4.6 Three ways to ask a question — Epoché
What you will be able to do Ask a yes-or-no question in the three ways French allows, and choose between them according to how formal you want to sound rather than by guesswork. Use the eight question words that cover almost everything you will need to ask in your first year. Choose correctly between the two long forms that both translate as what , by asking yourself one question about the verb. Say what English does instead at each point, and in particular why the English habit of adding an auxiliary verb has no counterpart here. Prerequisites : 4.5 — you should already be able to build the negative bracket, since one of the commonest tags in the language is a frozen negative question. See 4.5 Grammar if you need it. French has three ways of turning a statement into a yes-or-no question, and they are not stylistic variants of equal standing. They form a ladder from the most casual to the most formal, and most French speakers use all three, choosing according to who is being spoken to and whether the sentence is spoken or written. Knowing all three is not optional, because you will hear the casual one constantly and be expected to write the formal one. The first way changes nothing at all except the pitch of your voice. The second puts a fixed two-syllable phrase at the front and leaves the rest of the sentence untouched. The third turns the verb and the subject around. Read that list again and notice how little work the first two involve: French gives you two ways of asking a question that require no rearrangement of the sentence whatsoever. For a beginner, that is a gift, and the right strategy is to use the second way for almost everything while you learn to recognise the third. The second half of the lesson is about asking for information rather than for a yes or a no. Here the eight question words do most of the work, and they behave almost exactly as their English equivalents do, with one genuine complication around the word for what . How English does it English has to fetch a verb to ask a question. To turn you like music into a question, English inserts an auxiliary that was not in the statement and puts it in front of the subject. That operation is so automatic for a native speaker that it is invisible, and it is the main reason English speakers find French questions strange: they keep looking for the auxiliary and there is none. French leaves the sentence alone, puts a fixed phrase in front of it, or moves the verb it already had. It never fetches an auxiliary to carry the question. English does use intonation for questions, but only for a narrow purpose. You're leaving? with a rising pitch is a perfectly good English question, and it carries a shade of surprise or of checking something you thought you knew. In French the same device is the ordinary, everyday way of asking a question in speech, with no shade of surprise attached. So you already own the mechanism; you have to widen the range of situations in which you use it. English inverts only auxiliaries, French inverts the main verb. Modern English can say are you tired and have you finished , inverting a linking verb or an auxiliary, but it cannot say what Shakespeare could and invert an ordinary verb. French can and does: it puts the conjugated verb in front of its own subject pronoun and joins the two with a hyphen. If you have read older English, you already have a model for this, and it is worth leaning on that memory rather than treating the pattern as alien. English puts its question word first and then inverts. French puts its question word first and may or may not invert. Because French has three yes-or-no strategies, it has three ways of building an information question too: question word plus inversion, question word plus the fixed phrase, or question word plus an untouched statement. All three are current, and the last is very common in speech. English has one word for what ; French has several forms and the choice is grammatical. This is the only genuinely difficult thing in the lesson. English uses what whether it is the subject or the object of the verb. French uses two different long forms for those two jobs, and they differ in a single syllable. Getting it wrong does not usually destroy the meaning, but it is immediately audible, and the rule that fixes it is short. The first way: change nothing but the pitch Take a statement, raise your voice at the end, and you have a question. The word order does not change, nothing is added, and in writing the only mark of it is the question mark. French English Elle est belle ? [1] Is she beautiful? Le bain est prêt ? [2] Is the bath ready? Compare each French sentence with its English gloss and notice that the English had to reorder itself while the French did not. This is the commonest way of asking a question in spoken French and it is completely respectable in conversation. It is not, however, used in formal writing, where the question mark alone would be doing too much work. One typographical point, since you will see it in every French text. In France, a question mark is preceded by a space, and so are the exclamation mark, the colon and the semicolon. The space is narrower than an ordinary one in good typesetting, but it is genuinely there, and its absence is one of the ways a French reader spots a text written by a foreigner. The second way: a fixed phrase at the front Put the invariable phrase meaning roughly is it that at the front of a statement and you have a question, with the rest of the sentence completely untouched. This is the workhorse of the three, neutral in register, correct in writing and in speech, and the one to reach for whenever you are unsure. French English Est-ce que c'est possible ? [3] Is it possible? Est-ce que c'est normal ? [4] Is it normal? Two things to notice. First, the phrase is frozen: it never changes for person, tense or gender, so there is nothing to conjugate and nothing to agree. Learn it as one lump of sound of two syllabl