Talk:French personal pronouns

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In the article, under the Subject Pronouns section, you said:

"Except when the predicate is être ("to be") plus a noun; in that case, ce is used (c' if before a vowel). For example, « C'est un homme intelligent », "He's a smart man." This is because the referent has not yet been assigned a gender (since gender depends on the word used)."

I was told that you use "c'est" rather than "il est" or "elle est" because there's a noun being described by an article or an adjective. i.e. "Il est intelligent" there is no noun being described by the adjective, so you use "il est," but in "C'est un homme intelligent" you use "c'est" because there is a noun (homme) being described by an adjective (intelligent). Also, what do you mean when you said the referent (I assume you meant "antecedent" here) has not yet been assigned a gender? --Kurotsyn 21:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

First of all, "because there's a noun being described by an article or an adjective" is a statement of the rule rather than a reason for it. And it's not completely accurate, anyway: you would say C'est Marie, not *Elle est Marie, even though there's no article. (The rule is really just that you use ce with a noun; something like Il est avocat might seem like an exception, but it's really that avocat is acting like an adjective here. This seems strange from an English standpoint, until you realize that we do the same thing with nationalities and religions: American is both a noun and an adjective, as is Catholic.)

And no, the word is referent; an antecedent is a previously-mentioned noun that a pronoun stands in for (with a few exceptions), and the whole point here is that there is no antecedent. The referent hasn't been assigned a gender because gender in French is a feature of nouns, not of beings. (Now, in the case of humans, a person's name has the gender of the person's sex: Mme Renaud est gentille; but I could just as easily say Le professeur est gentil, and suddenly I'm using a masculine adjective to describe the same person.)

Ruakh 17:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah! I see now. Thanks for clearing that up :) --Kurotsyn 02:05, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Structure?

I added a new table of personal pronouns here based on the one in Spanish pronouns. I think it would be best if:

1. Possessive pronouns were moved to this article from French pronouns, as they are certainly personal.
2. The article repeats itself a lot. It would be good to move all the repeated pieces to the most appropriate place and just leave a short pointer in other places.
3. Any information on choice of pronoun was moved from the sections on each type of pronoun (in particular, the explanatory table under Subject pronouns), and put into its own section (along with a sub-section on on?). Leave the sections on subject/COD/COI/... pronouns to discuss where those are used. The exception to this would be where the choice is specific to that pronoun form, as with il vs. ce, which does belong under Subject pronouns, and y vs. lui & leur under Indirect object pronouns
4. The list of forms under each section were put into a table, or better yet just listed shortly at the start, since readers will refer to the table at the top. This saves on repetition re: elision etc.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 219.89.242.76 (talk • contribs) .

I appreciate your efforts, but to be honest, I don't really like all your changes. Some created basic problems that are easily fixed (the notes in #Subject pronouns are misnumbered now; #The second person addresses its reader; etc.), but some created hard-to-fix problems. The reason for the previous structure was that a single table of personal pronouns will necessarily either be greatly misleading, or have a huge number of footnotes clarifying everything. I see that you've chosen the "greatly misleading" path, expecting the reader to read the entire remainder of the article to find all the places where the table misled them; but I really dislike that approach. The previous approach wasn't perfect, but at least it presented one small table, with its few associated corrections, at a time.

I really don't see any reason that this article has to mimic Spanish pronouns.

It's true that there was repetition previously, but all the repetition was in brief footnotes, which I don't think is a problem. Indeed, having several footnotes of the form "but see [other place]" is essentially as repetitive, but forces the reader to jump around in the article to get any information. In the old way, the reader could see the topic of the note, to see whether it was about something (s)he already understood, before deciding whether to follow its reference.

Ruakh 14:07, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

(This is the previously anonymous editor, now with an account of his own.) Honesty appreciated! I think the table is the best way to convey the various sets - i.e. to list all the disjunctive pronouns and all the forms of the second person plural pronouns, and so on. It's a good and brief summary of personal pronouns. I can understand in general that it could be misleading, but the only things I can think of are the uses of y and en, which can be clarified and redirected in two footnotes. Honestly, my main issue with the previous format was not the lack of a single table of pronouns, but the long setting out of pronouns, which I think would be difficult to understand for somebody who didn't already know their French pronouns. A compromise, as mentioned in 1. above, would be to have a small table under each section (and do away with the large table?), like this:

French disjunctive pronouns

Person	Singular	Plural
1re	moi	nous
2e	toi	vous
3e	lui	eux
	elle	elles

(Similar to what was already under Subject pronouns, but without the table attempting to explain the tu/vous distinction, which goes above all case distinctions.)

There is no reason that this article has to mimic Spanish pronouns, but I find the Spanish article well set-out and comprehensible.

I may have been unclear: I don't have an issue with footnotes, and certainly don't think things should be cut down to just (See elision) without further explanation. But when the same footnote saying the same thing appears repeatedly in a page (particularly in the case of things like elision), I see no reason not to put all of this information in one place and cut down on unnecessary repetion.

xander 21:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)