7.3 Au marché — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a French text of 516 words with a spoken dialogue inside it, and follow the dialogue without a transcript. Explain what the partitive article is doing in a place where English puts no word at all. Recognise the pattern used after quantities of measure, containers, approximation, or negation, and stop putting an article after it. Read a market exchange aloud with the intonation of a question that has no question word in it. Four sentences from the text, before any explanation. Read them aloud at whatever speed you can manage, without looking anything up; you will meet them all in place. Le samedi matin, le marché de la place Carnot commence à sept heures. Élise arrive à neuf heures avec un grand panier et une liste. Devant l'étal du maraîcher, elle s'arrête. Je voudrais un kilo de tomates, s'il vous plaît. Prerequisites : 7.2 and 5.4 — the reading habit and the possessives from the second text (7.2), and the food vocabulary (5.4). You will also use most of the conjugation volume, because from this text onwards the past tenses are used. Read the companion document first, once, straight through. This time the narration stops three times for people to speak. Do not slow down for the dialogue: spoken French on the page moves faster than the prose around it, not slower. Then come back. Coming after the conjugation, grammar and conversation volumes, this text makes no allowances. About this text The text is called Au marché . It follows a woman called Élise through a Saturday market in a French provincial town, from seven, when the lorries arrive in the dark, to eleven, when she climbs her staircase with a basket that is too heavy. It runs to 516 words in twenty-one paragraphs, twelve of them single lines of dialogue. It was written for this course. The gap from the last text is the largest in the first phase. The second text had no irregular verbs and no past tense. This one has both, plus reflexive verbs, object pronouns, the pronoun that replaces a quantity, the imperfect against the perfect, and five relative clauses. Almost nothing in it is ahead of you: if a sentence stops you, go and check the lesson rather than guess. A market makes you use the partitive article in almost every sentence, because it is all about unspecified quantities. You do not buy the tomatoes or a tomato; you buy some tomatoes, and French has a word for some that you cannot leave out. The same scene in English has almost no articles at all — the clearest demonstration of a rule that otherwise feels arbitrary. One point of setting. At many stalls in a French market, it is not self-service: you do not touch the produce; you wait, you are addressed, you ask, and the seller chooses and weighs. At a stall, the exchange begins with a greeting and a question from the seller, and a customer who states a quantity without saying good morning has been rude. That is why the first dialogue opens the way it does. The article English does not have French has three articles where English has two. Besides the definite and indefinite articles, there is the partitive, which marks an unspecified quantity. Its forms are the preposition de welded to the definite article: masculine du , feminine de la , de l' before a vowel, and plural des . English has a word for this, some , but in English it is optional and in French compulsory. I bought bread is good, natural English. In French it cannot be said, because a bare noun with no article is not a French noun phrase, except in a short list of fixed expressions. Read the first paragraph of the text again. The smells of the market are listed with four partitives in a row — warm bread, fish, strawberries, cheese — where English would have no articles at all. That is why English speakers write bare nouns in French for years. French English · what to notice du pain chaud warm bread — the article is compulsory in French and impossible to keep in idiomatic English de la salade some lettuce — feminine, and note that the noun means the leaf as well as the dish des fraises strawberries — the plural partitive des is spelled exactly like the plural indefinite des , and in practice you do not need to tell them apart de l'eau water — the elided form, used before any vowel sound regardless of gender un kilo de tomates a kilo of tomatoes — after a quantity of measure, the article vanishes and bare de is left pas de fraises no strawberries — after a negation the same thing happens: the partitive collapses to bare de The last two rows are one rule, worth memorising. When the noun already has a quantity in front of it, a measure or a negation, the article disappears and only the bare preposition survives. A kilo of tomatoes, a pound of beans, two hundred grams of cheese, a litre of cider, about thirty cheeses, a lot of interest: all are in the text, all with bare de (or d' ) and no article. English speakers reliably write the article back in, because English says a kilo of the tomatoes when it means particular ones. How the dialogue works The dialogue is printed the French way: no quotation marks, and each new speaker starts a new paragraph with a long dash. Nothing says who is speaking; in a two-person exchange the alternation does the work. In the first exchange the seller speaks first, third and fifth, and you are never told his name. Three features of spoken French appear that you met in the conversation volume but probably not yet in print. First, questions are asked by intonation alone. Not one question in the text uses inversion or the longer question-marker construction; all are statements with a question mark and a rising voice. They are from here? is not bad French but the ordinary spoken form; the other question forms belong to writing and careful speech. Second, the polite conditional. The customer does not use the plain verb for I want , which in a shop is close to rude, but the form from lesson 3.7 — the normal way to order anything in France. Third, the pronoun th