Why do French Questions look so STRANGE? A linguist explains what's REALLY going on
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- Опубліковано 9 чер 2024
- French has a reputation for having crazy complicated questions, but is that really accurate? Here I explain what's really going on, touching on a lot of other languages on the way.
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I'm just here to watch the francophones lose their minds over "chocolatine".
South of France will defend it in the fight against “pain au chocolat” 😂🥐🍫
i am more offended by calling it a chocolate croissant
@@mikolajlisAnd all of french-canada! ⚔️
It's "pain au chocolat" and nothing else !
😂
@5:23 "Tu as mangé ma chocolatine"
**Toute la France sauf le sud du pays a quitté la conversation** 😅😛
C'est grave. Manges pas mes chocolatines!
In Brazilian Portuguese there's this weird thing where formally we would say "O que é isso?" ("What is this?"), but informally we actually say "O que é que é isso?", pronounced something like /kekjɛ isu/ (I'm not sure if I got the IPA right). Fun stuff
oh cool .. first time I heard this expression in portuguese I thought it's korean 😅
kek
@@MutohMech UA-cam should have a "translate to alliance/horde" option
When I took a prepare course for the Law School in 1957, in São Paulo, Brazil, Professor Castellões called "é que" a "expletivo", that means: it has no meaning, it just reinforces . Anyone remembers professor Castellões from the "Cursinho Castellões"?
Standard English has its own question-weirdness - "you go to school" vs "do you go to school?" - but Suffolk dialect uses the "do you" at the start to form a command as it "do you stop doing that"; there's an apocryphal story of a substitute teacher from outside the area saying to the class: "do you go home now?" and the students getting up and leaving as they thought they were being dismissed.
"Do I not like that"
--Graham Taylor - Football manager once famously said on national TV.
You go to school?
Great video! One thing I think you left out is that those who consider French questions "strange" should realize that, by the same logic, English questions are even stranger: if you go on to translate them literally, for example to French they would be something like this: What do you want = Que fais-tu vouloir? What do you do? = Que fais-tu faire? And such weird way of speaking also holds for negations. I do not want this = Je ne fais pas vouloir ceci. By the way, where in the parameters/principles scheme does English "do-questions" fit in? I suppose it is a question marker, but it seems to be rather peculiar. I know that some Celtic languages use a similar construction
😅😅😅 exactement hhh 👌
In older Englishes, the verb was conjugated properly. It's only later on that this emphatic way of speaking (using "to do" was emphatic, like in modern day "I do know!" Is emphatic) became the norm for negative and interrogative sentences
@J Boss This seems like an overcomplicated discussion. Germanic languages and French, which is a romance outlier with Germanic grammatical traits, all do pretty much exactly the same thing when asking questions. All using modal verbs, which actually do still need conjugation. So the view that they were just simple unlettered farmers simplifying their language is not quite the case. In some cases the language of then is somewhat more complicated than simplifications which have subsequently developed among 'lettered' users.
@J Boss No, the point you made was that it was simplified by not being conjugated, but it wasn't. You don't need to be the appointed expert on this. 'Boss' is only in your username, not your function.
@J Boss They are conjugating though. And it's not like every single verb in a sentence was conjugated previously.
2:55 in informal North American French, we often use “tu” as a question marker after the verb (ex. “Tu parles tu français?”)
To me French questions seem so weird because I constantly compare Frech to other romance languages that I have already learned
As a french speaking person i found this video very interesting bc it’s something i say every day so i never really thought about it
As a French learner, and someone with a casual interest in linguistics, I really appreciate this video. Wished I saw that whilst I was learning French questions though.
Thanks for this linguistic tour of ‘crazy’ French questions. One example you could touch on that may seem crazy to English speakers at first is 'n’est-ce pas?' when tacked onto the end of a sentence. But it’s actually much more simple than in English - or most IE languages I think. In English we have to deal with verb agreement, egg ‘Isn’t it?’, ‘Don’t you?’, ‘Aren’t they?, etc. In French, 'n’est-ce pas?' works for pretty much anything, n’est-ce pas?!
Except in working class UK English, which uses innit? for all.
"N'est-ce pas ?" also tends to feel a little old and overly formal in France these days. I'd say using ", no ?" (if the original question was worded "positively", as in "Tu as déjà mangé, non ?" (You have already eaten, haven't you?)) or ",si ?" (after a "negative" question, like "Tu n'as plus faim, si ?" (You aren't angry anymore, are you?)). Sometimes, if something feels weird or complicated, there are other ways to convey the same meaning.
I won’t attempt to answer the question of whether you left anything out; I will say that it pleases me greatly that you included the eyebrow markings of ASL. I loved when I first learned about that, and how the exact same sequence of hand signs can have (at least) three distinct (and easily distinguished) meanings, based on eyebrow position.
Always informative and fun, but I'm puzzled why you left out inversions. They map very well from English to French and deserve an honorable mention.
Inversions are very rare now in the spoken language, they’re mostly used in literary contexts.
En français québécois, et ailleurs en Amérique, on emploi la particule -tu pour former des questions (où la réponse est oui ou non), dans le langage familier. Par exemple, "Je sais-tu?" , "Ça se peut-tu?"...
Vive la diversité linguistique!
Ça fait partie du registre familier, voire vulgaire.
@@philippegauvin-vallee9371 En fait, le vieux français avait la particule de question "ti" à la fin de la phrase. Le Québec s'est retrouvé isolé de la France pendant longtemps, quand le Québec à eu de nouveau contacte avec la France, la province s'est fait dire que c'était mal parlé d'utiliser cette particule puisque la France l'a éliminé. Dans un effort de sur-correction, le "ti" s'est transformé en "tu"
Il n'y a pas de formulation de phrase vulgaire en linguistique, si ça parait comme tel, c'est uniquement votre ignorance de l'origine de cette formulation.
@@myriam8091 Hélas ce n'est pas la bonne explication. En fait, le «tu» provient d'une transformation des sons «d et t» devant «i et u», un phénomène que l'on appelle «affrication». En fait, ces sons en québécois se prononcent «dzi, dzu et tsi, tsu». Le «tu-viens-tu» est le résultat de cette affricatiion. A l'origine, l'expression était semblable au français normand ou picard: «tu viens-ti» que Molière d'ailleurs parodie dans une scène de Don Juan. Du fait de l'affrication, le deuxième ti est devenu «tsu».
La France n'a rien à voir avec cette transformation.
Au passage, mais évidemment, la carte de la position d'autorité est insupportable, donc j'évite généralement, j'ai fait un doctorat de linguistique à l'Université de Montréal....
@@lesfreresdelaquote1176 C'est à l'Université que tu as appris à faire des prétéritions?
I noticed this when in Quebec some years ago and found it deeply confusing!
To translate "chocolate croissant" with "chocolatine" is to ask for controversy!
Anyway, I'd say in modern French, for yes/no questions, you can fit them in three different categories. For example if you want to ask **Are you coming?**
Questions where you take an affirmation and just add a question mark: **Tu viens?**
Questions where you invert subject and verb: **Viens-tu?**, they sound more formal
Questions where you add "est-ce que": **Est-ce que tu viens?**, they can feel cluttered in some situations, but as a single question you ask to a friend before leaving it is still short enough, while raising any ambiguity with it being a question, an order or a simple statement.
This last form is a progressive deformation: "Ceci est X" (this is X) -> "Est ceci X?" (Is this X?). In English that would look like: "Cats are mortal." -> "Cats do be mortal" -> "Do cats be mortal?"
Picard has some pretty weird question markers. Mostly yes/no questions are formed by postponing the particle -ti (deriving from 3sg il) to the verb, regardless of the subject - Éj coprai-ti à travér camps? "Do I cut across the field?". However in some dialects (sadly mostly extinct) the particle is -jou (deriving from the stressed form of 1sg je), again regardless of subject; T'iros-jou? "will you go?" Even stranger still, this particle can be placed at the beginning of a sentence; Jou que t' y vos? "Are you going there" - or literally, "I that you go there?". (One theory I've seen is that this comes from Old Picard sai-jou que... i.e. "do I know that...").
I've read that yet other dialects use -tu (2sg) in its place (no examples I'm afraid), which means that depending on dialect, Picard questions with any subject can be formed with particles deriving from any of the three persons of singular pronouns. Pretty cool aye?
You blew my mind with the ASL eyebrows thing, it was something I just did automatically, wow!
How does this channel have less than 1k subscribers. It deserves many more.
0:47 Shots have been fired! When we talk about language, we're talking about a way to verbalise notions. This can be done by speech or by writing (or indeed by signing). Writing can record notions that were not previously spoken, and aren't intended to be spoken.
I’m obsessed with your channel! Would love a follow up video about the historical journey of the language as evidenced by its structure today, which you alluded to. Keep up the great work ❤
That example was designed to get comments. Very subtle
I’m surprised that 5:27 hasn’t started a fight among French people in this comment section yet 😆
On oublie. Circulez !
Circulez il n'y a rien à voir.
That's because he said it right and use the good word ! 😁 (yes i'm from south)
@@pax24 i mean i prefer the word chocolatine too ngl
Bah moi je préfère un bon petit pain au chocolat😋
English speakers saying that French questions are weird is a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black. 😊
Take a sentence like "He went to the store." How do you turn that into a yes-no question? Beginners in an ESL class might think it would be, "Went he to the store?" since this kind of simple inversion appears in other situations, like "He will leave" becoming "Will he leave?" But no, in Modern English you need to say, "Did he go to the store?" What happened to "went," and where did "did" and "go" come from???
Modern linguistics (e.g. Chomsky in "Syntactic Structures" from 1957) has consistent ways to account for such forms, but to someone encountering English for the first time, such question formation must look pretty weird.
ETA: Reading some of the below comments after posting mine, I noticed that others have made similar points. Consider this one a variation on a theme.
This video was interesting in a sort of “meta” way. Learning French (about half a century ago) I never thought French questions looked strange. _Est-ce que_ was basically a way to turn a statement into a question, _qu’est-ce que_ was basically “what” and that was that. It never really occurred to me to translate the phrases piece by piece (and no teacher ever did) because they worked pretty well the way I understood them. I’m still not sure exactly what’s strange about them or why they’re supposed to be “crazy complicated” but I guess some people view them that way.
A lot of students (who are gen Z) studying French in my secondary school viewed French questions in the way he describes. And this seems to me to be a common view among people that had to study French at school, that perhaps didn't enjoy it as much as you or I. I'm sure a good amount of those people would have used the unusual structure of French question words (once having broken them down) to tell themselves that French is an overly complicated and nonsensical language, which would give them a better reason to not try in class.
I only recently started learning French, and already knowing English and Spanish I didn’t think the question structure was strange or hard, BUT I’ve really been struggling with pronouncing « Est-ce que » kept hearing eska but kept trying to force an extra syllable in there; so thanks for pointing out that it really is just eska and I’m not hearing it wrong. Also knowing that the spelling is applicable to old French and that it’s ok if things aren’t spelled phonetically is helpful - I’ll relax and just focus on how I hear it instead of trying to make the spelling match the sounds!
The french non accentuated "e" prononciation is very closed to the English shwa sound => (ə), but kinda shorter than its English version.
Therefore qu' est-ce-que is pronounced [kèskə] . What probably makes this harder that depending on Who you talking to , and the context of the conversation qu Est-ce-que can be shortenned into [kès] eg.
Qu Est-ce-que tu as as dit ? Pronounced both [kèskə tu a di] and also [kès ta di].
The two have the same meaning , but I'd tend to say the use of each depends on the context .
None of the two is of formal usage .I d just say the first one would seems more polite when the second one more agessive.
It can vary by the dialect and by whether it's formal or informal speech. In some dialects, especially in formal situations, one might say "Ay-suh-kuh", 3 distinct syllables, whereas in many dialects, especially in informal speech, one might say something morel like "ess-kuh".
Others have already pointed this out, but here's one more : the final "ə" pronunciation of eskə and keskə is close to the german and turkish ö but shorter. So if you speak german, it should be easy.
I learned French at school decades ago and all the inversions and qu- words etc. I am now re-immersing myself via télé policiers (particularly 'Engrenages'/'Spiral'. I realise that all this has virtually disappeared (along with 'nous') and questions are now almost entirely based on verbal inflexion. Tu est allé? Avec qui?
This is especially true in France, and, I think, European French in general (I never paid much attention to it, so I might be wrong, but I didn't notice any difference on that front when speaking to Belgian or Swiss people, and they haven't pointed out anything, and they do mock me relentlessly for "soixante-dix" et "quatre-vingt-dix"), but it is, as far as I know, not particularly common in Québec, they have their own preferred ways of asking questions.
Reminds me of the word for "today" in French, aujourd'hui, which I learned how to spell by breaking it down into au jour d' hui (at the day of "hui", which apparently once meant "now"), but, saying it, it's just one word, one morpheme.
the "chocolatine" bit hurt so much my little french heart
Wow. That tangent on Russians explains so much. Every single person I've spoken to with a mild to heavy Russian accent always came across as a bit... blunt when asking questions. I always assumed this was a Russian culture thing. I never realized that it was a Russian linguistics thing.
The point about Russian speakers coming across as rude because of comparative question intonation is fascinating. Sort of the intersection of prosody and pragmatics.
Nice mug. So, I kept hearing "David is afraid of mogs." I'm like, "What's a mog???" 😄
A "mog" is a "cat", althought not many people use that word anymore :p
@@spaghettiking653 Did not know that!
I thought he said moths
He said moths, but he voiced the ‘th’, which I’ve honestly never heard before as a native English speaker. I always say moths with a voiceless th
@@archeofutura_4606 What he said was even closer to "marthes", if that were an English word. What makes it incomprehensible is a combo of voicing the "th" in "moths", as you said, and saying "ah" instead of "o", which makes it obscure that "moths" was the word he was saying.
When he talked about sign language 😍
As a student of French and English as foreign languages, the French way of forming questions (est-ce que xxx) never struck me as more bizarre than the English way (do you xxx). In Italian we simply change the intonation and put a question mark at the end of the sentence
You find nearly the same structure in some varieties of Spanish, e.g. "¿Qué comiste?" 'What did you eat?' is phrased instead as "¿Qué _es lo que_ comiste?" 'What is that that you ate?'. Colonialist prescriptivists like to deride this construction as an "unnecessary gallicism", but it's not -- the form without "...es lo que..." is perceived as expressing disbelief or disapproval, which the form with "...es lo que..." avoids.
@@poissonpuerile8897 I use both but I can't explain what the difference is, I don't perceive any disbelief or disapproval in any of the forms. I'm a native speaker of Spanish and English, and I feel these are equivalent 1 to 1 with English: "Que comiste?" -> "What did you eat?"; "Que es lo que comiste?" -> "What is it you ate?" or even "Que fue lo que comiste?" -> "What was it you ate?".
I found surprising that the inverted question mark in Spanish sentence are not at the beginning but where the actual question part starts. Logical but hard for me to remember to write. (Total beginner here.)
well, this isn't necessarily an aspect of grammar either, it's just a spelling quirk (I also think most native speakers wouldn't even bother with it precisely because it's not even particularly necessary haha)
5:28 wtf how DARE you call a "chocolatine"!!! It's "pain au chocolat" 😤
Jk, great video!
Great video !!!
Did you forget “why” and “which” as wh- question words?
Everything was so interesting and great!! I was on a cloud and suddenly you said.... Chocolatine? 😢
Chocolatine ??? Send him to the stake !! 😉
That was very informative, thank you
In Quebec French we also have "tu" to indicate a question which is separate from the pronoun "tu" ex: "on vas-tu à la plage", gets a bit weird when used with the 2nd person pronoun "tu" like "tu vas-tu à la plage?".
sorry to be that guy, but shouldn't it be "on va-tu" and not "on vas-tu"?
Surely because in Québec they find it to difficult to simply inverse verb and subject as "Vas-tu à la plage ?"
I mean most French people don't do inversions in casual speech, not just the Québécois.
@@impossiblynice yes in casual no inversion.
It gets weird because of the "tu" indicating a question being now pronounced in Quebec in the same way as the pronoun "tu".
But in the Normand (Cauchois) variety of French, for example, where this weird "tu" question marker is still used, it's still pronounced "ti" (tee), as you may know.
"Tu vas-ti à la plage?"
Which is closet to its origin, the "-t-il" used in standard French (As in: "Va-t-il à la plage?")
So, less weirdness there. Or maybe still as much for people only used to a standard type of French!
I never really thought of French questions as "weird". Like sure its a handful when you look at it the first time, but once you realise it is a really simple word, it works like questions in English I feel. However, I never stopped to think about what each word meant as that didn't occur to me. "Words just be that way sometimes"
Whoa....just found your channel...mind blown...speechless!! 🙊
I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic and and find the VSO order rather charming and very neat where you generally know right at the beginning of a sentence whether the verb form indicates a positive or negative statement or a positive or negative question.
I've been learning Irish Gaelic and I've wondered if "Do" questions in english came from contract with the Celts since its closer to "An" questions forms than what is found in Germanic and Latin languages.
@@j.obrien4990 That is a hypothesis, but there's no real evidence for it, especially as "do support" is actually also found in Dutch and in many German dialects. Also, the use of "do" in questions in English began to appear very late, in the Middle English period. If it had come from Celtic languages, it would surely have appeared earlier than that.
The more Gaelic I learn the more I realise how its grammar and syntax have moulded Scots and Scottish English, but "do support" isn't one of those features.
@@alicemilne1444 Well I'd say you've stopped me from advancing my hypothesis to a theory. ;-) Thanks for the explanation, and even though I'm not very familiar with Hiberno English I have noticed some of their twists of phase probably came from Irish similar to your observation about Scottish English.
@@j.obrien4990 You reminded me that I have a linguistics book called "Celtic and English in Contact". I decided to consult that about this again. It seems the discussion on "do-periphrastic" (in other words, forming more wordy forms in speech) is not over, but it's still regarded as a hypothesis.
From my observation of Scottish Gaelic verbs (I have a book with 500 verbs fully conjugated), "do" is only a particle in the dependent past tense. It is not a verb itself. And it has many other meanings and functions as a preposition, pronoun, etc.
But since my knowledge of Gaelic is intermediate I'll leave it up to the experts to battle this out.
5:26
Half of france just disliked the video right about here
The wrong half lol
in portuguese "what is this' is 'o que que é isso?', but you can drop the second 'que' if you want.
Linguists - “These parameters have a very high explanatory power.”
Interesting video, even though it fails to mention that "Est-ce que" can be simplified :
Est-ce que tu as mangé mon bonbon ? - > As-tu mangé mon bonbon?
Qu'est-ce que tu as fait ? -> Qu'as-tu fait ?
Où est-ce que tu es allé ? -> Où es-tu allé ?
These forms are a little more formal, using them make things easier for beginnners
I got particularly curious about how the "est-ce que" came to be.
My father and his family are all from Hungary, but my insight into English comes from how my grandmother would say things in English. So, although she would ask me (correctly), "What are you doing?", she would preserve the same word order in the command, "Tell me what are you doing."
Do you have any recommendations for books (or other stuff) where I can learn more about this? Your video was fascinating; this is exactly the stuff I love learning about! Thanks!
As a French person, when I was a kid and first learned how to say "Do you speak English?", it made no sense to me that it translated word-for-word as "fais-tu parler anglais".
I don't think its strange at all. Of course I've been reading it for about 30 years. Previously I had studied both Latin and German. Which was a big help. But my attitude was always to accept it as is. It only seems strange if you translate it literally. Which is always a mistake.
Exactly, I run into similar issues when I explain/teach languages, you have some people that have either the mental plasticity or willingness to accept it as is, while others question some rules or expressions to no end, constantly comparing them to their native language (which also has a lot of rules that make no logical sense regardless of which language it is)
Very well said!
Absolutely!
It's not forbidden to question how a language (or anything) works, but first, you have to learn the basics before you can start to take the language appart and criticize.
When you're new to a language, you can't really make the difference between what might sound weird but is as it is with no way around it vs what's not logical and can / could be changed or improved.
For example, many English speaker love to add superfluous "pre" in front of many words, one of the most common being the silly "pre-plan(ned)" (see George Carlin who did a whole sketch about it). Well, you need to have reached a certain level of English to be able to notice such examples and be able to correct / not use them in your own speech. But as a beginner, you can't go around finding things silly and questioning it all; you have to move on.
@@mats1975
3:20 WH words are Who What When Where and... How?
The look on your face made me laugh😂
Thanks for using the cute word ‘chocolatine’!
4:15 As a Russian speaker I never really paid attention to it. I would add we raise pitch on Wh-words
I've been speaking French my whole life and never thought about that before lol
Thank you
The problem with all the English people who talk about the "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça" is that they never care about the different levels in French language. So they talk about something that is familiar and informal (surely because of the internet "teachers" who don't have a good level). In formal French it is "Qu'est-ce ?" so nothing weird.
I fully support this. As a French native, my French teachers regularly warned against abusing of these weird structures (est-ce que...).
It's very odd to see it described as "French language" like if it would be the canonical way of doing...
Very well said!
And very true about the self proclaimed UA-cam "teachers" who have no formal qualifications to be teaching French. Which I wouldn't even bring up if at least they were good and spoke correct French to start with. But many of them don't (despite being native speakers).
I only have notions of Turkish, but I find the Turkish way of forming questions probably the cleverest in the six languages I know. You have a question word (mı, mi, mu, mü, it's actually the same word with variants for phonetic harmonization) which you can place anywhere in a sentence to indicate what it is that you are questioning. Here's how it works :
let's take the affirmative sentence :
Yesterday Chris went to the movies with a friend.
You can question any part of this by adding mu :
Yesterday mu Chris went to the movies with a friend ? means : is it yesterday that he went ?
Yesterday Chris mu went to the movies with a friend ? means was it Chris who went ?
Yesterday Chris went to the movies mu with a friend ? means Did he go TO THE MOVIES with a friend ?
Etc.
I feel like if anything, the historical spellings of French made it easier for me to learn, in the sense that knowing “est-ce que” means “is it that” makes it easier to remember the structure of the sentence.
People who say that are making noise because a simple "C'est quoi ?" is all you need for "What's this?" or "What's that?"
Okay, no one’s asking the really important question: why do you use “chocolatine” instead of “pain au chocolat?” 😂
(I learned “chocolatine” because I primarily learned French in La Rochelle, and - as I understand it - it’s very much a Charentais and Bordelais term. Which makes me curious where in France you may have studied!)
He might be aware of the “debate”. That would explain the Toulouse cross just after.
@@AllanLimosinoh… I was wondering what that cross was about 😂
Just a dumb English-speaker here, who was not aware of the debate lol
@@AllanLimosin Huh, I didn't notice that! I'll have to go back and look.
The Pied Piper drowned the *rats* of Hamlyn!
I think of "est-ce que" as "is it that" for y/n questions. Is it that you're hungry? "Qu'est-ce que" is for "what is it that". What is it that you want to eat?
Thanks for this material, it's very helpful. I hope your channel grows and brings you revenue so that you could invest it in some good quality microphone ;)
Something more "big picture" I like to emphasize to my students is that language is more about whether a given phrase functions for its intended purpose than whether you're able to make immediate sense of the grammar.
French: I am the king of strange questions and strange spelling
English: Hold my dummy do and my phonics
Well, the phonics is easy enough to explain... two languages from two different families had their own phonics/spelling systems. They had a head-on collision almost a thousand years ago and the clean-up process still isn't done.... So we stiill have a bit of a mess on our hands.
"Do" as a modal for questions and negation is a bit tougher for me, though. I feel like I'm missing something here. From my perspective hast thou? -> have you? -> do you have? in an extremely short amount of time compared to how quickly most other changes occur.
IMO the rise of 'do' as a modal is a much bigger change than the secod person pronouns collapsing into 'you', yet there seems to be much more research on the latter.
Maybe worth its own video?
Props for including ASL as an example.
French spelling: It's bizarre but it works. I took French in middle school and the weekly quiz always had dictation and/or read aloud with no comprehension required. I nearly always got max points for that part of the quiz. We won't talk about the other parts of the quiz....
I switched to Russian for HS and it was so much easier....
And the "Keske" in "Qu'est-ce que tu manges" is often even more simplified into "kess", as in, "kess tu mange"?
It's fun to think it's becoming a proper word in its own right :)
I've never heard of 'chocolatine'.. In our house we debate whether the standard patisserie French is pronounced pain-chocolat or pain-au-chocolat.
That Russian tangent explains so much! Love your videos!
I can't believe you called a pain au chocolat a chocolatine. - A Parisian.
6:10 Chomsky still refers to them as principles and parameters.
4:16 about the Russian question intonation thing: I don't understand the example, isn't that the exact same for English questions? At least that's what we were taught in phonology by a fluent American-English speaking teacher: yes/no questions have a rising intonation and wh-questions have flat or even falling intonation in unmarked speech; however, if you are emphasising or asking for futher clarity or in disbelief about whatever you're asking or don't understand the answerer, only then will a wh-question have a rising intonation.
What I've learnt from this video, and having checked to verify, is that Americans seem to pronounce plural 'moths' differently to us Brits, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders.
You seem to say 'moθ' in the singular and 'moðz' in the plural whereas we also say 'moθ' in the singular but say 'moθs' in the plural.
Yeah, I know we say the vowel differently too but that's not what I'm looking at.
That's an ongoing change in progress, and my speech is somewhat conservative. I have eth in deaths, booths, myths, etc. But it's definitely on its way out in English.
@@MrNyathi1 I'd guess American. Where I grew up the majority of people had English as a first language and everybody folnowed the 'rule' of final '-s' being voiced or not depending on the preceding sound, not the other way around.
Where I live now the majority don't and I can't mind much of a pattern to any changes of any kind.
What my brain seems to be stuck on is why people omit the auxiliary in the continuous aspect when doing so in their native languages is the exact same kind of error and introduces the same ambiguities as doing so does in English.
I guess this video explains why Chomsky would deliver his lectures at mathematics conferences.
6:26 just curious, but wouldn’t this graph only hold for VSO and SVO languages? (Though I’m aware this type of strict categorization of languages is somewhat of a simplification)
What I mean is, it seems like it assumes that the Object (or whatever noun is being replaced by the wh-word) is always at the end of declarative sentences
'How do you do' for instance may seem equally strange to 'Comment ca va'
Hahaha! Non, non, non. On dirait plutôt, «Que sék t'as mangé, toé?» (que c’est que tu as...) Belle vidéo! J’sais pas si ça va aider à ma classe, mais on verra. 😊 (T’as très raison; on parle pas comme on écrit. J’imagine que c’est vrai pour toutes les langues.)
CHOCOLATINE ??? no way !
I looked in the comments expecting a war about "chocolatine", and I am surprised to find none.
Languagejones, did you learn French in Toulose or somewhere else in the South-West?
chocolatine? I see you have chosen death
Wh-movement? Yo, dude! I bring that up with my wife & she has a conniption fit. But the concept, I'm sorry, is sooooo simple. Carry on, amigo! Nice mug, by the way.
It's a pain au chocolat, not a chocolatine!!
Otherwise: brilliant.
English speakers: Why do French questions look so weird?
French speakers: Why do English questions look so weird?
In English we have the double truth searching question or legalese of 'is it or is it not the case that'. Linguistic term for that?
The "qu'est-ce que" fixed expression did start out as a roundabout way of asking a question without flipping the subject and verb, but it's almost its own question-word now, reduced down to [kEsk] or [kEsk(ë)] in nearly all settings. It could nearly be shortened in spelling to quesq without losing too much of the etymology. And yes, literally, it's "what is it that?" but it has reduced in basic meaning down to more like a special form of "what" or just a general question marker, specifically so you can follow with a subject and verb without flipping them to verb-subject like in the shorter way of asking questions in French. And yes, learning it as a non-native speaker, it does seem odd and overly roundabout, but that's just how it is. (Quesq would at least be shorter, and could be explained, taught, fairly simply, with the history given as context or trivia to pique students' interest.)
Yes, est-ce qui would similarly reduce to esq. Whether you wanted to explicitly add a schwa E, e-muet, for esqe, kesqe versus esq, quesq might fit as if it were like the a/an, or archaic my/mine, thy/thine in English, similar to how French adds the -t- out of thin air as a holdover from an older stage of French. (Such as, Comment t'appelle-t-il?)
I want to argue about the intonation in russian questions. Wh questions have the same rising intonation. But the intonation goes up through the WH word and then goes down to the end of the sentence. But even in questions without wh word, the intonation doesn’t just go up to the end of the sentence, it goes up untill it reaches the end of the word we ask the question about. Ты придешЬ сегодня домой? Ты придешь сегОДНЯ домой? In the first question we emphasise the word придешь, because we want to know weather you come home or not, in the second question we emphasise the word сегодня, because we’re asking weather you come home today or not today. So with the WH question it’s the same but the rising intonation goes on the WH word, because that’s what we wanna know когдА ты придешь домой? WHEN will you come home? WHO will come home.
Nice how you “snuck in" the blason with the croix occitaine after the example use of chocolatine, although the use of that term for the viennoiserie is both wider than that, and is patchy in its use in the South as well. By the way, another driving force for how miserable French orthography is, beyond a tendency toward written language being generally more conservative (McWhorter uses “frozen”) than spoken language, is how freakin’ complex the language’s roots are with regards to the region’s ethnic history. Several independent strains of Germanic influence, from Gothic tribes and Rhineland peoples, to the much later Vikings, as well as Celtic languages, Basque influence, and the whole history of Parisian power and dominance over the much more purely Romance languages of the South, like Occitan’s many dialects, and Catalán. Season with Italian, Corsican, Savoyard, and the imported vocabulary from an extensive global colonial history. There’s a wonderfully complicated daube bubbling away on the stove.
i somehow came up with the exact same question in arabic for hal
"How" has a w and an h in it, it's just that they're not next to each other. :-)
Chomsky used to refer principles and parameters? Used to? Chomsky Lives!
In Finnish they also have a question marker (-ko) and their intonation doesn't change in questions. That's weird for us Germans.
It's an agglutinative language, they have a suffix for everything, and solve everything by adding a suffix
@@hastaelcielo8690 not even close to everything
You said "Chocolatine " for chocolate croissant ? Do you want to start a war ? My parisian heart has been chocked !!! Joke apart, it was really cool as a french to sees the other side of learning.
Your video was already excellent but when you used the word "chocolatine" at 5:23, you convinced me to suscribe.
French has this "qu'est-ce que", in Brazilian portuguese we have "kikse": kikse wanna eat, kikse did yesterday, kikse do for a living...
oh! and there's also "kiktu" in Rio, the South, the Northeast
I don't know where you picked up this "chocolatine" word, but nobody speaks like that in France. We say "pain au chocolat" instead.
So, you are the whole of France all by yourself, then? Or you asked all the 60 plus millions of your fellow countrymen how they call this particular piece of French pastry?
Sure.
Give me a break, will you!
Is it that they put style over simplicity?
This video deserves more views
English also has its own complicated system of question markers, where you repeat a statement as its interrogative opposite:
You don't want that, do you?
He likes bacon, doesn't he?
And so on.
What makes the French question a bit harder is that you can't entirely take "qu'est-ce que" as one question word ("keske"), or it should rather be "est-ce que" ("eske") on it's own, or with the added question word in front it becomes "QU'est-ce que", or "OU est-ce que", or "QUAND est-ce que"... In itself this is not any more complicated than questions in many other languages, but that added complication is not specific to "est-ce que" or just questions in French: it's the fact that the words get merged together and it's hard to distinguish the bit that comes before the "est-ce que" (hard for beginners).
5:53 On peut aussi dire : "qu'as-tu mangé ?" qui est plus correct que : qu'est ce que tu as mangé ? :)