5.2 Family and people — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name everybody in a family, from grandparents to grandchildren, with forty-eight words, not all of which are cognates. Build the whole set of in-law and step-relations from a single compounding rule, instead of learning a dozen separate words as English makes you do. Handle the three French words that each cover two English ones, and see why a sentence about a woman can also be a sentence about a wife. Call out to a stranger, a shop assistant or somebody you love, using words French uses where English uses nothing at all. Prerequisites : 5.1 — you should already be taking every noun together with its article, and you will meet here the same compounding habit that built a thumbnail out of a nail and a thumb. See 5.1 Vocabulary if you need it. The family is the first field where a beginner runs out of words within a minute of conversation, and an English speaker starts here with an odd mixture of assets and gaps. The assets come from the Norman layer: the general vocabulary of kinship was borrowed wholesale in the Middle Ages, so the words for parents, an uncle, an aunt and a cousin are there to read at a glance. The gaps are in the closest relations of all. The words for a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son and a daughter were never replaced in English, because a language rarely borrows the words its children learn first. So exactly where the vocabulary matters most, you are starting from nothing — and then there is a second layer of relations that English handles with a cluster of unconnected words and French handles with one rule. Words this lesson leaves out on purpose These come free, and none of them appears in the word list. The reason they are collected here is that the free words are the general ones and the words you have to learn are the specific ones, which is the opposite of the usual shape of a vocabulary list. Already readable What you still have to add la famille feminine; also a biological family les parents masculine plural; also relatives in general l'oncle masculine; borrowed into English from this word la tante feminine; English aunt came from an older French form of it le cousin masculine; the feminine adds an e l'enfant either gender; English kept it as infant la personne feminine; also means nobody, with a negative le mariage masculine; both the ceremony and the state One of those eight deserves a warning, because it is the only one that can turn round and bite. The noun for a person doubles as the pronoun for nobody: with a negative word in the sentence it stops meaning a person and starts meaning not one. You met that in 4.5; here, simply notice that a free word can have a second life as a piece of grammar. Three words that cover two English words each The first is the noun for a woman, which is also the noun for a wife, with no change of form and no separate word available. Which one is meant is decided by the little word in front: with a possessive it is almost always a wife, with an article almost always a woman. English escapes the ambiguity only because it kept two old words, one of which stayed general while the other narrowed to a married woman. The second is the noun for a daughter, which is also the ordinary noun for a girl. With a possessive it is almost always a daughter; with an article, it is usually a girl, but can also mean daughter depending on context. The third is the noun for a man, which is also the word for a human being, the way English man used to be and increasingly is not. A sentence built on it may be about males or about humanity, and the difference is never marked. The word for a husband, by contrast, is its own word, so the pair for husband and wife is lopsided: one member is specific and the other is not. Two words go the other way. There is no everyday French noun for a single sibling: you say that you have a brother and a sister, or, in the plural, brothers and sisters. And the ordinary noun for people is plural only, takes a plural verb, and cannot be counted; to count people you switch to the free cognate for a person. How in-laws and step-relations are built English has a dozen expressions here, from two different systems. For relations by marriage it welds a phrase onto the noun: mother-in-law, brother-in-law, son-in-law. For relations by remarriage it puts a word in front: stepmother, stepbrother, stepson. The two systems do not overlap, and a learner of English has to learn both. French does all of it with one pair of adjectives — the ordinary adjectives for handsome and beautiful — placed in front of the noun and joined with a hyphen. The adjective agrees with the relative: the masculine form before a male relative, the feminine before a female one. That is the whole rule, and one pair of adjectives does the work of both English systems. Pattern What it can mean beau- + male relative the in-law, or the step-relation belle- + female relative the in-law, or the step-relation petit- + son a grandson — the small son petite- + daughter a granddaughter grand- + parent a grandfather or grandmother Two things follow, and both matter. The first is that the compound is ambiguous where the English words are not: one word covers a mother-in-law and a stepmother, and a French speaker adds a phrase only when the difference has to be made. When you read one of these words the context decides, and if it does not decide, the writer did not think it mattered. The second is that the son-in-law has two words. By the rule he is beau-fils , the same word as a stepson, but French also has a word of his own for him, gendre , unrelated to anything else in the list, which can only mean son-in-law. The grandparent compounds repay a look for a spelling reason. The adjective in front of a grandmother is the masculine form, without the feminine ending you would expect: a fossil from the time when that adjective had one form for both genders. The grandchild compounds use the adjective for small, so a grandson is a smal