5.1 The body and health — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the parts of the body from head to foot with fifty words English mostly does not hand you for free, and know which words you can skip because you can read them already. Say where it hurts, using the one construction French relies on for almost every ache, and get the small word in the middle right instead of guessing at it. Describe an ordinary illness — a cold, a cough, a fever, a wound — well enough to be understood in a pharmacy. Recognise the two words in this field that mislead an English speaker. Prerequisites : 4.2 — you should already be able to put the right article in front of a noun, since every noun in this lesson is given with its article and the gender is half of what you are learning. See 4.2 Grammar if you need it. This is the first lesson of the vocabulary volume, and it works differently from the lessons before it. Up to now each one has taught you a rule; from here on they hand you words, and the interesting question is which words. For an English speaker learning French that question has a real answer, and it is not the answer a speaker of a non-cognate language would get. The reason is the one measured in the cognate volume: the overlap between the two languages is heaviest in learned and technical vocabulary, and medicine is the most learned vocabulary there is. Almost the whole clinical half of this field arrived in both languages from the same Latin and Greek sources, at the same time, and in nearly the same spelling. So a body-and-health lesson written for you should not spend a line on the word for muscle, nerve, artery, infection or operation. What is not shared is the everyday layer — the parts of the body you can point at, and the complaints you would actually make about them. That layer is old in both languages and went its own way in each. The word for a knee, an ankle, a nose, a mouth, a stomach: many of these are not guessable, and every one of them is a word you need in your first month of living anywhere. So the fifty words below are chosen mostly by subtraction. While some cognates are included because their English forms are less common or their French forms present significant pronunciation challenges, the core selection aims to cover words not easily deduced. Words this lesson leaves out on purpose Read the left column and notice that your eye does not slow down. None of these words is taught here, because there would be nothing to teach: you know the meaning, and the only thing to add is the gender, which the endings of lesson 4.2 will often give you. Already readable What you still have to add le muscle masculine; not the English vowel le nerf masculine; final f silent l'artère feminine; an accent, same word la température feminine; also a fever l'infection feminine, by its ending l'opération feminine; surgery too le vaccin masculine; a nasal ending l'hôpital masculine; irregular plural la pharmacie feminine; the shop l'ambulance feminine, by its ending Ten words, and the words for a doctor and a patient behave the same way. What the right-hand column shows is that a free word still costs you two things, as the cognate volume warned: the gender, which English cannot supply, and the pronunciation, which your eye gets wrong. The words in this lesson cost a third thing on top, which is the meaning itself. Saying where it hurts English has a crowd of ways to report a pain. Some parts of the body take a compound noun: a headache, a toothache, a backache. Others refuse one, so you fall back on a verb: my knee hurts, my throat is sore. There is no rule behind the split; you simply know which nouns take the compound. French does the whole job with one frame. You take the verb for having, add the word for harm or evil, and then name the part with the preposition that elsewhere means to or at. Literally it is I have harm at the throat . It works for almost every part of the body, so learning it once replaces the whole English crowd of expressions. The one exception to know is the heart: avoir mal au cœur means to feel sick, nauseous, not to have a pain in the chest. This is the most useful pattern in the lesson, and it is worth drilling until it arrives without thought. The only thing that varies is the small word before the noun, and it varies for a reason you know from the grammar volume: the preposition fuses with the definite article. Before a masculine noun the pair comes out as one syllable; before a feminine noun the two words stay apart; before a noun beginning with a vowel the article reduces; before a plural the pair fuses into a different syllable. Four shapes, and the gender, initial sound, and number decide which one you get. That is why the word list gives you the article and not the bare noun. Fragment What decides the middle mal au dos masculine singular, consonant at the start mal à la gorge feminine singular, consonant at the start mal à l'estomac either gender, vowel at the start mal aux dents plural, either gender Those four fragments are drills written for this lesson rather than corpus sentences; put the verb for having in front of any of them and you have a complete report of a pain. Notice also what the frame does not do. It does not tell you how bad the pain is, and it does not distinguish an ache from a sharp pain. For that you use the noun for pain with an adjective, and one of those adjectives is a trap you will meet in the last table. Two words that lie to you The first is the word for a forehead. It is spelled exactly like the English word for the part of something that faces you, and it does also mean that in military and weather usage, but its ordinary sense is the part of your face above your eyebrows. Read it as English in a sentence about a fever and you will picture the wrong thing entirely. The second is the adjective that means deaf. Applied to a person it is straightforward. Applied to a pain or a sound it means dull or muffled, which is its sense in the sentence about an arm in the las