Tenses

[Sally mills]

The future tense sounds like the conditional tense; Je donnerais/Je donnerai when spoken or is there a subtle difference?

[Chantal Savignat]

Hello

the two tenses have exactly the same sound.

[Vedas]

Things are a bit more complicated.

It should be different but in practise they are often similar, as for one make the difference between the sound "é" in "je donnerai" and the sound "è" in "je donnerais"

This is the way I learnt it at school and I consider it  a mistake when it 's not correctly pronounced.

[Neil Coffey]

Remember that *you* may consider it a "mistake", but the language has no inherent obligation to conform to your wishes! :)

[Vedas]

I do agree but it's not a question of wishes it's the way grammar was and is still taught and I was not born in the 19th century. ..I'm 44 

The grammar (grammaire du français classique et moderne/ Hachette) I have dates back to 1991 ok it's not new but they clearly make the difference between the two pronunciations.

It's not a question of being fussy or advocating anything, it's just a rule.

Why change should always be laxity ? That is an interesting question !

I was educated in the west of France and we still make the difference between the two sounds, I have always paid attention to it just like the "é" of the passé simple.

Now you're right if you go to the South of France people don't make any difference between "é" and "è" and there can be some misunderstanding.

[Chantal Savignat]

Yes, if you speak with French who are careful of the language, there are light differences in pronunciation (there is another exemple : in school I learnt when there is "rr" we should pronounce the 2 "r")

but in current life, there are a lot of French who don't do difference, and I think that this kind of difference is too light to be heard by a non native.

[Neil Coffey]

Hi Chantal -- I agree broadly, but would just take a slightly different stance.

I would say it's not about whether the difference is subtle, but rather about whether it is reliable.

You can find cases where speakers reliably use the open vs close 'e'. For example, in the word clé vs craie speakers generally use a close e vowel in the first case and an open e vowel (as though the word was written "crè") in the second. Similarly, in pairs such as thé~tête. So the distinction between these vowels per se is perfectly alive and kicking in French, and in some cases, which vowel is used can reliably help to distinguish between words.

But it just so turns out that in the case of donnerai vs donnerais, that distinction isn't reliable. All things being equal, if you hear a speaker say "donnerai(s)" with an open ("é") vowel at the end-- even assuming that you have unambiguously identified the vowel as being an open and not a close 'e'-- you still cannot reliably ascertain whether the word they intended to say was "donnerai" or "donnerais". (Of course, in practice, you can generally determine which word was intended because of the surrounding context.) It's not an issue of identifying which vowel is used, simply that the two vowels aren't used consistently enough to be a reliable indicator in this specific case. (Whereas, in other cases such as thé vs tête, these same vowels are used consistently enough to be a reliable indicator.)

[Chantal Savignat]

HI Neil ! I understand your idea. But in my mind, pronunciation (I think it's the same thing in English) is never reliable.

I live in Paris but my family is from Auvergne in the center of France.

In Paris we hear equally "cré" (close vowel) or "crè" (open vowel). 5 minutes ago, I asked my daughter, she said "cré". It's the same thing for "lait". 

in Auvergne we used to hear only "crè" (open vowel) or "lè".

I think the problem is for "è" (open vowel) 

"clé" is 100% heard "clé", I don't know anyone saying "clè"

[Neil Coffey]

Hi Chantal -- Thanks for this, it may be by the sound of things that this merger goes even further than I thought. I was under the impression that a few less common words, e.g. "haie", "craie", still had more of a tendency to keep the distinction of the 'e' vowel, but maybe that's not even the case nowadays.

[Neil Coffey]

Thanks for this follow-up to my admittedly glib comment! -- again, there are some interesting issues here.

Now, when a grammar book states a "rule", what does that "rule" actually represent? Well, at two ends of spectrum, it could be:

- that it is a "descriptive" rule: the author is attempting to describe the language 'as it is actually spoken'

- that it is a "prescriptive" rule: the author is advocating a particular pattern that they recommend people follow (e.g. because they believe the result is more elegant).

In reality, many rules will be a mixture of the two to some extent: what it is in practice possible to prescribe is limited by the actual language to some extent, and conversely, a thorough description of the language will take into account speakers' preferences, social pressures etc.

In any case, a given "rule" is still subject to evaluation one way or another. If it is predominantly a descriptive rule, we can assess whether or not the rule actually describes the language in its present form. If it is predominantly a prescriptive rule, that doesn't automatically imply an obligation to follow it: as a speaker, you will assess to what extent you agree with the author's reason for advocating the rule, whether you personally prefer to follow it, whether you feel there is actually a social pressure to adhere to it etc.

As a descriptive rule, the idea that /e/ (close 'e' vowel) reliably represents 'donnerai' and /E/ (open 'e' vowel) reliably occurs in 'donnerais' clearly falls flat on its face. Actual observation of speakers' behaviour clearly doesn't bear that out. Now, you may still decide to adopt it as a prescriptive rule. And that's fine: you weigh up your aesthetic preference for that rule, the social pressure you feel for adopting the rule, whether in reality it is actually practical to re-train yourself to adopt it etc. But... you don't speak the language in a vacuum. Other speakers will be performing their own similar, personal evaluation.

Now, is this change an example of "laxity". Well, there are at least two ways of viewing this. From one point of view: even if it was, so what? Why should the language be deliberately more complicated than it needs to be? From another point of view (and the view that I really subscribe to), it's pretty much impossible to arrive at such a judgement. Remember that a "language" is a complex system: the amalgam of potentially millions of speakers applying millions and millions of different patterns/rules. As one part of the system changes, another part adjusts. It's really impossible to isolate one particular aspect (e.g. distribution of /e/ vs /E/ in the future/conditional forms) and predict one specific adverse impact of changing it (e.g. negative impact on the comprehensibility of future vs conditional tense) without analysing the millions of other factors involved in the system. And objectively, it's also not clear why you should worry that much -- if you look at the thousands of languages spoken on earth today, it's difficult to point to a clear concrete example of a major aspect of communication breaking down in this way.

By the way, I am in no way saying that the difference between the two 'e' vowels is not made at all. As I mentioned in a post to Chantal, there are cases where the difference is reliably made (e.g. "thé" vs "tête"). It just turns out that in the case of future vs conditional, usage isn't that consistent.

[Vedas]

 ok, I agree 100% with your comment and I thank you for your time  (don't forget to sleep!) and clear explanations.

I was not going to fight against this usage anyway, I'm pretty aware that few people make the distinction in that matter. It's just that as you may know in linguistics the difference is said to be "relevant" which is not the case in the way you can pronounce "lait". Did I sound worried? I apologize I was born with a proclivity toward anxiety and seriousness...

Joking aside the fact that I am a teacher might explain my concern as on a daily basis I'm confronted by sentences I can't make  sense out and pupils would always retort "but I understand myself" well right then... but to what extent can usage take precedence over the rules ?

Now as  a case in point English is interesting, although RP is only spoken by a minority (2 or 3 % ?) and so at odds with usage it remains a reference for teaching foreigners. At some point we must agree  on points of reference even when it contradicts usage.

For sure there is no clear cut frontier and variations of usage have always prevailed but I think that sociologically, with the strong sense of individuality that permeates our societies, any rule to stick by tends to be resented or felt as offensive and it's more and more difficult to find  and accept common ground. I'll accept the idea that I'm old fashioned or a stickler to principles. 

As a matter of fact you'll find more and more people unable to differenciate the future from the conditionnal or mix it up with the imparfait which is a bit more problematic, some pupils (from 12 to 20) don't even know (or pretend not to) about the existence of  the conditionnal. 

That reminds me of  Orwell saying (in politics and the English language)  that the struggle against the abuse of language was seen as a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light  but there was more at stake : "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fails all the more completely because he drinks . It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts"..."

Obviously it can be applied to French all the more today with the use of the management and technical vocabulary that pervades our whole environment.

Now incidentally in the media the distinction between "é" and "è" is more and more blurred to the point that misusage has almost become the norm:

"j'é été étonné de voir le succé de votre dérnier... quel été le montant de votre premier caché ?"

for "j'ai été étonné de voir le succès de votre dernier...quel était le montant de votre premier cachet"

Interestingly it seems that people in Switzerland or Belgium are more respectful to the "é" and "è" pattern pronunciation.

In old songs or poems the distinction would be extremely relevant.

Actually in the 20th century many sounds have faded away in French, there used to be a distinction between "brun" and "brin" (close and open) or jeûne et jeune as the sound in pâtes tends to dissapear.

[Neil Coffey]

I appreciate much of this general point of view, although I suspect if broken down in detail many of the 'issues' you highlight would still turn out to be social preferences rather than objective problems at the end of the day. (When you say that pupils don't differentiate the imperfect and conditional, I suspect that what would turn out to be the case is that they don't use or label them in a way that you would prefer them to; when you describe the pattern of 'e' vowels you mention as being a "misusage", what you effectively mean is 'usage that does not match my expectations'-- it's hard to see how objectively it could really be "wrong" one way or the other-- there's no absolute, God-given or inherent, logical reason why a particular pattern should occur -- it's all a question of practice and convention at the end of the day.)

Now... that's still fine. As a teacher, of course part of your role will inevitably be as a "tutor", instilling your personal values and preferences upon your pupils. Even though your job description and staff code of conduct may declare otherwise, reality is reality. (Conversely, I would posit that what it means to be generally 'well educated' also includes the faculty to evaluate, accept or reject such values.)

*But*... what I would also posit is that an educator has a moral responsibility not to distort facts. That's may major gripe and "campaigning point" with much of the prescriptivist approach to language education that we see. (And I don't just mean among individual teachers-- I'm talking about an institutionalised phenomenon.) Most prescriptivism in practice consists of aesthetic preferences presented as though it had some intrinsic fact or logic behind it, and that's what I see as the problem. I see nothing wrong with saying. e.g. "I personally recommend that you don't split 'to' and the following infinitive, because there appears to be a convention among a number of respected writers not to do so, and I and many people think it is aesthetically more pleasing that way". But saying e.g. "you should not split 'to' and the following infinitive because that is not how infinitives worked in Latin" (or whatever) is making either a factual claim that is untrue or presenting as 'good logic' rationale that is actually faulty (or worse, both...).

Another common type of rule proposes to solve a particular problem. For example, that using /e/ on the future tense and /E/ on the conditional will solve an ambiguity, or that avoiding the passive will make a text easier to understand. Again, such rules imply claims that are not necessarily true and can be subject to scrutiny (is there actually a communication problem when you subject the matter to a rigorous scientific investigation, and does the proposed rule actually solve it?)

It's curious that people tend to treat language differently to other subjects in that they treat things which are a matter of fact as though they were a matter of opinion. In most subjects, the core of knowledge that is taught in schools is ultimately based on some kind of evidence and widely accepted by experts in the field. (We teach that, say, ethanol boils at a certain temperature or that the atom has a particular structure because a number of repeatable experiments have been run over the years supporting this information. But when it comes to language, for some reason it is fair game to assert that, say, a certain structure is ambiguous, without citing any experiment showing that to be the case.)

 

This is the objection I have with, for example, the Académie français's approach of putting a table on a web site saying "dire" and "ne pas dire", giving the false impression that their aesthetic opinion has some inherent 'truth' or 'logic' behind it which it simply does not. There's no problem with people having and instilling aesthetic opinions about language, and of course there is irrational social etiquette around language, just as there is irrational social etiquette around singing happy birthday to people on their birthday or not wearing baseball caps in church. As I say, my main gripe is when instilling such etiquette involves misrepresenting facts about the nature of language (or a given language).

[Neil Coffey]

P.S. Just to address briefly a couple of other very interesting issues you mention in passing which also merit discussion.

What you say about 'establishing a reference' is also very true, of course. Both French and English come with them a whole body of established convention on how they are typically described and taught, and such convention may be bound to particular societies. If you were taught in France, "French" probably has three types of verb conjugation: -er, -ir and 'other'; if you were taught French in England, "French" probably has four conjugations: -er, -ir, -re and 'irregular'; if you were taught French 200 years ago, "French" probably had 10 regular verb conjugations... (essentially) the same language, but a different model of representation... (OK, yes, French has changed in 200 years, but not so radically that the entire verb system has remodelled itself-- the actual verb system was still ostensibly the same and what has changed is the conventions on how it is presented.)

Now, the case of RP is also interesting. As you say, it is a whole system of reference to which it could be argued that practically no speaker actually adheres. That said, there are some things to bear in mind:

- "pronunciation" is really a misnomer. The term "received pronunciation" originates from the late 1800s when there was little formal distinction between what we would nowadays term "phonetics" and "phonology" (and indeed morphology to some extent) -- in other words, partly what was referred to as pronunciation is in reality describing a sound system. And many of the systematic behaviours of RP do extend to other accents in general;

- what is actually perceived of as "RP" has changed over time, and the pronunciation traits that would fall under a category of "RP" or "not geographically marked" has possible widened;

- the number of speakers exposed to a pronunciation that would be perceived of as "RP" has probably hugely increased in recent years, now that a large percentage of the population go to university, people have much greater mobility, the UK has a number of economic hubs with instant communication with the capital, television broadcasts of RP speakers are ubiquitous...

- for the above reasons, the 3% figure probably doesn't reflect presentday reality. It comes from a study conducted by Trudgill in... the 1970s... in a small-ish city (Norwich) on the periphery of the country... in a study with a grand sample size of 50. Whether you can extrapolate this to the entire country in 2013 (or indeed whether you can extrapolate it to anything really) is debatable.

What nowadays constitutes "RP" for most speakers probably doesn't adhere entirely to the conventions still used in many dictionaries and textbooks (traits such as /i/ rather than /I/ at the ends of words such as "city"; the fronting of the /u/ vowel; the reduction of certain diphthongs and triphthongs...), but on the whole, much of the material that uses RP as a frame of reference still has merit and relevance.