Monday, March 25, 2013

Build or fight

Two French words people sometimes struggle with are "battre" and "bâtir", specifically when it comes to conjugation these. You really do not want to get the conjugations wrong as you might end up telling someone you are fighting rather than you are building something.

For a long time, I struggled to remember which word meant what. The trick that helped me was to remind myself that "bâtir" uased to contain an 's'. I know this  because of the use of the circumflex. Thus, somewhere in the mists of time the word was something like "bastir". The word "bastir" reminds me of the English word "bastion", which is a type of building. Therefore, "bâtir" means to build. I wonder, by the way, if the word "bastille" is somehow derived from "bastir".

I am not going to give the full conjugations of the two verbs. Instead I will give only the present tense of "nous" for each verb:

Nous battons      We fight/We beat
Nous bâtissons   We build

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