French: passé simple (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

French: passé simple
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12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

tarvos
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Message 9 of 12

21 August 2013 at 4:56pm | IP Logged

Actually Être has like three or four basic forms from which it mutates; same with aller.
The reason is that historically the verb was actually a set of different verbs in Latin,
which had a dogfight when certain forms of those verbs fell out of use and have become
contained in one verb.

You will for example see that the verbs ire and vadere in Latin have come together to
form parts of the conjugation of aller. These were separate verbs in Latin but merged
with another verb to form aller.

Same for être which has f-based forms, and then forms based on esse and on stare (to
stand).
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Cavesa
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Message 10 of 12

21 August 2013 at 5:39pm | IP Logged

Thanks. I certainly need to return to Latin one day.
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emk
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Message 11 of 12

21 August 2013 at 5:41pm | IP Logged

Cavesa wrote:

It is sometimes used in movies or shows with historical or historical like setting. I would quite expect it in the French dubbing of the Star Wars. And surely in shows like the Borgias. But not in the shows like Eureka which I am watching now in French.

I haven't heard it in normal conversation from a native yet. However, I wouldn't be that surprised to hear it during a lecture or perhaps when a granny or grandpa tells a fairy tale.

Natives will sometimes use fut in conversation, and there's a couple of fixed expressions that will come up occasionally.

In works of fiction, characters will sometimes switch to the passé simple when they're recounting a story of the distant past. In season one of Buffy, for example, the librarian Giles uses the passé simple when talking about demons in human prehistory. And in the Tintin story L'Oreille cassée, there's a man who's been living in the jungle for 20 years, and he switches to the passé simple when he retells the story of how he got stuck there.

I've never actually heard somebody do this in real life, probably because many native speakers can't actually produce long stretches of the passé simple on demand. But if you were making up a fairy tale on the fly, I think it would sound perfectly appropriate, if you could actually pull it off.

Interestingly, this means that the overwhelming majority of French books use the passé simple for narration and the passé composé in dialog. If an author wants to avoid the passé simple, they'll usually go with the present tense. Books which use the passé composé for narration are actually pretty rare—the only one I've seen is L'Étranger.

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