5.4 Food and drink — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name fifty-five foods, drinks and pieces of tableware, many of which are not cognates, and shop for a meal without pointing. Name the worst false friend in the language, the one you eat at every meal, together with one more false friend and two words with an unexpected second sense in the same field. Say that you are hungry and thirsty the way French says it, with the verb for having rather than the verb for being. Order and pay in a restaurant without being caught by the word that looks like an English list of dishes and is not one. Prerequisites : 5.3 — you should already be able to name a kitchen and the things in it, and you should have the partitive article from the grammar volume, because you cannot say that you are eating bread without it. See 5.3 Vocabulary if you need it. Food is the largest field of everyday vocabulary in any language and the one a learner needs first. It is also, for an English speaker learning French, the field with the strangest distribution of free words. The vocabulary of eating out is almost entirely shared, because English borrowed it in bulk and twice over: once from the Norman kitchens and again from the nineteenth-century restaurant trade. The vocabulary of the raw ingredient is largely not shared. The result is that you can read a printed bill of fare and follow a review in a newspaper, and then stand in a market unable to name a leek. That is the gap this lesson fills. It also takes on two words that look English and are not, and two with an unexpected second sense; one of the first two is so common that getting it wrong will follow you around for years. Words this lesson leaves out on purpose The free half of the field, in eight examples. Every one of them is a word English took from French, which is why it is free. Already readable What you still have to add le restaurant masculine; a nasal ending, nothing sounded after it la sauce feminine; the same word, a different vowel le dessert masculine; two s, as in English la salade feminine; also a lettuce, the plant itself la soupe feminine; a thick one has another name le fruit masculine; the final consonant is silent le chocolat masculine; the final consonant is silent le menu masculine; a set meal at a fixed price, not the list The last of those eight is the one to read twice, because it is free to the eye and misleading to the ear. In a French restaurant the word means the whole fixed-price arrangement: two or three courses, chosen from a short set, for one figure. The list of everything the kitchen can make, which is what an English speaker means by the word, is called la carte , a word that also means a map and a playing card. Ask for the first when you want the second and you will be handed a choice of three dishes. Two false friends and two double meanings The first is the word for bread. It is spelled exactly like the English word for physical suffering, and it is one of the commonest nouns in French. There is no way to avoid it and no way to soften the collision; you simply have to overwrite the English reading. The compensation is that once you have, a dozen compounds come with it, since the words for a loaf, a roll, a slice of toast and a gingerbread are all built on it. The second is the word for a grape. English borrowed it and narrowed it to the dried grape, so the French word covers the fresh fruit and the English word does not. A sentence about wine being made from the juice of this fruit is therefore perfectly ordinary in French and slightly absurd if you read it as English. The other two are not false friends, because no English word looks like them, but each has a second sense. The third is the word for a peach, which also means fishing and, in a fixed phrase, a punch. The fourth is the word for a walnut, which also serves as the general word for a nut and turns up in the names of the other nuts as a first element. Neither of these will ruin a sentence, but both will slow you down if you are expecting only one meaning. Notice what the four have in common. Every one of them is an old, short, everyday word — exactly the profile the cognate volume identified as the unreliable end of the shared vocabulary. The long learned words are safe; the short domestic ones are where the traps are, and food is nothing but short domestic words. Hunger is something you have English treats hunger and thirst as states of the person: you are hungry, you are thirsty, and the words are adjectives. French treats them as things you possess: you have hunger, you have thirst, and the words are nouns. The verb is the ordinary verb for having, and no article stands in front of the noun. This matters for more than two sentences, because the same pattern runs through a whole family of expressions. Being cold, being hot, being afraid, being right, being wrong, being twenty years old: all of them are built with the verb for having and a bare noun in French. So learning this pair of sentences properly buys you a construction rather than a phrase, and a learner who says the equivalent of I am hunger has made the single most recognisable beginner's mistake in the language. One consequence to notice: although the word for hunger is a noun, French makes it stronger with the ordinary adverb for very , exactly as if it were an adjective: J'ai très faim. Three meals and a regional disagreement The three meal words look straightforward and hide a trap that has nothing to do with English. In France the morning meal is the diminutive of the midday one — literally a small version of it — and the evening meal has its own word. But in Belgium, in Switzerland and in Quebec the same three words are used one step earlier: the plain word means breakfast, the evening word means the midday meal, and a fourth word, which in France is no longer the everyday word for the evening meal, means supper. So the sentence naming all three, which you will read in the corpus below, is unambiguous in Paris and ambiguous