Break It Down

French Lesson I: Le Meurtre

See the vaches ambling up the hill, head to rump, head to rump. Learn what a vache is. A vache is milked in the morning, and milked again in the evening, twitching her dung-soaked tail, her head in a stanchion. Always start learning your foreign language with the names of farm animals. Remember that one animal is an animal, but more than one are animaux, ending in a u x. Do not pronounce the x. These animaux live on a ferme. There is not much difference between that word, ferme, and our own word for the place where wisps of straw cover everything, the barnyard is deep in mud, and a hot dunghill steams by the barn door on a winter morning, so it should be easy to learn. Ferme.

We can now introduce the definite articles le, la, and les, which we know already from certain phrases we see in our own country, such as le car, le sandwich, le café, les girls. Besides la vache, there are other animaux on la ferme, whose buildings are weather-beaten, pocked with rusty nails, and leaning at odd angles, but which has a new tractor. Les chiens cringe in the presence of their master, le fermier, and bark at les chats as les chats slink mewing to the back door, and les poulets cluck and scratch and are special pets of le fermier’s children until they are beheaded by le fermier and plucked by la femme of le fermier with her red-knuckled hands and then cooked and eaten by the entire famille. Until further notice do not pronounce the final consonants of any of the words in your new vocabulary unless they are followed by the letter e, and sometimes not even then. The rules and their numerous exceptions will be covered in later lessons.

We will now introduce a piece of language history and then, following it, a language concept.

Agriculture is a pursuit in France, as it is in our own country, but the word is pronounced differently, agriculture. The spelling is the same because the word is derived from the Latin. In your lessons you will notice that some French words, such as la ferme, are spelled the same way or nearly the same way as the equivalent words in our own language, and in these cases the words in both languages are derived from the same Latin word. Other French words are not at all like our words for the same things. In these cases, the French words are usually derived from the Latin but our words for the same things are not, and have come to us from the Anglo-Saxon, the Danish, and so on. This is a piece of information about language history. There will be more language history in later lessons, because language history is really quite fascinating, as we hope you will agree by the end of the course.

We have just said that we have our own words in English for the same things. This is not strictly true. We can’t really say there are several words for the same thing. It is in fact just the opposite — there is only one word for many things, and usually even that word, when it is a noun, is too general. Keep this language concept in mind as you listen to the following example:

A French arbre is not the elm or maple shading the main street of our New England towns in the infinitely long, hot and listless, vacant summer of our childhoods, which are themselves different from the childhoods of French children, and if you see a Frenchman standing on a street in a small town in America pointing to an elm or a maple and calling it an arbre, you will know this is wrong. An arbre is a plane tree in an ancient town square with lopped, stubby branches and patchy, leprous bark standing in a row of similar plane trees across from the town hall, in front of which a bicycle ridden by a man with thick, reddish skin and an old cap wavers past and turns into a narrow lane. Or an arbre is one of the dense, scrubby live oaks in the blazing dry hills of Provence, through which a similar figure in a blue cloth jacket carrying some sort of a net or trap pushes his way. An arbre can also cast a pleasant shade and keep la maison cool in the summer, but remember that la maison is not wood-framed with a widow’s walk and a wide front porch but is laid out on a north-south axis, is built of irregular, sand-colored blocks of stone, and has a red tile roof, small square windows with green shutters, and no windows on the north side, which is also protected from the wind by a closely planted line of cypresses, while a pretty mulberry or olive may shade the south. Not that there are not many different sorts of maisons in France, their architecture depending on their climate or on the fact that there may be a foreign country nearby, like Germany, but we cannot really have more than one image behind a word we say, like maison. What do you see when you say house? Do you see more than one kind of house?

When are we going to return to our ferme? As we pointed out earlier, a language student should master la ferme before he or she moves on to la ville, just as we should all come to the city only in our adolescent years, when nature, or animal life, is no longer as important or interesting to us as it once was.

If you stand in a tilled field at the edge of la ferme, you will hear les vaches lowing because it is five in the winter evening and their udders are full. A light is on in the barn, but outside it is dark and la femme of le fermier looks out a little anxiously across the barnyard from the window of her cuisine, where she is peeling vegetables. Now the hired man is silhouetted in the doorway of the barn. La femme wonders why he is standing still holding a short object in his right hand. The plural article les, spelled l e s, as in les vaches, is invariable, but do not pronounce the s. The singular article is either masculine, le, or feminine, la, depending on the noun it accompanies, and it must always be learned along with any new noun in your vocabulary, because there is very little else to go by, to tell what in the world of French nouns is masculine and what is feminine. You may try to remember that all countries ending in silent e are feminine except for le Mexique, or that all the states in the United States of America ending in silent e are feminine except for Maine — just as in German the four seasons are masculine and all minerals are masculine — but you will soon forget these rules. One day, however, la maison will seem inevitably feminine to you, with its welcoming open doors, its shady rooms, its warm kitchen. La bicyclette, a word we are introducing now, will also seem feminine, and can be thought of as a young girl, ribbons fluttering in her spokes as she wobbles down the rutted lane away from the farm. La bicyclette. But that was earlier in the afternoon. Now les vaches stand at the barnyard gate, lowing and chewing their cuds. The word cud, and probably also the word lowing, are words you will not have to know in French, since you would almost never have occasion to use them.

Now the hired man swings open la barrière and les vaches amble across the barnyard, udders swaying, up to their hocks in la boue, nodding their heads and switching their tails. Now their hooves clatter across the concrete floor of la grange and the hired man swings la barrière shut. But where is le fermier? And why, in fact, is the chopping block covered with sang that is still sticky, even though le fermier has not killed un poulet in days? You will need to use indefinite articles as well as definite articles with your nouns, and we must repeat that you will make no mistakes with the gender of your nouns if you learn the articles at the same time. Un is masculine, une is feminine. This being so, what gender is un poulet? If you say masculine you are right, though the bird herself may be a young female. After the age of ten months, however, when she should also be stewed rather than broiled, fried, or roasted, she is known as la poule and makes a great racket after laying a clutch of eggs in a corner of the poultry yard la femme will have trouble finding in the morning, when she will also discover something that does not belong there and that makes her stand still, her apron full of eggs, and gaze off across the fields.

Notice that the words poule, poulet, and poultry, especially when seen on the page, have some resemblance. This is because all three are derived from the same Latin word. This may help you remember the word poulet. Poule, poulet, and poultry have no resemblance to the word chicken, because chicken is derived from the Anglo-Saxon.

In this first lesson we have concentrated on nouns. We can safely, however, introduce a preposition at this point, and before we are through we will also be using one verb, so that by the end of the lesson you will be able to form some simple sentences. Try to learn what this preposition means by the context in which it is used. You will notice that you have been doing this all along with most of the vocabulary introduced. It is a good way to learn a language because it is how children learn their native languages, by associating the sounds they hear with the context in which the sounds are uttered. If the context changed continually, the children would never learn to speak. Also, the so-called meaning of a word is completely determined by the context in which it is spoken, so that in fact we cannot say a meaning is inescapably attached to a word, but that it shifts over time and from context to context. Certainly the so-called meaning of a French word, as I tried to suggest earlier, is not its English equivalent but whatever it refers to in French life. These are modern or contemporary ideas about language, but they are generally accepted. Now the new word we are adding to our vocabulary is the word dans, spelled d a n s. Remember not to pronounce the last letter, s, or, in this case, the next to the last letter, n, and speak the word through your nose. Dans.

Do you remember la femme? Do you remember what she was doing? It is still dark, les vaches are gone from her sight and quieter than they were earlier, except for the one bellowing vache who is ill and was not let out that morning by le fermier for fear that she would infect the others, and la femme is still there, peeling vegetables. She is — now listen carefully—dans la cuisine. Do you remember what la cuisine is? It is the only place, except perhaps for the sunny front courtyard on a cool late summer afternoon, where une femme would reasonably peel les legumes.

La femme is holding a small knife dans her red-knuckled hand and there are bits of potato skin stuck to her wrist, just as there are feathers stuck in le sang on the chopping block outside the back door, smaller feathers, however, than would be expected from un poulet. The glistening white peeled pommes de terre are dans une bassine and la bassine is dans the sink, and les vaches are dans la grange, where they should have been an hour ago. Above them the bales of hay are stacked neatly dans the loft, and near them is a calf dans the calves’ pen. The rows of bare light bulbs in the ceiling shine on the clanking stanchions. Stanchion is another word you will probably not have to know in French, though it is a nice one to know in English.

Now that you know the words la femme, dans, and la cuisine, you will have no trouble understanding your first complete sentence in French: La femme est dans la cuisine. Say it over until you feel comfortable with it. La femme est—spelled e s t but don’t pronounce the s or the t — dans la cuisine. Here are a few more simple sentences to practice on: La vache est dans la grange. La pomme de terre est dans la bassine. La bassine est dans the sink.

The whereabouts of le fermier is more of a problem, but in the next lesson we may be able to follow him into la ville. Before going on to la ville, however, do study the list of additional vocabulary:

le sac: bag

la grive: thrush

l’alouette: lark

l’aile: wing

la plume: feather

la hachette: hatchet

le manche: handle

l’anxiété: anxiety

le meurtre: murder