Can we say that French language is a little bit inconsistent? [closed]

Question

I would love to provide more examples in other grammar topics too but this requires time. Therefore I consider updating this question gradually.

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Example 1:

Je te le donne (1) - I am giving it you

Je le lui donne (2) - I am giving it to him/her

In the first sentence the structure is:

subject + indirect object + direct object + verb

...while in the second sentence the structure is:

subject + direct object + indirect object + verb

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Language evolves, that means rules and idioms change by time. But, while studying French I feel like I encounter 'different rules/structures on the same topic' quite often. Is it just me or can we say that French language is a little bit unstable or inconsistent in its current state?

Answer 1

This is more of a linguistics answer to a linguistics question, but TL;DR it depends on how you frame the rules.

"Rules" in popular grammar are not good analytical tools. They tend to be generalizations, i.e. just one step above observation. When we say thing like "In English, an object pronoun comes after the verb, but in French, it comes before the verb," we're not adding any understanding of language as such; we're just summarizing our observations. A true analysis would describe some underlying mechanism that allows us to predict the placement of object pronouns, issuing statements that are possible to falsify. (For example, an analysis might predict speakers' interpretations of je me te donne and je te me donne, where the status of the pronouns is ambiguous on the surface, or it might provide a coherent explanation for vous me le montrez but montrez-le-moi.)

I say all that to explain that the "rules" we use to describe grammar are of arbitrary scope. Since all they do is summarize observation, it's up to us to decide how much of what we observe will be included in the summary.

The less we include, the simpler the rule, but everything we've excluded becomes an "exception". The more we include, the more complicated the rule, but we do away with "exceptions".

In the examples you cite, we could write a simple rule that goes: "The direct object comes first." In that case, we'd have to list as exceptions me, te, se, nous vous. Alternatively, we could write a simple rule that goes: "The indirect object comes first." Then our exceptions would be le, la, les. (In both cases, things like me te require extra exceptions.)

On the other hand, we could decide that we don't like inconsistencies and exceptions and instead formulate the rule: "Singular direct objects of fewer than three letters and plural direct objects of fewer than four letters come second; all others come first." This rule is convoluted and arbitrary, yes... but it has zero exceptions!

So the "inconsistency" depends on our point of view. However, the assumption (in generative linguistics, at least) is that there is some deeper rule we haven't detected that determines the order. Perhaps it's phonological? Semantic? Syntactic? Historical, i.e. a cause that has disappeared while the effect remains? But this belief in a consistent underlying mechanism is not universal, and one might argue that even that mechanism is somehow inconsistent or random.

Note that while rules of this kind are not analytical, it's true that some give rise to better analytical directions than others. For example, a common rule you might see is: "Indirect object first, unless they both start with L, in which case do it alphabetically." This rule is both simple enough to memorize and it works simply because it happens to sort lui and leur after le/la/les. But at the same time it's very unlikely that the underlying mechanism takes account of our written alphabet (after all, illiterate people still use pronouns correctly). It's the kind of accidental rule that's discovered by machine learning, correlation without causation, and hence not a good research direction.

Answer 2

Rather than thinking about the placement of French's pronouns in terms of word order, it's simpler to analyse its whole verbal complex as verbal template in the model of what would be done for e.g. the Quechuan languages:

Each slot of this template can potentially be filled by one of several defined morpheme, that follow a rigid order and can't be intruded upon by another word.

Applied to French, this gives the following template:

Where "syncretic P" encompasses the reflexive pronouns and those that are syncretic (i.e. identical) with them. For example, the 1S object pronoun doesn't change form when it's reflexive (je me lave), a non-reflexive direct object (il me voit) or a non-reflexive indirect object (elle me parle).

In contrast, the Acc P and Dat P columns include the pronouns that do change form according to their role: Il se lave, il le voit, elle lui parle.

In Quechua like in French, there are some idiosyncrasies like forbidden combination or contractions that'd we'd need to take into account to refine our model, but that falls outside the scope of the question.

When we try to fill our template with the two sentences in the question, it outputs the right order:

The advantage of this model is that it's simple, both to explain and to acquire. There's a limited amount of slots to the template, that can be filled by a limited number of morphemes (and always just one at max except in the derivational prefix slot).

Answer 3

Your first example is not what you can term an inconsistency. There is, undoubtedly, an apparently contrived process to know in order to place the two objects correctly, but no contradiction; so, this example would have justified such a question as "Can we say that French language is a little bit contrived?". That is an entirely different subject.

However, in the way of inconsistencies we can come up with some real ones as full fledged candidates for the list. Why do the French say "la grand rue" when "rue" is feminine? — why do they say "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" when "Qu'est-ce?" means the exact same thing, and why do you never hear "Qu'est-ce?"?; why are they introducing in their language, as it is being done presently two nouns for each name of profession, one masculine and one feminine, when any profession is supposed to imply strictly the same functions and duties in both cases?
We can now speak about inconsistency. It is difficult to compare with other languages, as first of all it is quite difficult to master even as few as two languages: I have never heard any generalization in that vein of thinking. Studies in years to come will perhaps enlighten us on that subject, both on the level of each language per se and on the level of the compared worth of various languages; it's a matter of interest.