The image above is the Present tense conjugation table for French -er verbs. Since we are in a rebellious mood, lets’ question the table. 2 questions:

 

Question 1:

Who organised it this way?

 

Question 2:

Is there a better way of doing things?

 

Before dealing with those questions, let’s look at a third.

 

Question 3:

What is the purpose of the table.

 

The answer to that question,

 

Answer 3: The purpose of the table is to summarise the rules that language learners can use to produce the I-form, you-form, 3rd person form, we-form, yous-form and they-form of a verb when beginning with the infinitive form. For example, the French word for “to give” is donner. To say “I give”, you replace the er in donner with e and pair it with Je (I) to get Je donne.

 

That’s question 3. Now to question 1.

 

Question 1:

Who organised it this way?

 

Answer 1:

It was organised/standardised this way by linguists a long time ago.

 

Now to the more interesting question, 

 

Question 2:

Is there a better way of doing things? 

 

The short answer is 

 

Answer 2:

Yes

 

In the next article, I will present a simple argument for why the answer is yes.

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There is more where this came from.