5.6 The city, transport and directions — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the parts of a town and the ways of crossing it with fifty words no cognate gives you. Ask the way and follow the answer, including the two instructions that are built on the same word and send you in different directions. Avoid the cognate that looks like a railway station and is not one, which is the commonest wrong turn an English speaker takes in France. Get on and off a train, a bus and a lift with the two verbs French uses for all three. Prerequisites : 5.5 — you should already be able to read a timetable and a price, since a platform number and a ticket price are half of what you will be told at a station. See 5.5 Vocabulary if you need it. This is the last vocabulary lesson of this phase and the most immediately practical one, because getting lost is the first thing that happens to anybody in a new city. The field looks friendly at first: a great many words for transport are shared, and the shared ones are the big obvious things — the train, the bus, the taxi, the underground. That is exactly why the field is dangerous. The words you can read cover the vehicles, and the words you cannot read cover the places, the surfaces and the instructions. So you can buy a ticket for a thing you can name and then be unable to understand which platform to stand on. Worse, one of the readable words means something different from what you expect, and it happens to be the word you will reach for when you want a railway station. The cognate that sends you to the wrong place An English speaker who wants a railway station will reach for the word that looks like the English one. In France that word means a stop on the underground or the tram, or a bus stop on a route, or a holiday resort in the mountains. It does not mean the building where the long-distance trains come in. That has a short French word of its own, and it is the single most useful noun in this lesson. The distinction is not a pedantic one. Ask at an information desk for the readable word and you will be directed to the nearest underground entrance, which may be a long way from the trains. The French word for the railway station also appears in the names of the great Paris termini, so you have almost certainly read it already without knowing what it meant. A second word in this area you will need within a minute of arriving: the word for the platform, which also means a quay on a waterfront. English quay is the same word, so the waterfront sense is readable; the railway sense is the one to learn. Straight on, and to the right Here is the trap of the lesson, and it is a trap of grammar rather than of vocabulary. French builds the instruction for going straight ahead and the instruction for turning right out of the same adjective. One is the adjective on its own after the word for all ; the other is the feminine form of the same adjective after the preposition for to . They differ by one written letter and by a small difference in sound, and they send you two different ways. Why should one word do both jobs? Because the adjective originally meant straight, and the right hand came to be named after it — the straight side, the correct side — in the same way that the English word for right covers a direction, a correctness and an entitlement. The French word carries all three of those senses too, so a legal right and a right turn are the same word. The practical advice is to learn the two phrases as complete lumps and never to assemble them from parts. If you hear the one word you go on; if you hear the other you turn. The opposite direction is a completely different word. English has borrowed it as it stands, in the sense of clumsy, and in French politics it also names the left wing. Three more direction words are worth taking as lumps in the same way: the phrase for opposite, which is built out of the word for a face; the word for near, which is an adverb and takes a preposition after it; and the pair of words for in front and behind. Getting on and getting off English has a small set of verbs and particles for boarding and leaving a vehicle, and it distributes them by the shape of the vehicle: you get on a bus and a train, you get into a car, you board a plane. French uses one pair of verbs for all of it, and the pair is simply the verb for going up and the verb for going down. You go up into a train and you go down out of it; you go up into a car and you go down out of that too. The same pair does the lift, the stairs and a hill, so the vocabulary you learn here works in a building as well as in the street. The corpus sentence below about a lift uses both verbs in one breath, which is the neatest possible demonstration. One more verb matters here and it is irregular: the verb for taking, which French uses where English says to catch or to get a bus or a train. It is one of the most frequent verbs in the language and you will have met it in the conjugation volume. The word that is not a coin One false friend sits in this lesson, and it is a short old word. The noun that looks exactly like the English word for a piece of money means a corner: the corner of a street, the corner of a room, and by extension a spot or a neighbourhood. An English coin is a different French word entirely, and you met it three lessons ago, in 5.3, as the word for a room in a house. Two more nouns in the list cannot be read from English and are worth naming as pure learning. The word for the pavement, which Americans call a sidewalk, is built on the French verb for trotting; and the word for a crossroads comes from a Latin word meaning four-forked, so it is literally a place where four ways meet. Words this lesson leaves out on purpose The vehicles, which are the readable half of the field. The first of them is the one to read twice. Already readable What you still have to add la station feminine; an underground stop or a resort, never a railway station le train masculine; also the act of doing something, in a phrase le taxi mascu