Me: Okay, subject-verb-object, nice and familiar.
The French Language: Oui! Except of course for les pronouns.
Me: Oh, like « je te vois »? A subject-object-verb special case, no problem.
French: I knew it would be pas de problème pour toi!
Me: So what about indirect objects then? Do they just go at the end?
French: Bien sûr, as in « je le donne aux enfants ».
Me: And I assume the same is true when they're pronouns, for clarity.
French: Mais non, you have guessed wrong, mon amie! It nestles itself just aprés the subject, as in « je te le donne ».
Me: Well that seems a bit confusing, but as long as it's subject-indirect-direct-verb I guess that's at least consistent. How do you handle both the pronouns being third-person, as in "I give it to him"?
French: Ah, one conjugates! « Je le lui donne ».
Me: Okay. It's pretty fucked that « lui » only shows up in this one form but I guess I can deal with it as a disambiguator. So presumably that means "I give it to her" would be « je la lui donne »?
French: Oh, non, it is the same as before. No « la ».
Me: Wait. Do you mean to tell me that « le » in « je me lui donne » is actually the direct object?
French: I suppose I do.
Me: And so this one particular form is inexplicably subject-direct-indirect-verb, unlike every other way of structuring this sentenct?
French: Désolée, but it seems that that is so.
Me: Okay. Jesus. Wait. Doesn't this mean there's ambiguity? How do you say "I'm giving her to you?"
French: Ah... "Je te la donne". But this is perhaps un peu ambiguous I admit.
Me: And if you flip it? How do you say "I'm giving her to you"?
French: Oh, this I can answer facilement! « Je te donne à elle »!
Me: No. No. You absolutely cannot come up with this convoluted inconsistent mess of a word order system only to WHOLLY ABANDON IT once you hit the ambiguity that was always latent! You could have been using « à » with the indirect pronoun the entire time! It would have been sensible. It would have be been consistent. But no! You had to go and fuck it up completely! I am going to INVADE your GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY and BRÛLE L'ACADÉMIE AU F U C K I N G SOL!


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in reply to @nex3's post:

French is like a little baby. In Portuguese, in some (okay, somewhat disused now but still found in formal writing and literature) cases, the object pronoun can wedge itself in the middle of a verb, between the stem and the conjugation suffix

I have this theory that every language on Earth has this moment when, past a certain level of detail, you're forced to give up explaining it and proclaim, "I don't know. [LANGUAGE] is fucking stupid."

To provide an example from Japanese: there's a kana that's written as ケ and pronounced "ke." However, you can also write it as ヶ, at which point it's pronounced "ka." This is not an obscure spelling, either; it shows up all the time in place names (E.G. SekiGAhara) and when counting months (so as to distinguish them from the names of the months, which translate to First Month, Second Month etc.). Why is Japanese like this? Because ケ derives from 介 (which I think was pronounced as "ke" hundreds of years ago, but is pronounced closer to "ka" when used in words, but closer to "ke" when used in names), and ヶ derives from 箇 (still pronounced "ka").