France has a highly competitive education system. Your score on the high school exit exam–the baccalauréat général, usually referred to as the bac–does a lot to determine where you will go in your life afterwards. Odd career paths like mine would be even less likely in France than they are in the US.
The bac is not easy. Here are some example questions from the philosophy épreuve (see below), taken from this web page (and yes, philosophy is a required subject for high school students in France):
- Is man condemned to create illusions about himself?
- Can we prove a scientific hypothesis?
- Does language betray thought?
- Does historical objectivity presuppose an impartial historian?
As Nadeau and Barlow’s excellent book on France describes it: “The Bac exams in June are always covered by the media, starting with talk shows that invite guests to discuss and comment on the questions for the philosophy exam.”
Forget being able to pass the bac–thanks to Zipf’s Law, I have enough trouble just reading the analysis of the bac in the papers. Here are some words that I had to look up from today’s article:
- le dessous: as a preposition, it can mean on the bottom, underneath, under, or below. As a noun, it has many meanings, including the downstairs apartment; bottom or underside; underwear; secrets, what lies behind something, hidden facts. The headline of today’s newspaper story is Les dessous d’une note–good luck figuring out which sense is intended without reading the whole article!
- la note: a number of meanings, including “note,” but also rating, mark, or grade–presumably the intended meaning here.
- une épreuve: many meanings–in this case, part of an exam. The article begins Après des épreuves de maths et de physique-chimie jugées trop dures, des consignes de clémence auraient été données aux correcteurs.
- la consigne: a number of meanings. In this case, an order or instruction, but also a baggage-checking room, as well as a deposit, as in a deposit on something that has to be returned. When you get into verbal and adjectival forms, it gets even more amusingly diverse, but we’ll leave that for another time. (Addition: later in the day, I ran into this in an email from the director of the Institute regarding various and sundry things that people needed to do regarding the aménagement (layout, arrangement, set-up) of the new equipment room: Merci à tous de respecter ces consignes.)
There are, of course, many other words that Zipf’s Law brings us in the rest of the article, but at least now we can read the first sentence! Almost, at any rate: I can’t even figure out what tense auraient été is, let alone what it means!
Zipf's Law 
auraient été données = will have been given (I think) (avoir + future stuff = aur) + (3pl + past = aient) + etre (for passive) + donner + participle + 3rd singular feminine agreement,
Duolingo constantly pulls me up on gender and number agreement mistakes, which I somehow avoid in German but get wrong all the time in French.
This example is another facet of KevinBCohen’s theorem, which states that once you have taken a field methods class, or even just met enough people who have, you cant go back.
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So, I spent some time talking with a couple of my native-speaker coworkers about that construction. We all spent some time with Bescherelle, and the consensus was that it is the past conditional of a passive. This matches the morphology, but contextually, it seems weird, as I don’t see a way to fit the past conditional into the narrative.
I am all about failing to get number and gender agreement right–my French is definitely of the “I can haz cheezburger?” variety. In fact, I propose that as a new technical term, to go with “Monty Python sentence” and “donkey anaphor.” It would signify an utterance with failure of agreement of any sort.
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Kev, I think you’re being too literal (as opposed to clear) and not French enough. I know my French intuition is rusty, but “auraient été” sounds perfectly unsurprising. (And more so since HS in these days of the death of the subjunctive.)
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It’s not like I thought it was ungrammatical or anything–it just didn’t seem to fit in the discourse.
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Chris, I did indeed apply my field methods and corpus linguistics approach in a later post on temporal adverbs, in which I induced (I think–I’ve always been weak on logic) that one of the temporal adjectives takes an NP complement, although this apparent fact wasn’t documented in any of the written materials that I came across.
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Your response to me: I was trying to say that I thought it fit the discourse. Sorry for the confusion.
Your response to Chris: Instead of “induce”, I think you may have meant “adduce”.
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The “like” is because you made me think back to my Bac 🙂
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One of my favorite sights in Paris in June is the cafes full of studying high school students!
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