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Don't get me wrong, I love General Yakovleff; out of the 4 or 5 French Generals that regularly appear before the media he is the one I would be most enthusiastic to take orders from, General Trinquant being a close second. But why does he not know how to conjugate 'extrader'?
In this video at :55 NATO he says

ils [Turquie] posent quelques conditions inacceptables à la Suède, en particulier que la Suède extradite,

then he rolls his eyes, knowing that he goofed, and the moderator corrects him. It seems like he's getting the word confused with the English word "extradite" since "extrader" does not even have a "t" in it. Admittedly, George Bush and Donald Trump regularly made mistakes in grammar but General Yakovleff seems cut from a different cloth than those two.

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    As for being cut from a different cloth, all native speakers make errors, especially (as Marck's answer ably shows is probably the case here) when it comes to adapting irregular structures by analogy with regular ones. One can be, so to speak, too good at applying a rule.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Jul 11 at 14:19
  • Odd that you can't spell your favorite general's name right.
    – caPNCApn
    Jul 11 at 22:32
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    @LukeSawczak Also, for speakers in multilingual settings, it's easy to slip and use a word from another language, esp. when the environment is tolerant of the slippage and effective communication can still be achieved.
    – Frank
    Jul 12 at 6:10

1 Answer 1

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"Extrader" is a verb whose related noun is "extradition", but it is not used in a daily context, thus not known by the majority of people. Other pairs of verb/noun like these are (examples) :

  • "extruder" (j'extrude, tu extrudes, il extrude) / "extrusion"
  • "citer" (je cite, tu cites, il cite) / "citation"

French people often tend to invent some words or ways to conjugate verbs they do not know based on more common words. I believe the General thought about the noun "extradition" first, and thought the related verb should be "extraditionner" (from "extradition") or "extraditer", while it actually is "extrader". So he started conjugating with "extraditer", giving "extradite".

It is however highly possible that he thought the English word "extradite" (="extrader" in French) is the same as in French, so he used it. Moreover, the English word "extradition" is the same in French, and both have the same meaning, thus possibly confusing Mr. Yakovleff.

(See Google Books Ngram Viewer for the use of "extrade" and "extradition" over time.)

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