“I go, you go, he goes, we go, you go, they go.” Admit it: what you just read seemed bizarre to you, not to mention abominable. And yet, forget for a moment what you have always learned, quietly reread the above and recognize that this could be a logical way to conjugate the verb “to go”, especially if it belonged to the first group.
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Because, frankly, how can we explain that we must say both “I am going” and “we are going”; “you will” and “you will”? Native French speakers pay no attention to this, but poor foreigners who make the effort to learn our language tear their hair out at such extravagances.
To understand this apparent aberration, we must, as is often the case, go back in time. In Latin, “to go” was said “ire”, which we find today in our future (“I will go”, “you will go”, etc.) and our conditional (“I would go”, “you would go”…). Why only there? “Because at that time it was already an irregular verb, which the people had difficulty conjugating,” explains spelling historian Bernard Fripiat. So the Romans preferred to use two others.
The first is “ambulare”, which had a close meaning to “to stroll” – which resulted in our “to stroll”. Over the centuries, “ambular” evolved to give “allare” in Latin, then, in Old French, “alare” and finally “aler” (with a single “l”). These are the forms distantly derived from the verb “aler” which are the majority in our conjugation today. We find them not only in the infinitive (“to go”), but also in the imperfect (“I was going”, “you were going”); in the simple past (“I went”, “you went”); to certain people of the present indicative (“we are going”, you are going”); of the imperative (“allons”, “allez”); without forgetting the past participle (“gone”); the present participle (“allant “), the present subjunctive (“that I go”, “that you go”) and the imperfect subjunctive (“that I go”, “that you go”) – even if the latter is hardly in use anymore .
To simplify anything, and without really knowing why, the Romans sometimes used a third verb: “vadere”. It also meant “to go, to advance, to walk”, with a simple nuance of speed and force (which we perceive in its distant French heir “to invade”). “Vadere” for its part imposed itself on the present indicative for the first three persons of the singular (“I go”, “you go”, “he goes”) and in the third person of the plural (“they go”) as well as ‘in the second person of the imperative (“go!”).
Our current conjugation of the verb “to go” therefore combines three Latin verbs of similar meaning: “ire”, “ambulare” And “vadere”. It is therefore described as “heteroclite” (like “être”, which gives at the same time “je suis”, “tu es” and “je fut”) and considered as one of the most irregular words in the French language. . Those who like to present our national idiom as a French garden will undoubtedly detect the first disastrous signs of a dangerous carelessness…
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