If you've ever learned any sort of French before, you've probably come across the phrase
'est-ce que' when forming various types of questions.
If you haven't studied French before, essentially, whenever you make a question in French, you
need some way to communicate that you're asking a question.
This can be done by simply raising the inflection of your voice at the end of the question,
adding a yes or no question particle at the end of the question (similar to eh? or right?
in English), inverting the order of the subject and the verb, or simply adding the phrase
'est-ce que' to the beginning of the question or immediately following a question word.
But the confusing part is that 'est-ce que' is, in many cases, not so easily translated
into English.
In this video, we'll explore the linguistic reason why French speakers use 'est-ce que'
to form questions.
If you were to break down est-ce que into three separate words, it translates literally
as is this that?
OR is it that?
So if you see est-ce que in a yes or no question like 'Est-ce que tu parles français?'.
The literal translation is 'is it that you speak French?' which directly translated certainly
makes sense but wordier than how we would actually say it in English.
In another example: 'Qu'est-ce que tu fais?'
The literal translation of this question is: "What is it that you do?"
Same kind of thing here too: it makes sense literally translated but it's wordier.
So, the question becomes: why do French speakers even bother using 'est-ce que' at all in a
question if it seemingly adds additional words which don't really add any additional information
to a question.
To answer this, we'll need to look at the syntax or sentence structure of French sentences
and questions and also to go back in time to the days when people spoke Old French.
In Old French, it was common to invert word order to identify a yes or no question.
For example: 'Est intelligente mon amie?'
As Old French became Middle French, speakers started to prefer to use what are called cleft
structures to ask yes or no questions.
" Cleft structures, also referred to as cleft
sentences, are a way of constructing normally simple sentences in a more complex way in
order to highlight a particular component in the sentence.
For example: 'He's writing a book' is a simple sentence.
It can be written as "It's a book that he's writing."
Another example is "We wanted to eat spaghetti" which can be rewritten as "What we wanted
to eat was spaghetti."
These are examples of cleft sentences because the word order is moved around to highlight
a certain component, in these cases 'a book' and 'spaghetti'.
If you're enjoying this video so far, I'd really appreciate it if you could support
my channel by liking this video.
I'd also love it if you subscribed to my channel to stay up to date on new content and to be
part of our language-loving community.
The cleft question: est-ce que mon amie est intelligente? which literally translates to
'Is it that my friend is intelligent?' became a common way to phrase yes or no questions.
As French continued to change over time, the cleft structure 'est-ce que' which originally
meant 'is it that' began to be recognized primarily as a question particle.
We know that 'est-ce que' has become a question particle because est-ce que never changes
according to verb tense, mood, or number – which would be common for a typical verb in French.
From a linguistic perspective, the transformation of est-ce que from a normal sentence or question
to a never-changing question particle is an example of reanalysis which is a type of syntactic
language change.
Subscribe to my channel to learn more about the world's languages.
Don't forget to turn on notifications to be notified about new videos each week.
Here are some others videos you might be interested in."