French Verb Conjugation Rules

Introduction to French Verb Conjugation Rules

This project is intended to provide a set of rules for conjugation of all French verbs. This ability is necessary for computerized French language learning, computer translation projects, or where a simple set of rules is needed to guide conjugation. These rules can be used to reduce Bescherelle-like conjugation books to a few simple pages.

There is no ability to handle forms that are non-infinitives or non-existant French infinitives. Books such as Bescherelle are still the non-computerized best choice.

The rules consists of a Microsoft Access database. The database fields should be self-explanatory with the exception of the most important field named RegEx. RegEx is a regular expression like syntax that is used to match infinitives. The rows of the database are ordered such that the first match of an infinitive on a RegEx row yield the conjugations for the infinitive. For example, accroire or courre matches RegEx in the first row of the database, thus their conjugations info is shown on that row.

Some RegEx expressions use * for wildcard matching of any letters and [ ] are used to donote matching of one and only one of the enclosed letters.

The conjugation rules have been verified against all possible sources. The author believes the rules to be the most accurate of any publicly available rules.

Areas wanting additional verification are participles, omitted tenses such as impersonals, handling of reflexives, handling of verbs with special conjugations (gender), and adding missing defective verbs.

The database could be enhanced to handle additional columns for information such as group number (I, II, III).