Wikipedia:Peer review/French grammar/archive1

French grammar

accurate and precise translation needed at Talk:French grammar, and collaboration needed/wanted at French grammar. Request posted by Lysdexia 21:38, 18 February 2005 (UTC). (Bishonen | Talk)

Some comments:

1. General — The article lacks references. This could well be one of the reasons for the confusion in the debate at the Talk page.
2. General — Take leave of the idea that there is only one 'accurate and precise translation'. Languages simply don't map accurately and precisely onto each other, so it's hardly a surprise if there are various possible translations of a given construction.
3. General — There is nothing on question formation. What are the different ways to ask questions? What question words are there? What syntactical and intonational devices?
4. Verbs > tenses — This section is in desperate need of simple sample sentences. In general, it needs more structure and more didactics; the reader should be taken by the hand and led along the different tenses, every single of them supplied with a sample sentence. The main distinction (simple vs compound) should be explained before the reader starts to worry about it. Sample sentences help to intuitively visualize this distinction. And so on. Incidentally, I have found the neat format used at Nafaanra_language#Tense_and_aspect (bulleted sentences, bolded morphemes) to be handy.
5. Verbs > tenses — 'Aside from these tenses, there is an imperative, a participle, and the infinitive, each of which can be inflected for tense (present and past), although the past imperative is quite rare.' :) But that's not a peculiarity of French; I'd say that's for obvious semantic reasons.
6. Verbs > Compound tense auxiliary verbs — I count only the sixteen motion verbs, but the text says that 'Those sixteen verbs, plus three common compounds, are: (...)'. Where are the compounds? What's the meaning of 'compound' in this context?
7. Verbs > The Past Participle — It reads that participle-as-an-adjective '...follows all the regular agreement rules of the language...', but the reader has not yet come across those regular agreement rules; clarify expressions on first use.
8. Verbs > Conjugation — Contains no text.
9. Nouns — What morphosyntactical consequences has the gender of a noun? Does the conjugation of the verb change? Does the form of the adjective have to agree with it?
10. Adjectives — I miss the 'agreement rules' previously referred to. What determines the form of an adjective? Examples of this agreement would be nice.
11. Word order — Could do with an example sentence.

Quite a list... but that's it for now. — mark ✎ 11:12, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)