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Nouns that end in -s, -x or -z in the singular are left unchanged in the plural in both pronunciation and spelling (cf. croix > croix 'crosses', both pronounced [kʁwa]). Liaison between a plural noun and a following adjective is one case where the plural ending -s or -x may be pronounced: des fenêtres ouvertes [dɛ fənɛtʁəz‿uvɛʁt ...
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
The Modern English-ing ending, which is used to form both gerunds and present participles of verbs (i.e. in noun and adjective uses), derives from two different historical suffixes. The gerund (noun) use comes from Middle English-ing, which is from Old English-ing, -ung (suffixes forming nouns from verbs).
The variants -(z)ito and -(z)ita, direct analogues of Spanish -(c)ito and -(c)ita, are also common in some regions. The forms with a z are normally added to words that end in stressed vowels, such as café → cafezinho. Some nouns have slightly irregular diminutives. Noun diminutives are widely used in the vernacular.
Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
There are nine verbs which have an irregular subjunctive stem. These verbs are generally the most irregular verbs in French. With them verbs the 3P stem plays no role and the 1S stem is little use in inferring the present indicative inflections. Many of them construct the present indicative (especially the singular) in an idiosyncratic fashion.
The sound noted -s and -x was a hard [s], which did not remain in French after the twelfth century (it can be found in words like (tu) chantes or doux), but which was protected from complete elision when the following word began with a vowel (which effectively means, when it was found between two vowels).
In Romance, the inchoative suffixes in Latin became incorporated into the inflections of fourth conjugation verbs (-īre).Catalan, Occitan, Italian, and Romanian have distinctions between "infixed" (infixed with the inchoative suffix -ēscō) and "pure" (non-infixed) verbs, with the number of pure verbs tend to be fewer than the infixed ones, while French has pure verbs but treated as irregular.