2.3 Suffix rules II — -té/-ty, -eur/-or, -ique/-ic — Epoché
What you will be able to do Convert between English -ty and French -té , English -or and French -eur , and English -ic and French -ique , in either direction. Give the gender of a noun from its ending: -té is feminine apart from a handful of concrete nouns, and -eur splits into a masculine class and a feminine class that you can tell apart by meaning. Say why English has both electric and electrical while French has only électrique , and stop looking for the second form. Split an unknown word into stem and ending, so that you can guess a word you have never seen from a root you have. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English C'est une bonne université. [1] This is a good university. C'est devenu une réalité. [2] It has become a reality. C'est de mauvaise qualité. [3] It is of poor quality. Prerequisites : 2.2 — you should already be able to run the -tion , -sion and -ment correspondences in both directions and read the noun-or-adverb distinction off the slot; see 2.2 Cognates if you need it. The three rules in the last lesson were the easy ones, because the spelling did not change. These three are the ones where the two languages visibly went their separate ways, and that makes them harder to spot and more valuable once you have them. A learner who knows that French -té is English -ty reads la spécificité without hesitating. A learner who does not know it sees an unfamiliar word. All three endings have the same history. Latin had three very productive suffixes — one for making abstract nouns out of adjectives, one for making a noun out of a verb to name the person or thing that does it, and one for making adjectives out of nouns. French inherited all three directly and wore them down in the mouth. English took the same three, but took them through a mixture of French and direct Latin borrowing, and ended up with slightly different spellings and, in the third case, with two endings where French kept one. So these are not arbitrary correspondences to memorise. They are the same suffix in two costumes, and each pair of costumes is regular. The rule Three correspondences. Each one is stated with its gender consequence, because the gender is the part you are actually buying. English -ty is French -té , and the noun is feminine. Drop the English y , write é : university gives l'université , reality gives la réalité . The abstract nouns made this way are all feminine, which makes it one of the most reliable rules in the whole volume. English -or is French -eur . When the noun names a person or a machine that performs the action, it is masculine : a director is un directeur . When it names a quality or a sensation instead, it is feminine : la couleur , la douleur . The split is by meaning, not by spelling, and both halves are worth knowing. English -ic and -ical are both French -ique . One French form covers two English ones, so the conversion is easy in that direction and lossy in the other: from historique you cannot tell whether English wants historic or historical , and you have to decide from the sentence. Rule 3 is the one where English speakers make an error that French speakers find odd: inventing a second French form to match the English pair. There is no word logical in French, only logique ; no electrical , only électrique . If the English distinction matters — and it does, sometimes, since a historic day and a historical novel are not the same thing — French marks it with a different word or a phrase, never with a different ending. Rule 1: the abstract noun ending that almost never fails Take most English abstract nouns in -ty , replace the ending with -té , and you usually have the French word: quality , reality , liberty , difficulty , curiosity , university , society , identity , possibility , responsibility . Longer English words in -ility become -ilité , though the stem can shift ( responsibility is la responsabilité ), and that sub-family alone runs to several hundred words. The gender is the free gift. The abstract nouns in -té are feminine, so every one of these takes la or une . A handful of concrete nouns in -té are masculine, among them l'été (summer), le côté (side) and le comté (county); learn them one at a time as you meet them. Two things do not come free. The first is the accent: French writes é , English writes nothing, and a missing accent is a spelling error. The second is that English does not always have the -ty partner. French la beauté is beauty , which fits, but French la santé is health , with no -ty word in English at all. So the rule is safe from French to English and slightly leaky the other way — some English ideas simply have a different French word. Rule 2: agents are masculine, qualities are feminine The -eur ending has two families living in it, and telling them apart is easy once you know they exist. The first family names a doer. Take a verb, add the ending, and you have the person or the device that performs the action: from the verb for to work you get un travailleur , from the verb for to sing you get un chanteur . Every noun in this family is masculine; the feminine forms for people add -rice or -euse , and the family is still productive, so new devices get new names this way. The second family names a quality or a sensation and does not come from a verb. These are feminine, and there are perhaps two dozen of them in common use, including some of the most frequent nouns in the language: the words for colour, heat, pain, fear, smell, flavour, flower, error. English speakers who have learned the masculine rule then produce the wrong article for all eight, which is why the split is worth a paragraph rather than a footnote. The English side of the correspondence is less tidy than the French side, and you should expect that. English writes the agent ending sometimes -or , sometimes -er : director and author take one, visitor takes one and singer the other. French makes no su