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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 ...
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 ...
In -é.er verbs, the é becomes an è before silent endings, and optionally in the future and conditional tenses. In -e.er verbs other than most -eler and -eter verbs, the e becomes an è before endings that start with a silent e (including the future and conditional endings). For example: peler (to peel) -> je p-èle (present) / je p-èlerai ...
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.
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 ...
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.
Later in Modern French, these changes were limited to fewer irregular verbs. Modern French also had lost the class of rather unpredictable -ier verbs (resulting from ejection of /j/ into the infinitive suffix -āre, which still exists in some langues d'oïl), having been replaced by simple -er verbs plus -i instead, as in manier, but Old French ...
Verbs which in any way deviate from these rules (there are around 200 such verbs in the language) are classed as irregular. A language may have more than one regular conjugation pattern. French verbs, for example, follow different patterns depending on whether their infinitive ends in -er, -ir or -re (complicated slightly by certain rules of ...