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Jul 13, 2018 at 0:45 history edited jlliagre CC BY-SA 4.0
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Jul 11, 2018 at 16:52 comment added Luke Sawczak @jlliagre For the gerund/infinitive, here it depends on the verb: "I suggest doing X" but "I hope to do X". Either one could also be "I suggest/I hope (that) you do X". For "what/which", there are two cases. When selecting from known options, "which" is standard and "what" is populaire ("Which car should I choose?" ~ "What car should I choose?"). But when identifying a referent, "what" is standard: "I stole a car? I don't know what car you're talking about." (And then "which" would imply a set of possible stolen cars; you concede that you've stolen some but you don't know which one he means.)
Jul 11, 2018 at 16:27 comment added jlliagre @LukeSawczak Thanks for the corrections! No need to comment unless there is something to clarify. Here I understand most of my mistakes except the issue I have to figure out (figuring out?) in what (which?) cases "using" need to be used instead of "to use"...
Jul 11, 2018 at 15:31 history edited Luke Sawczak CC BY-SA 4.0
(p.s. do you prefer editing, commenting, chat, or leaving alone for this kind of fix?)
Jul 10, 2018 at 23:53 comment added jlliagre @MathieuGuindon You are missing the point. Nobody wrote random rules affect some word spelling change (despite liaison presence being sometimes unpredictable). In my reply I actually wrote French words do not change their spelling depending on what word follows, i.e. we write un petit homme where the ending t is pronounced but we do not write un peti garçon because that t is not. Ruakh rightly pointed a few exceptions to this "rule".
Jul 10, 2018 at 23:25 comment added Mathieu Guindon Ok I see what you're saying with ce vs cet, although.. Can we agree it's because you're linking a vowel-ending word to a vowel-starting word, e.g. cet opéra, vieil ami, and that using le vs la has everything to do with "you use masculine or feminine form of the direct object pronoun in accordance with the gender of the word that follows"? As a native French speaker there's something about "(word) has its spelling affected by the word that follows" that's just completely over-simplified and sounds like things are pretty much random, when they're absolutely not random at all.
Jul 10, 2018 at 22:06 comment added jlliagre @MathieuGuindon ruakh's point is beau, vieux, ce change their spelling (and pronunciation) to bel, vieil and cet because of the following world characteristics. Le and la also have their spelling affected.
Jul 10, 2018 at 21:36 comment added Mathieu Guindon @ruakh "bel homme", "vieil homme" ...aren't those just adjectives qualifying the man in question? meaning, as adjectives to a masculine noun, they take masculine form? (and would take plural form if the noun was plural, too).. and "cet homme", although here again, the demonstrative takes gender & plural/singular forms ..and I'd deem the L+apostrophe in "l'homme" more of a completely separate thing, where "le/la/les" in front of a vowel-starting noun ("H" being mute) just takes the apostrophe. "spelling is affected by the following word" - it's actually the exact opposite...
Jul 10, 2018 at 21:21 history edited Stéphane Gimenez CC BY-SA 4.0
edited body
Jul 10, 2018 at 9:11 comment added jlliagre @ruakh There are indeed cases where the spelling is affected by the following word.
Jul 10, 2018 at 6:02 comment added ruakh Re: "French would have been even more complex should we have different spellings depending of what word follows some words": Well, but we do have that: consider e.g. "Qu'en pense-t-elle ?" and "Vas-y !" (And that's only counting cases where, as in your liaison examples, we're just inserting a consonant. If we count other sorts of changes, then we also have bel homme, cet homme, vieil homme, l'homme . . .)
Jul 9, 2018 at 20:46 history answered jlliagre CC BY-SA 4.0