4.4 Adjective agreement and position — Epoché
What you will be able to do Write the four forms of a French adjective — masculine and feminine, singular and plural — and say which of the four you would actually hear. Name the ten short adjectives that go in front of the noun instead of after it, and use the memory hook that keeps them together. Handle the small group whose meaning depends on which side of the noun it sits, in particular the two that every reader meets in the first month. State what English does instead at each of these three points, since English agrees with French at almost none of them. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Il est grand. [1] He is tall. Elle est grande. [2] She is tall. Il est beau. [3] He's handsome. Prerequisites : 4.3 — you should already be able to make a noun plural and to choose an article for it, because an adjective agrees with whatever the article has already committed you to. See 4.3 Grammar if you need it. An adjective in French is not a fixed word. It is a small set of forms, and which form you use is decided entirely by the noun it belongs to. That is what agreement means: the noun is the master, the adjective copies its gender and its number, and the copying is compulsory. There is no neutral or default form that you can use to stay out of trouble. You have already met this twice without being told. In the gender lesson, you saw that the spelling of an adjective is often the only clue to a noun's gender, and that in L'eau est propre. even that clue is missing, because propre is spelled the same for both genders. In the word-order lesson, every adjective you saw sat after its noun. This lesson puts the two facts together and adds the exceptions. A word about how much of this is audible, because it changes what you should practise. In writing, agreement is everywhere and highly visible. In speech, a large share of it disappears: the letters that mark the feminine and the plural are usually silent. So the written system is bigger than the spoken one, and the tables below mark the cases where the difference can actually be heard. How English does it English adjectives do not agree with anything. One form serves every noun in the language: a small house , small houses , the small woman , the small men . This is not a simplification English made recently in one corner of the grammar. Old English had agreeing adjectives with a full set of endings, and the modern language has lost all of them. So you are not learning an alien mechanism; you are relearning one that English threw away, and you have no competing habit to fight because there is nothing in modern English that could interfere. English puts the adjective in front, with no exceptions worth the name. French puts most adjectives after the noun and a short list in front. Since the word-order lesson (4.1) told you to default to after , this lesson is where you learn the exceptions to that default, and the list is short enough to memorise in one sitting. The important thing to notice is that the ten exceptions are among the commonest adjectives in the language, so in practice a beginner meets pre-noun adjectives constantly and could easily get the wrong impression about which order is normal. English does not change an adjective's meaning by moving it. In English an adjective in front of a noun and the same adjective after a linking verb mean the same thing: a clean room and the room is clean . French has a handful of adjectives that mean one thing before the noun and a genuinely different thing after it, and the two meanings are not near neighbours. The word that means own in front of a noun means clean behind it. The word that means former in front means ancient behind. English has very little like this ( the city proper , a proper meal ), which is why these words have to be learned as two separate items rather than as one item with a note. English signals number on the noun; French signals it on the noun, the article and the adjective. Where English says the plural once, French says it up to three times in the same phrase, and most of those repetitions are silent in speech. That redundancy is why French writing is so unforgiving about agreement: the writing system is carrying information that the sound system has given up on. The four forms Take one of the commonest adjectives in the language, the one meaning small , and write its four forms. The pattern is: the feminine adds one letter, the plural adds another, and the feminine plural adds both. Form The adjective for small masculine singular petit — the form the dictionary gives you feminine singular petite — one letter added, and this one you can hear, because the added letter makes the preceding consonant sound masculine plural petits — one letter added, silent, so it sounds like the masculine singular feminine plural petites — both letters, and it sounds exactly like the feminine singular Read the right-hand column again for the sound. Four written forms, two spoken ones. The distinction French keeps in speech is gender, not number, and it keeps it only when the masculine ends in a consonant letter that the feminine ending brings to life. When the masculine already ends in a written -e , as in the adjectives meaning young or easy ( jeune , facile ), all four forms sound identical and two of them are even spelled identically. A handful of adjectives change more than one letter. The one meaning good doubles a consonant, the one meaning white changes its ending outright, and the one meaning old has a feminine that looks like a different word. All of these are audible, and all of them are frequent, so they are worth learning as pairs rather than as rules. The forty adjectives at the end of this lesson give both forms for every one of them. Three of them, the words for beautiful , new and old , also have a second masculine singular, used before a vowel, as in un bel homme , un nouvel ami , un vieil arbre .