Practice Makes Perfect

part, share), and dos (dowry).

La nuit, tous les chats sont gris. 

Everyone looks the same in the dark.

De nombreuses espèces de perroquets   Many species of parrot are to be found 

se trouvent dans la forêt tropicale de  

 

in the tropical forest of Mauritius 

l’île Maurice. 

 

Island.

-eur

Nouns ending in -eur include names of professions as well as words denoting certain tools and 

machines.

l’aspirateur 

vacuum cleaner 

le compositeur  composer

le climatiseur 

air-conditioner 

l’ordinateur 

computer

le cœur 

heart 

le réfrigérateur  refrigerator

Léa, tu devrais passer l’aspirateur dans  

Léa, you should vacuum the living room. 

le salon.

Paul-Henri a un cœur de pierre. 

Paul-Henri has a heart of stone.

Don’t be intimidated by the references to Latin. No one expects a budding—or even 

competent—Francophone to become a Latinist. However, Latin is not only the direct 

ancestor of French but also a living presence. When a French-speaking person dips into the 

vast ocean of Latin vocabulary to create a handy neologism, he or she, as scholars have 

written, is not borrowing from a foreign language.

 

While English is a bit removed from Latin, let us not forget the Norman Conquest 

(1066), which imposed Norman French on England for more than three centuries. English 

was not accepted in the courts until 1386, becoming the fully accepted idiom only around 

1400. As a result, modern English retains an enormous Latin vocabulary, acquired via Nor-

man French. In fact, English is probably more French than any other non-Romance lan-

guage, and English speakers use French in everyday life without even knowing it. For exam-

ple, while love is a Germanic word, its adjective, amorous, is French. We are so used to our 

Romance vocabulary that we don’t even notice our natural bilingualism when we alternate, 

depending on the context, between friendly (Germanic) and amicable (French). There are 

thousands of such examples—no surprise, since around 30 percent of our vocabulary is 

French. These affinities and similarities between English and French are good news for the 

learner.

 

In another example, we are all familiar with an elegant French word for software: logi