefix (or suffix etc) plus another word, and "remove" the prefix. It's similar to how we get "burger" from "Hamburger".

 

I'm not just sure when "clitique" started being used in French-- whether it was more or less around the time of the coining of English "clitic" or if it was much later (the Wiktionary entry suggests later, but they don't cite any source).

 

Of course, this is just the first *attested* use of "clitic" as far as we can see. It supposes that originally, people only thought of using "enclitic", and for a period of around 450 years, nobody in the universe thought to derive "clitic" from "enclitic"...

Permalink Reply by carrie-lee on January 27, 2011 at 5:58pm

Relative pronouns!   For example, when to use duquel vs dont. 

Thank you!

Permalink Reply by Peter Wouters on January 30, 2011 at 2:37am

Sans doute, la bête la "plus noire", c'est le subjonctif. Pas seulement la formation, mais plutôt l'utilisation et les nuances...

Permalink Reply by Erwan on January 30, 2011 at 9:30am

Tu trouveras des éléments intéressants ici : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjonctif et également ici http://www.xtec.es/~sgirona/fle/subjonctif_index.htm

Je reconnais que ma réponse est un peu facile :-)

Le subjonctif est également la bête noire de beaucoup d'élèves français.

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