Unité 1
cajun 101 - learn louisiana french at home |
Leçon 3 - Quelle âge tu as?
Quelle âge tu as? J'ai six
ans.
kel aj ta? dg-ay sees ahn.
How old are you? I am six years old.
Since the motivation for creating these Cajun French lessons is to teach my son French, I try to be sensitive to the interests (and attention span) of a first grader. Beyond a person's name, the other most important fact about them (if you are in first grade) is how old they are. In Cajun we ask Quelle âge tu as? or, literally, Which age have you? The response from my son (at the moment) would be J'ai six ans, literally I have six years.
Notice how in French we have an age instead of being an age, so we use the verb to have or avoir to talk about how old we are. The word âge is almost the same in English, age. The difference is the little inverted "v" (^) over the "a". This mark is called a circumflex and, as we'll see, these little marks are very important in French. The marks are essential to correct spelling, leave the marks off and you've misspelled a word (possibly even changed the meaning).
In French, the form of the verb changes depending on the noun it works with. In this lesson we see that the verb avoir (to have) has two different forms:
- tu as, you have
- j'ai, I have
In International French, the verb and subject are usually reversed in order when asking a question, like this: as-tu. So another way of phrasing this lesson's question is Quelle âge as-tu? However, Cajuns don't worry about this inversion and rely on the inflection in their voice to indicate a question. Also, Cajuns tend to elide words together when then speak them, so tu as will sound like t'a. (Note, the "s" at the end of "as" is not pronounced in French.)
To study these words, see the Quizlet set for this lesson. To practice your numbers in French, see the Quizlet set French numbers 1-10. Also, take look at this: a Youtube video of Émile counting from 0 to 10.
Note. In Rev. Daigle's books you'll find that he used spellings that reflect the Cajun pronunciation of words. In Cajun Self-Taught you'll see that he spells tu as as t'a. Rev. Daigle's spelling is not (technically) incorrect since Cajuns are likely to write down their words the way they say them. You'll see all kinds of spelling variations in written Cajun French, e.g. j'sus for je suis (I am). How to spell words in Cajun French can be a sticky point of debate. I don't really want to get into proscriptive debates on which spellings are appropriate for this or that region of Louisiana, but I have to follow some consistent rules for the purposes of this course. For Cajun 101 I'll follow the primary spellings given in the Dictionary of Louisiana French (Valdman ed.) These spellings tend to agree with the accepted International French spellings, which is a bonus since I want my son to be familiar with International French. It is important to know about all the Cajun variants (this is a necessary part of learning Cajun French). Thus I'll introduce "cajunisms" whenever I can, but will give the normalized (or International) spellings for words where ever those corrections don't totally remove the Cajunness of the phrase.
The Numbers from 0 to 31
| zéro | 0 |
| un | 1 |
| deux | 2 |
| trois | 3 |
| quatre | 4 |
| cinq | 5 |
| six | 6 |
| sept | 7 |
| huit | 8 |
| neuf | 9 |
| dix | 10 |
| onze | 11 |
| douze | 12 |
| treize | 13 |
| quatorze | 14 |
| quinze | 15 |
| seize | 16 |
| dix-sept | 17 |
| dix-huit | 18 |
| dix-neuf | 19 |
| vingt | 20 |
| vingt et un | 21 |
| vingt-deux | 22 |
| vingt-trois | 23 |
| vingt-quatre | 24 |
| vingt-cinq | 25 |
| vingt-six | 26 |
| vingt-sept | 27 |
| vingt-huit | 28 |
| vingt-neuf | 29 |
| trente | 30 |
| trente et un | 31 |
