Alignment chart, impossible french verbs to conjugate edition
(they honestly all deserve to be in the chaotic evil case)
French is out there having verb that you just… can conjugate in only two (2) time
Gésir does have full conjugations, only they’re not used in Contemporary French anymore, where this rare, archaic verb only survives in expressions fixed by usage, such as ci-gît…, ‘there rests…’ found on tombstones.
Middle French (late 15th to early 17th centuries) used the simple future forms as well as the subjunctive; mediaeval French used more, like the simple past. Personally, nous geûmes makes me weak in the knees.
This day in 1942, the communist French Resistance fighter Jean Quarré was executed by the Nazis at Mont-Valérien, aged 23. On the way to his firing squad, he stuck out his tongue at the German cameraman making a propaganda film.
Languages have different levels of othographic depth, that means that a language’s orthography can vary in a spectrum of a very irregular and complex orthography (deep orthography) to a completely regular and simple one (shallow orthography).
English, French, Danish, Swedish, Arabic, Urdu, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Chinese, and Japanese have orthographies that are highly irregular, complex and where sounds cannot be predicted from the spelling. These writing systems are more difficuld and slow to be learned by children, who may take years. In the medium of the scale there’s Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Greek, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Korean, where there are some irregularities but overall the correspondence of one sound to one phoneme is not that bad. At the positive end of the scale there’s Italian, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, Indonesian, Quechua, Ayamara, Guarani, Mayan languages, and most African languages (because there were no history of spelling, so a new one of scratch was made as very regular), they all have very simple and regular spelling systems, with usually a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. These are very easily learned by children.
Orthographic depth has several implications for the study of psycholinguistics and the study of language processing and also acquisition of reading and writing by children.
Note: remember that there’s no objective numbering on the three categories I made, there are more than just these three categories, because it works like a spectrum. Three categories were used just as a means for simplification.
It’s pronounced [u] in most orthographies, but in French, Occitan, Azorean and inner-central European Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic and Occitan, <u> represents [y]. In Afrikaans it also represents the more common [œ].
In Swedish, Norwegian, Somali, Faroese, Southern Sami, Ume Sami, Maori, Madeiran Portuguese and Californian English it’s central [ʉ].
In English it has a variety of values namely [ʌ] as in “cut”, [juː] as in “music” and [ʊ] as in “put”. Less commons values are: [ɪ] as in “busy” or [ɛ] as in “bury”.
In Northern Welsh it’s [ɨ] and in Southern Welsh it’s [i].
Periphrastic constructions of tense-aspect with auxiliaries is common for modern Indo-European languages. The present perfect (I have eaten) and the past perfect (I had eaten) both use “to have” (possession verb) as an auxiliary. That’s also the case for Portuguese, Spanish (although no longer with a possession sense), Catalan, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, and Amharic.
Some languages have both “to have” and “to be” depending on the type of the main verb. French, Italian, German and Dutch have “to be” for unaccusative verbs (including reflexive verbs and intransitive motion verbs, etc.) and “to have” for all other verbs.
Slavic languages, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian languages tend to use “to be” for the same effect. Also, many Bantu languages but only for the past perfect.
Some languages use a verb or particle derived from “to finish” or “already”, such as Arabic, Afrikaans, Meithei, Burmese, Karen, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Khmu, Malay, Indonesian, Sundanese, Javanese, Minangkabau, Aceh, Toba, Tagalog.
Note: not all languages share the same meanings when using the present or past perfect of English, even though the literal translations may be the same. In Portuguese “tenho comido” (lit. I have eaten) means “I have been eating [over and over again]”
Many Bantu languages use a prefix system (also with gender).
Most Indo-European languages have suffixes, although the Germanic languages, and, to a lesser extent French, have a mixed strategy that involves apophony/umlaut, and in the case of French, many irregular plurals, that totaly change the pronounciation of the word.
Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, some Nilo-Saharan languages have this mixed strategy with vowel changes in the middle of the words, and suffixes.
Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan) have only a stem change (apophony).
A few African languages just change the tone of the word. French, Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Philippines’ languages and many Polynesian languages, and the Mande languages West Africa, use a particle before the noun, usually. In French this is the definite article la/le vs. les, because the final -s of nouns is not pronounced, so the plural is only noun in the spoken language from this particle.
Indonesian and Malay have full reduplication (orang - person; orang-orang - people).
Many East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai) don’t mark plural at all.
![Pronounciation of the Latin alphabet letter <U>It’s pronounced [u] in most orthographies, but](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5451afbc4bccadda6ccb7884286e7e53/tumblr_pxox5279XT1uuqf4fo1_r1_1280.png "Pronounciation of the Latin alphabet letter <U>It’s pronounced [u] in most orthographies, but")
