Lydia Davis - Break It Down

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 .