Today we are going to talk about a very common verb, “to go”, to answer the question of a listener who chose the funny nickname of Sintelabo, on the site RTL.fr. “Hello, he wrote to me (or she!). In a recent column, about verbs, you remind us of the notion of” radical “, as an oversight to forget [ou jou pour jouer, auquel s’ajoutent les différentes terminaisons des conjugaisons]. But to find the radical of a verb like to go, there is work, laughs our listener, knowing that one says: I go, we go, you will go, that I go there, etc. ” wonder how that is explained.
It is true that the verb “to go” is very irregular! You could even say that it is the most irregular of all – well, there is a draw with the verb to be. It poses few problems for those whose mother tongue is French, but for a brave stranger who tries to tame our capricious idiom, it’s a serious headache!
The student who studies French conjugations expects that “to go”, with its ending in -ER, conjugates like “to play”. Which would give: “I go, you go, he goes …” But no, it’s “I go, you go, he goes …”. And in the future, we say “I will go, you will go …” when we could wait “I will go, you will go”. Young children sometimes combine like that, moreover: “They will go to the beach …” Yes, the little French people also discover the French language, and sometimes get their feet in it.
A sacred phenomenon
And indeed, the verb to go does not have a radical, like to play, it has three: goes, in the present indicative, go to the future and conditional and all for the other forms.
But what is exciting is: why?
Well imagine that the verb to go, teaches us the Antidote dictionary, “derives its particular conjugation from three different latin verbs all of which expressed displacement: to walk, to go there, and growing louder, who bequeathed the forms of type let’s go, will go and go respectively. These three Latin verbs are also related to direct or indirect way to other French words : “Ambulare, to walk provided ambulant, ambulance, paramedic”, and even “ambulatory”. Without forgetting the sleepwalker, who “sleeps while walking”!
“Ire” ‘go’ is hidden in French in the form of its derivative to undergo, which properly means in Latin ‘to go under’. “Fathers “march” has produced several derivatives “which have given in French” to escape, escape, evasive, evasively, invasion “and even” to invade “.
In short, with the verb to go, it is not a verb that we use, but three! Usage has drawn what suited him best to make the conjugation to his sauce. And this verb has another peculiarity, which is also underlined by our listener (or trice!). When we say, in the near future, “I’m going to the beach early”, we use the same verb twice, in different forms, “go” and “go”. In short, this going which seems so banal to us is in fact a sacred phenomenon!
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