7.2 Ma famille — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a French text of 496 words about a family and follow who owns what. Choose between the three shapes of a French possessive without thinking about the owner. Say out loud why son père and sa mère are the right words for a brother and for a sister alike. Name the four things in the text that the course has not taught you yet, and read past them anyway. Here are 4 sentences taken from the text itself, before you read any of the explanation. Read them aloud now, at whatever speed you can manage, and do not look anything up; you will meet all of them in place. Je suis Julien, j'ai vingt ans et j'habite encore chez mes parents. Mon père a cinquante-deux ans. Ma mère a quarante-neuf ans. Ma sœur Léa a dix-sept ans. Prerequisites : 7.1 and 4.4 — you should already be able to read a continuous present-tense text without stopping at every unknown word (7.1), and to make an adjective agree in gender and number with the noun it belongs to (4.4). The companion document holds the French. Read it straight through before you read anything below, once, at whatever speed you can manage, and do not look anything up. You will understand less of it than you understood of the first text, and that is expected: this one is about a fifth longer and it is thinner in cognates on purpose, because a family is described with the oldest and least Latinate words a language has. Then come back here. Everything below assumes you have read it once. About this text The text is called Ma famille and it is spoken by a twenty-year-old called Julien who still lives at home in Nantes. It runs to 496 words in nine paragraphs, all of them in the present tense, and it was written for this course. It is not an adaptation of anything and it is not a translation of the family lesson in any other course on this site. Two facts about how it was built will make it easier to read. The first is that almost every verb in it is one you have already conjugated. Apart from être and avoir , every single verb in the nine paragraphs belongs to the first conjugation, the one with the infinitive in -er . Apart from those two, there is no irregular present tense anywhere in the text. That was not easy to arrange and it will not happen again in this course, but for one text it is worth it: it means that when you stumble, the problem is a noun or a possessive, never a verb form you could not have known. The second fact is the reason the text exists. Its eighth paragraph is a deliberate demonstration, built by repetition rather than by explanation, of the single feature of French possessives that English speakers get wrong for years. You will find that paragraph strange when you reach it, because four sentences in a row have almost the same shape. That is not clumsy writing. It is a paradigm pretending to be prose. The cast is worth having straight before you read it again. Julien is the narrator. His father teaches mathematics; his mother is a doctor; his sister is seventeen and at school; his brother is nine and a nuisance. There are grandparents in Brittany, an aunt and an uncle in Bordeaux, and one cousin at university in Toulouse. Nobody in the text does anything dramatic. The whole point is the pronouns. The one rule this text exists to show In English, a possessive tells you about the owner. You say his mother when the owner is male and her mother when the owner is female, and the thing owned has no say in the matter. English has been doing this since Old English and it feels like the natural way for a language to work. French does the opposite, and it does it completely. The French possessive tells you nothing about the owner's sex. It agrees with the thing owned, in gender and in number, exactly as an ordinary adjective does — which is what it is. Son is the masculine singular form; sa is the feminine singular; ses is the plural for both genders. Which one you use depends on the noun that follows, and on nothing else in the sentence. So in the text, when Alice loves her father, that is son père . When her brother loves his mother, that is sa mère . Reverse the owners and nothing changes: a boy's father is still son père and a girl's mother is still sa mère . The word père is masculine, so it takes the masculine form for ever; the word mère is feminine, so it takes the feminine form for ever. If you want to know whose father is meant, French makes you get it from the context, or add à elle or de Julien , which is what a French speaker does when it really matters. Here is the whole set. Read the second column with the first: the point is that the left-hand column tells you about the speaker and the top row tells you about the noun, and the two are independent. Owner Masculine noun · feminine noun · plural noun my mon frère · ma sœur · mes parents your (one person you know well) ton frère · ta sœur · tes parents his, her, its son frère · sa sœur · ses parents our notre frère · notre sœur · nos parents your (several people, or one person politely) votre frère · votre sœur · vos parents their leur frère · leur sœur · leurs parents Three things in that table are worth a line each. The first three rows have three forms, because they distinguish masculine from feminine in the singular; the last three rows have only two, because notre , votre and leur do not care about gender at all and only change for the plural. That means leur and leurs are the easiest pair in the table and the one English speakers still get wrong, because they hear an -s and reach for it whenever more than one person owns something. It is the thing owned that decides: one garden belonging to two grandparents is leur jardin , and it is in the text. The second is that mon , ton and son are used before a feminine noun as well, whenever that noun begins with a vowel sound. A female friend is mon amie , never the form you would expect, for the same reason that English says an apple : the language is avoiding two vowels in a row. The text does not use th