So I’ve got four high school students sitting at my kitchen table, and we’re going over the passé composé today, that stalwart French tense that is the bane of first-year students. I grab a random verb from the list in the textbook, renverser, to spill. Because they have an evil instructor who gives difficult quizzes at the start of every class session (the better to learn from, my dear) I remind them that a phrase such as j’ai renversé . . . [insert your own object, or wait five minutes and one of your younger siblings will have done it for you] can be translated variably as:
- I spilled . . .
- I did spill . . .
- I have spilled . . .
And then, since English verbs are just spilling out of my brain, I throw in:
- I done spilled.
(Alternate usage: I’ve done spilled. Alternate spelling, which is entirely unnecessary, and if it sorta capture the emphasis, it at times overstates the nuances on the pronunciation and in the process looks hopelessly silly: I dun spilled.)
And of course it could be spilt. So, so, many variations, and they aren’t interchangeable, non-natives don’t try this in public. If it isn’t your dialect, you listen politely and reply in your own. To the educated, it suffices that the variants are mutually comprehensible.
Then, of course, one of the kids wants to know how you say y’all in French. The answer of course is vous. I explain that if we hadn’t done away with thou, we wouldn’t need y’all. But we did, so we do.
***
Related: If you tend to get your pants in a wad because your kids’ French teacher is delving into dialect and she means it for serious because it’s not just interesting academically, but at times useful if you mean to be an educated person who can circulate in multiple circles without being snickered at by those possessing a wider understanding of the local culture than your average ill-educated, untraveled, upper-middle-class standard-English-speaking isolationist, maybe a book like this one will help you unwind a little. Or not. But it’s readable and interesting, so it can’t hurt to try.
Artwork: Diego Delso [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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