Talk:French conjugation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the French conjugation article.
Please sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~). Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Ask questions, get answers. This is not a forum for general discussion about the article's subject.	Be polite Assume good faith No personal attacks Be welcoming	Article policies No original research Neutral point of view Verifiability

	France Portal French conjugation is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.

	This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Languages, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, and easy-to-use resource about languages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.	language Portal
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.

[edit] Perhaps structure by tense, rather than verb type?

For the most part, most of the verb forms follow rather predictable patterns; for example, given the first-person plural of the present indicative, one can nearly always determine all forms of the imperfect indicative. (The only exceptions are être, -cer and -ger verbs, and verbs that lack one form or the other.) I think it might be helpful to explain these patterns when they exist, because otherwise we're essentially giving no information about irregular and stem-changing verbs. (I'd just like to hear another opinion before I go ahead and destroy all the tables that people worked to create.) - Ruakh 16:39, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

There's a fairly comprehensive article at Morphology of the French verb which was translated from the French Wikipedia one. How does that compare? —Blotwell 04:08, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Morphology of the French verb is very comprehensive, but it's rather poorly written. (Well, that's not quite accurate; I don't think anyone wrote it poorly. Rather, the French Wikipedia has a very different style from the English one, largely due to a difference between Francophone and Anglophone cultures, and this difference in style carries through in the translation.) It needs to be changed in a lot of ways to be consistent with the style of the English Wikipedia; also, it has some information that does constitute verb conjugation but does not actually constitute verb morphology (i.e., the information about auxiliary verbs). And then, some parts of it are simply inaccurate; for example, the vast majority of intransitive verbs use avoir, not être, as their auxiliaries.

Relatedly, I think French verb conjugation is a better name than Morphology of the French verb, simply because all the other articles about French-language topics have names starting with the word "French"; so if anything, I think the latter should be merged here. Ruakh 04:32, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

No one ever replied to this comment; if no one objects in the next few days, I'm going to make this change. Ruakh 16:40, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Could we rename this page "French conjugation tables"? Because normally I would expect "French conjugation" and "French verb morphology" to refer to the same article. As it happens, French verb morphology is currently also mis-named (see that article's talk page). CapnPrep 09:54, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

The thing is, this article shouldn't be just a bunch of French conjugation tables, as this is an encyclopedia, and a collection of French conjugation tables is not at all encyclopedic. Ruakh 12:18, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

The table approach makes sense for premier and deuxième groupe verbs, which are fully regular (in some sense) so I think this part of the page can be salvaged, with editing. Your "tense"-based organization will help to make sense of the subregularities in the troisième groupe and is certainly a better idea than just reproducing 70 tables or whatever it is. But even then, a small number of example tables wouldn't hurt, to illustrate the results. CapnPrep 16:17, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Congratulations! I'm French and everything is true! Thanks too! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.76.87.99 (talk • contribs) 11:46, 25 June 2007 (UTC).