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Post by aquacultured on Jun 3, 2018 0:30:04 GMT 1
As far as I know, Juncker had a very long career as a national Luxembourg elected politician, including as PM and Minister of Finances, and was elected by the EU Parliament on a big majority as Commission President
That's what I said in the third post on this thread, before we went all franco-phobe/phile. (I say this only to recall the original subject, without doing all that embedded quote stuff. I hope I used the right tenses thruout, tho.)
After which mrsonde responded :
Really, that's what you think you know? Then tell me, who was the candidate Juncker was running against? That "parliament" so elected with such a big majority? There wasn't one. He was appointed by the Council. By a majority, yes, behind closed doors, and also against no real credible opposition.
Trouble with democracy and its institutions, they vary widely over the globe, and also evolve over time. Terminology may have to be adjusted accordingly, but often lags behind.
The run-up to the Juncker Presidency marked a divergence from the past. He insisted that candidates should campaign openly, rather than simply be selected by the E Council. More progress towards transparency is promised for the future.
In the European Parliament elections of 2014, Juncker’s party (The EPP) had the largest vote, and the E Council accepted that Juncker, who had campaigned against Michel Barnier for the EPP candidacy (and, of course, against other parties too), should be the lead candidate. The E Parliament gave him a majority, and the Council appointed him. Much as our Monarch, sitting alone, appoints our PM, behind closed doors, while leaving the plebs to think they've elected the PM, when they weren't even asked that question.
However, the E Parliament can veto the Council’s appointment of President, and of course the President’s appointment of the Commissioners. Rather more transparency and checks and balances than we’re used to.
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Post by alancalverd on Jun 3, 2018 10:35:55 GMT 1
One mystery solved, I think. The reason I have no problem with formal written French with at least five past tenses, is because I (and possibly Jean) left school before Mr S was born, so I (we?) were taught "this is X" rather than asked "how does X make you feel?" Nor were we made to feel guilty about assigning a fixed gender to French nouns! O tempora, o mores. O gawd, I never thought it would come to this, juvenes tum eramus.
Anyway, a nos moutons, the creeping evil of a tariff war is that American citizens will have to pay more for US-manufactured goods because if imported feedstock carries a customs overhead, native feedstock can be sold at a higher price. European citizens will have to pay more for imported US goods because they will carry a direct customs ovehead. So the consumer pays for the political vanity of the president, and US manufacturing becomes less competitive. This sort of parasitism can lead to revolution, comrade, brother, citoyen, tovarich!
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 3, 2018 14:23:10 GMT 1
It seems you really do not understand the meaning of or else.Sure I do - it seems you really do not understand that your thinking is incredibly limited, and no one else is in any way similarly restricted to the confines of your stupidity and arrogance. I understand it perfectly well - I learned it, unlike you. And it was you, not me, who claimed it was a "past tense", liar. They don't need "deciphering". Neither do they need or warrant deliberate distortions, endless nitpicking by ignorant pseudo-intellectuals for self-aggrandisement, and outright false accusations in a fraudulent effort to score points. Pompous fool. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 3, 2018 18:27:28 GMT 1
That's not the issue - it's easy enough to simply skip the grammatical structures and still follow the sense. If that's what you do, you are missing half the fun. It's what everyone does. Most French people couldn't conjugate this tense. Sensible solution. The Spanish have the same dismissive snobbery about South American spanish. |
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Post by jean on Jun 3, 2018 19:24:35 GMT 1
It seems you really do not understand the meaning of or else.Sure I do... Good. So I give you two alternatives - this or else that. I say: either you are talking about the passé historique, or you are making things up. Well, on your own admission, you were talking about the passé historique.It follows, then, that you were not making things up - just embroidering an over-complex account of a fairly straightforward verb tense. Really, Nick, you should try not to get so upset about this sort of thing. |
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Post by jean on Jun 3, 2018 19:39:34 GMT 1
One mystery solved, I think. The reason I have no problem with formal written French with at least five past tenses, is because I (and possibly Jean) left school before Mr S was born, so I (we?) were taught "this is X" rather than asked "how does X make you feel?" Up to a point. I was certainly given a thorough grounding in French verb forms, even before O level (I know this because our French teacher, who always had to have a cigarette between classes and was therefore always late, by which time we were behaving very badly indeed, used to give us regular detentions in which we had to write out passé historiques for an hour or so - or sometimes subjunctives, just for a change). Obviously we were not asked how these verb forms made us feel. But our study of French literature would have benefitted us more I think if we had been encouraged to have our own reactions about what we read, instead of being given a few notes to regurgitate to the examiner. |
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Post by alancalverd on Jun 4, 2018 8:15:03 GMT 1
If that's what you do, you are missing half the fun. It's what everyone does. Most French people couldn't conjugate this tense. If everybody did, EU law would be even worse than it is now. Fortunately some of us are paid to scrutinise this crap, not make pathetic excuses about the inability of others, or the difference between spoken and written French, German or even English. It is odd that a man who holds the highest degree ever awarded in anything to do with philosophy, cannot disinguish between "everyone" and "most". Perhaps said degree was actually in politics, from Trump College, Pigsarse, Dakota. But we will never know. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 8, 2018 19:13:10 GMT 1
Good. So I give you two alternatives - this or else that. But only you are so thick or arrogant to suppose there are only two alternatives in that situation. Or I might have been talking about something else; or I might have not written exactly what you agree with for some reason; or I might have made a mistake; or I might know a great deal more about the subject than you think you do; or...or...or...So? Either you're a pompous fool, or else you're a daft old bat. No over-embroidery - it's not straightforward at all. It's pretty much exactly as I described, as a matter of fact. Ahhh - that's your aim, is it? Not merely just to show off by pretending you're some sort of an expert on linguistics, rather than just a mediocre schoolteacher who sort of once taught the made-up doddle of a language that's Latin? Not just a pompous fool, but yet another troll, like your goofy sidekicks? Hard luck - not upset. Just tired of it all. I'd like there to be someone on this board capable of holding a conversation, of having something worthwhile and interesting to say. Nay's away, I guess, jj rarely ventures here, no doubt due to your tiresomely abusive presence, and Marchesa is otherwise engaged. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 8, 2018 19:36:42 GMT 1
One mystery solved, I think. The reason I have no problem with formal written French with at least five past tenses, is because I (and possibly Jean) left school before Mr S was born, so I (we?) were taught "this is X" rather than asked "how does X make you feel?" Up to a point. You were not taught this tense at school. Even french kids aren't. And what age are you, ffs? You were born in the war, were you? I don't believe you. French literature doesn't use this tense - never has done. None that I've ever read, anyway - Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert. Racine and Moliere, maybe, I've never read them in the original, but I doubt it. |
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Post by alancalverd on Jun 8, 2018 21:36:28 GMT 1
You were not taught this tense at school. Even french kids aren't. And what age are you, ffs? You were born in the war, were you? Yes. Better not to guess what I was taught at school, unless Trump Pigsarse Uni included clairvoyance in its philosophy syllabus. And if it did, you are still wrong. |
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Post by jean on Jun 8, 2018 22:09:05 GMT 1
I was born in 1943. But the really interesting quesition is this.
If the specially reserved obscure tense structure we're discussing, which may or may not be the passé historique (perhaps Nick could give us an example, just to clear that up) is not used in literature and is not learned by anyone, how do we know that it actually exists? |
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Post by jean on Jun 8, 2018 22:56:58 GMT 1
French literature doesn't use this tense - never has done...
- Bonjour, dit le renard.
- Bonjour, répondit poliment le petit prince, qui se retourna mais ne vit rien.
- Je suis là, dit la voix, sous le pommier.
- Qui es-tu ? dit le petit prince. Tu es bien joli...
- Je suis un renard, dit le renard.
- Viens jouer avec moi, lui proposa le petit prince. Je suis tellement triste...
- Je ne puis pas jouer avec toi, dit le renard. Je ne suis pas apprivoisé.
- Ah! pardon, fit le petit prince.
Mais, après réflexion, il ajouta:
- Qu'est-ce que signifie "apprivoiser" ? ... |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 9, 2018 0:41:56 GMT 1
You were not taught this tense at school. Even french kids aren't. And what age are you, ffs? You were born in the war, were you? Yes. Better not to guess what I was taught at school, unless Trump Pigsarse Uni included clairvoyance in its philosophy syllabus. And if it did, you are still wrong. Well, you weren't taught much science, that's for sure. You might have been taught how to pass a Physics syllabus, back in 1950 whatever - or 40, or 30. As for whether you were ever taught academic French - I don't believe you, either. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 9, 2018 1:04:32 GMT 1
Ahh. That explains it. You've somehow forgotten that you've admitted yourself that it's not spoken by anyone. It's used in academiuc texts. By "academic" texts I mean those approved by the Academy - text books, journals, official documents. It's called the passe hstorique, but it's not really a past tense at all. It's really an eternal present tense - where it acquires its aura of settled-for-all-time objective authority from. We have no real equivalent. The closest is the rather artificial formulation that some aren't-I-clever novelists use - they're nearly always women - of writing about past events in the present tense. Mantel does it in her Wolf Hall novels, for example: "Henry puts his hand up Anne's voluminous silken skirts, rustling against her bare protesting legs, but she clamps her knees together like a vice. She blocks the progress of his fat sweaty fingers. Not yet, m'lord, she says, coyly. not til I have some gold on my finger, and that Spanish bitch is gone." I saw an episode of Apostrophes once (no equivalent of that here either - something like the early C4 all-night roundtable live debates, like the one where Ollie Reed provoked Kate Millett into flouncing with faux-horreur like a Victorian grande-dame) back in the 80s, where this subject was discussed, tangentially. It was during the national trauma that was the revelation of active French participation in the Holocaust during Vichy. One of the reasons French intellectuals found this subject so difficult to discuss, and hence why it had remained largely unspoken of until then, was due to this mandatory tense structure. It's very difficult to express conditionals using it - your sentence structure has to be transposed, most naturally into the future tense, which makes the whole thing very awkward. Counterfactual history is virtually unknown there as a result. This and that happened, and that's that. I had a discussion with a French pal shortly after watching that program and this was brought home to me - he literally didn't understand what I was saying, due to their unfamiliarity, when I posed a counterfactual hypothesis (this was about the sinking of the French fleet - what would have happened had Churchill not done so? But it did happen, was his bewildered response.) Personally, I think that may be the fundamental reason French intellectuals are, a) so preposterously arrogant and dogmatic (think De Gaulle, Gisacrd d'Estaing, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Levi, etc.etc,) and b) so utterly hopeless at constructing a rational argument. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jun 9, 2018 1:23:31 GMT 1
French literature doesn't use this tense - never has done...
- Bonjour, dit le renard.
- Bonjour, répondit poliment le petit prince, qui se retourna mais ne vit rien.
- Je suis là, dit la voix, sous le pommier.
- Qui es-tu ? dit le petit prince. Tu es bien joli...
- Je suis un renard, dit le renard.
- Viens jouer avec moi, lui proposa le petit prince. Je suis tellement triste...
- Je ne puis pas jouer avec toi, dit le renard. Je ne suis pas apprivoisé.
- Ah! pardon, fit le petit prince.
Mais, après réflexion, il ajouta:
- Qu'est-ce que signifie "apprivoiser" ? ... God bless Google. As I said, virtually medieval. Fairy tales, and those pretending to have their symbolic authority, are written in ye olde lingo for a reason. |
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