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The French use apéritif to refer to the time before a meal and the drinks consumed during that time, yet "hors d'œuvre" is a synonym of "entrée" in French and means the first dish that starts a meal. At home in family circles it means more specifically seasoned salads taken as a starter.
The verb forms of French are the finite forms which are combinations of grammatical moods in various tenses and the non-finite forms. The moods are: indicative (indicatif), subjunctive (subjonctif), conditional (conditionnel) and imperative (impératif). There are simple (one-word) tenses and those constructed with an auxiliary verb.
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 ...
For most main verbs the auxiliary is (the appropriate form of) avoir ("to have"), but for reflexive verbs and certain intransitive verbs the auxiliary is a form of être ("to be"). The participle agrees with the subject when the auxiliary is être, and with a preceding direct object (if any) when the auxiliary is avoir.
While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque (some verbs only) have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber ...
Note that the word in French has retained the general meaning: e.g. château in French means "castle" and chef means "chief". In fact, loanwords from French generally have a more restricted or specialised meaning than in the original language, e.g. legume (in Fr. légume means "vegetable"), gateau (in Fr. gâteau means "cake").
Reverso is a French company specialized in AI-based language tools, translation aids, and language services. [2] These include online translation based on neural machine translation (NMT), contextual dictionaries, online bilingual concordances , grammar and spell checking and conjugation tools.