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French object pronouns | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7163 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 11 14 January 2007 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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How did they get their crazy features:
a) some the same as subject pronouns, some different? b) some gender dependent, some the same for both orders? b) the fixed order, implying the pronoun for things sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the one for people? (ie it's 'le lui' but 'vous le') Has anyone ever seen an account of their evolution? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 14 January 2007 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Everybody who has learnt Ancient French has also learnt about the development of the unstressed personal pronouns, and if it is complicated today, it was no less complicated in the Middle ages. At least now there are only a certain number of forms, but 800 years ago there were a host of dialectal variations. Try to understand why the pronouns are different in this quote from Simon d'Authie's Essample Nouvel, which I found just by opening an antology of Old French texts:
L'un em prendés, et l'autre me laissiés, (One took me, the other let me go) I have a "Petite Syntaxe de l'Ancien Français" by Foulet. Out of 374 pages, pages 148 to 222 are spent on the personal pronouns. Just to make students of Ancient Français raving mad the rules were sometimes exactly the opposite of the modern rules: "Je le te comande" (p. 149), meaning "I order you that", - in modern French this would be "Je te le commande". Foulet explains this excerpt of the syntax of the personal pronouns like this (my translation): "You can resume the two rules above [in Foulets book] by saying that the Old French always put the direct object first. Modern French is less consequent as it has 'je le lui donnerai', but ' je vous le donnerai'. However the old word order has been preserved after the imperative, at least with a masculin singular object pronoun and first person singular indirect object pronoun*: 'donnez-le moi'. However the popular language is more logical and says 'donne me le', as in 'il me le donne'. Outside first person singular the usage is wavering; you hear both 'Donnez-la moi' and 'Donnez-moi la'**) (* my version, - Foulet writes this nonsense: "au moins avec le pronom masculin de la première personne du singulier") (** I never heard that, - it sounds like children's language) The imperative is a special case. Otherwise the normal order of unstressed pronouns is as follows: indirect objects 1.-2. person (and mostly persons) are followed by the direct object (mostly non-person and thus 3. person): me le, vous la..., but the opposite order prevails with a third person pronoun as indirect object: ... la lui, le leur. Combinations of this kind with persons as direct object are avoided. Edited by Iversen on 15 January 2007 at 4:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7163 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 3 of 11 15 January 2007 at 3:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks - so they've been crazy for a while!
But I'm confused by your example - what's 'em'? It seems to an object pronoun, but how is it different from 'me'? I'm still curious about how they got so, erm, strange. For example: 1) has 'nous' always been the same for subject and object pronouns, or was the distincition lost at some point? 2) was there ever a gender based variation in 'lui' ? 3) how did the old order (Direct Object - Indirect Object) morph into the odd modern order (DO[1st & 2rd person] - IO, but IO - DO[3rd person])??? But I guess with lots of dialects, they're tricky questions with unclear answers... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 11 15 January 2007 at 4:10am | IP Logged | |||||
The thing is ... it is not different. Unless my Ancient French has deteriorated more than I thought it means exactly the same thing as "me", it is just a dialectal form. In fact in Catalan "em" is quite normal ("em sembla" = "it seems to me"). I haven't got a good explanation for most of the changes since Ancient French. Where I'm sitting now I haven't got my old dusty books so I can't check things, but I have a faint recollection that "lui" started out as a stressed form ('forme tonique'), and that there was a separate unstressed feminine "li". But don't bet on it, - I haven't been studying Old French for almost 30 years. EDIT: I just found this table on the internet, - CRD= direct object, CDI= indirect object. It seems that "leur" (lor, lur in Old French, from latin "illorum") has always been unstressed, whereas "lui" did originate as a stressed pronoun in masculine, while the unstressed and the feminine stressed pronoun was "li". So my memory was not quite off the mark. one more EDIT: To know more about the early history of French check out this fine overview from the University in Copenhagen (in French). Edited by Iversen on 15 January 2007 at 4:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 5 of 11 15 January 2007 at 7:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Are you sure about this? 'Donne me le' sounds very odd to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7011 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 6 of 11 15 January 2007 at 9:03am | IP Logged | |||||
My guide to Quebecois French mentions this in "Other unusual constructions to watch out for", next to replacing `dont' with 'que', adding 're' to words that don't need it (rentrer instead of entrer, rejoindre intead of joindre, ...) and using 'venir' instead of devenir. I've heard all of these in everyday speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 11 15 January 2007 at 9:59am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not making it up, - I'm quoting the French linguist who wrote the book about Ancient French. But I probably should have put a disclaimer here as I did in two other cases because it also seems very odd to me. I would probably settle for "donne-le-moi", but I haven't got a grammar with me to verify that, - at least Google has 1,25 mio. examples of this sequence of pronouns. As stated by dmq 'donne me le' may be a regionalism, or it may have been popular at some earlier point in the history of spoken French Edited by Iversen on 15 January 2007 at 10:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7163 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 8 of 11 15 January 2007 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for those. It seems however crazy they are now, they were more complicated before, not least because ancient french still had cases. Now I feel quite lucky! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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