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There are two auxiliary verbs in French: avoir (to have) and être (to be), used to conjugate compound tenses according to these rules: Transitive verbs (direct or indirect) in the active voice are conjugated with the verb avoir. Intransitive verbs are conjugated with either avoir or être (see French verbs#Temporal auxiliary verbs).
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
This subject-verb inversion is similar to question formation in English, though in English the inversion may only occur with auxiliary verbs, while in French it may occur with all verbs. If the subject is anything other than an unstressed pronoun, an unstressed subject pronoun that agrees with the subject is added to the right of the verb.
The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle.The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms - although there is an important difference in usage between the perfect tense and the imperfect tense).
In French, the infinitives are -er, -oir, -re, -ir, but verbs with -oir and -re are in the third group, also known as irregular verbs. Latin deponent verbs like sequor and nascor (infinitive sequī , nascī ) changed to active counterparts *séquo and *násco (infinitive *séquere , *nascere ), as in Portuguese seguir , Spanish seguir , and ...
However, in colloquial speech the expressions moi-z-en, toi-z-en; moi-z-y and toi-z-y have become widespread (also registered as -z’en and -z’y). The possible reason for this phonological trend is because it follows the same logic, in which all verbs ending on en and y always use the liaison /z‿/ , like in parles-en /paʁlz‿ɑ̃/ (talk ...
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language.It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100 –1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years.