this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
1030 points (97.6% liked)

memes

9705 readers
2499 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bitMasque@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

The verb "parler" is indeed supposed to be unconjugated. That's down to differing grammar and syntax in French and English. If I were to try and translate directly from French to English while maintaining the original sentence structure and whatnot, it would look roughly like this: "I not know not speaking French."

...Which is awkward as hell to read, mostly thanks to French splitting negatives into two parts, but you can see how the verb "parler" (speaking or talking) is unconjugated.

You may also notice how that sentence structure looks more similar to an antiquated way of speaking English, if we tweak that just a little bit: "I know not how to speak French."