French Colours (and Adjectives)

This post is kinda like hitting two birds with one stone.

what a violent idiom, eh?

In French adjectives agree in number and gender with the noun they describe. Unlike English where the adjective comes before the noun in French the adjective comes after the noun (note: there are exceptions, but I’m not going to cover them in this post). So if the noun is singular feminine, so too is the adjective. So 'la rose' (the rose) becomes 'la rose bleue' (the blue rose). But guess what we can break it down into a simple formula(seen below in table 2).

I really hope you like tables…

That looks like a lot right?

But actually its kinda simple.  Consider the masculine form as the base and add and -e, -s, or -es to it repesectively depending on whether the word it modifies is fem.sing, masc.pl, or fem.pl.

If the masculine already ends in an 'e' then nothing changes from M -> F

If it ends in an s the MSG and MPL forms are the same

Now we woudn’t really be learning French if there weren’t some unique exceptions, so here they are:

A linguistic note for the real nerds:

A couple notes on the irregularities in French. French is actually doing something that is considered somewhat rare. Linguists refer to it as morphological subtraction. A general rule of French pronunciation is that word final consonants aren’t pronounced. So taking the feminine form as the root form, just remove the last SOUND you pronounce et voilà! It’s ironic that the French orthography effectively shows the opposite of French phonology in this case. Here’s an example of what’s happening in IPA:

See that final consonant deletion :eyes:

#CrashCourseFrench

Did I make a mistake? Do you have any questions, comments or concerns? In that case comment below!

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