Re: Re[2]: [tied] French Gerund v. Participle

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 18:23:09 -0800 (PST), you wrote:

>
>Brian:
>> Nor does it mean the same thing. People who speak French
>> may be speaking English.
>
>
>So would "people speaking French"! You're splitting more hairs
>and they may be used interchangeably in both English AND French
>despite what you may consider grammatically appropriate. Regular
>people don't speak "grammatically appropriate". Only grammarians
>do and even they have a lapse from time to time.
>
>Look in Google and do the following searches:
>
> "des personnes parlant francais"
> (143 entries)
>
> "des personnes qui parlent francais"
> (67 entries)
>
> "des personnes qui parlent le francais"
> (20 entries)
>
> "des personnes qui parle le francais"
> (2 entries)
>
>
>And now English, or rather what's left of the pieces:
>
> "people who speak English"
> (6330 entries)
>
> "people speaking English"
> (2230 entries)
>
> "people who speaks English"
> (644 entries)
>
> "people who speek English"
> (7 entries)
>
> "da peeps who be talkin' ma language"
> (surprisingly, no entries)

Glen, the original assertion (more of an obiter dictum, but never
mind) was that the French participial construction, although common in
writing, is rarely used in speech. You challenge this on the basis of
Canadian French, of which indeed I have no knowledge, so let me
qualify the claim by restricting it to metropolitan French.

Now what you are trying to prove with the above statistics from Google
I cannot guess. The point at issue is a difference between speech and
writing. What relevant point can you prove by searching _written_
documents on the web?

Kim Bastin