FRENCH LANGUAGE - GRAMMAR

In the 14th century the two case system of the Vulgar Latin became obsolete, the forms of the Objective case replacing those of the Subjective case. Thus, in modern French nouns are not declined for case. Formerly, they were marked for plural by the addition of -s or -es, but the ending, though kept in spelling, has generally been lost in speech.

French grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages, including:

* the loss of Latin's declensions
* only two grammatical genders
* the development of grammatical articles from Latin demonstratives
* new tenses formed from auxiliaries

French word order is Subject Verb Object, except when the object is a pronoun, in which case the word order is Subject Object Verb. Some rare archaisms allow for different word orders.

Masculine and feminine gender are distinguished but are usually marked not in the noun but rather in the accompanying article (definite article le / la) or adjective. Plural marking in spoken French is often similarly distinguished (definite article le / la : les). Adjectives change endings (usually by adding an -e for feminine and -s for plural) to agree with nouns.

The verb in French is conjugated for three persons, singular and plural, but again, although distinguished in spelling, several of these forms are pronounced identically. The French verb has 4 moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and conditional), 4 simple tenses (present, preterite, imperfect, future) of compound (analytical) perfect and progressive tenses; the latter are especially characteristic of the spoken language.

As in the other Romance tongues, the French future and conditional indicative are really compounds formed by adding to the entire infinitive (used as a stem) the present and imperfect indicative endings, respectively, of ‘avoir’. The perfect, pluperfect and future perfect are usually constructed with ‘avoir’ (Latin - habere) ‘to have’, but some intransitive and all reflexive verbs use être (Latin- esse) ‘to be’.

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on the medieval pronunciation with strong etymological bias towards the Latin parental forms, which has created many silent letters in French spelling. As a result, it is difficult to predict the spelling on the basis of the sound alone.

This system, however, allows for distinction between the different grammatical forms. Thus the following endings are all pronounced in the same way as an opened ‘e’:

-er in parler - to speak (present infinitive);
-ez in parler – ‘you’ (in plural) speak
-ais in parlais – ‘I / you’ was / were speaking
-ait in parlait – ‘he / she’ were speaking
-aient in parlaient – ‘they’ were speaking
-ai in parlai – ‘I’ spoke