this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Oh interesting. That's not a conjugation I've ever learnt. In formal language are those kinda similar the same way je vais manger and je mangerai are at least mostly the same thing, or is it similar to what their more literal English translation looks like "I would eat" vs "I would have eaten", which have quite different meanings?
Oh yeah, no, I understand that. What I'm curious about is where septante etc. came from, and what process lead to their use in most other French-speaking countries apart from France.
Haha, unfortunately my French grammar is pretty decent, but my vocab is abysmal. Put it down to an entirely academic introduction to French in school, with almost no exposure to natural French.
Thanks for all that history/cultural information. I already knew that l'Academie was incredibly conservative (I feel like that's so well-known that even people with no interest in language are at least vaguely aware of it—I often see references to l'Academie in the western tech press, for example), but I didn't know anything about the wider cultural context surrounding that.
But anyway yeah, it was really just a hypothetical. I'm fully aware that in the real world there's zero chance of it happening. Even in English, without that level of cultural baggage or institutional oversight, there have been many proposals for spelling reform, none of which ever go anywhere.
I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, "Je mangerais" == I would eat, "J'aurais mangé" == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It's very much not a complete transition, but "vous allez manger" and "vous mangerez" are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.
To say "you will do as I say", an angry mother will say to her kid "tu vas faire c'que j'te dis!" but an angry boss will say "vous ferez ce que je vous dis". Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. "You will have done as I say" implies another causal event between "now" and "you will have done", and French doesn't have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.
I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren't always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).