In my time cosplaying as a semi-fluent French speaker, I’ve noticed that the adverb trop is one of the most widely used words in French. Francophones have this tendency to use trop (meaning ‘too’) as a way to intensify the meaning of pretty much anything they’re talking about. In so many situations, you could find yourself hearing someone saying something like “Ahh, c’est trop mignon !”, “C’est trop beau” or “C’est trop bon” to really hit home the fact that something is remarkably cute, beautiful or delicious.
But what’s interesting is that trop is used in this way at all. In English, the concept of intensifying an adjective with an adverb that conveys the idea of excess doesn’t exist in quite the same manner. Of course, you could say that something is “too expensive”, “too loud” or “too stupid”, but in such cases the word “too” is used in a negative sense to describe something being undesirable in its excess. Yet while French also uses trop in this literal way - e.g. trop cher, trop con, trop stupide, etc. - you’re just as likely to come across the use of trop in a positive sense, which just doesn’t have a parallel in English.
So why does the French language do this? My theory is that French uses trop in much the same way that Italian embeds -issimo / -issima / -issimi / -issime within adjectives: to intensify the meaning of the adjectives in question. In Italian, you often hear words like buonissimo, bellissima and carissime all the time. Given the fact they’re essentially doped-up versions of buono, bella and care, it’s easy to assume that exaggeration is an extremely important feature of the language, if not the culture as well.
And yet, curiously enough, French also has its own version of -issimo (i.e. -issime), which the Académie Française says was borrowed from the Italian. But while the Italian variations are used in every second or third sentence (e.g. “Sto leggendo un bellissimo libro”), I get the sense that the French -issime is comparatively rarer and is somewhat of an affectation. In other words, when someone throws in adjectives such as gravissime or topissime in their speech, they’re making a conscious decision to do so, as it would be far simpler to go the trop route.
As English doesn’t have its own take on -issimo and doesn’t really use too as a positive intensifier, I guess we’re left with other adverbs to create the same effect. I suppose there’s a reason that words like very, extremely, absolutely and totally are used incredibly often and sound perfectly alright. English speakers also tend to use dramatic-sounding adjectives to stress an epic quality, employing adjectives such as awesome, awful, incredible, amazing, and - well - epic with such banal regularity that they’ve long been drained of their original meanings. ‘Awesome’ no longer describes something that provokes feelings of awe; indeed, the word itself is about as un-awe-inspiring as it gets.
Yet while English has these ways of spicing up adjectives, French and Italian have them too, and so English is actually relatively impoverished in this respect. So why not take a leaf out of its Romantic cousins’ books? There’s nothing to stop anyone doing so. But could you really get used to throwing “too beautiful” around?
Probably not. It’s just too weird.
Je voudrais une explication, s’il vous plaît
When I was at school, I was taught that if you wanted to order a baguette or whatever else at a boulangerie or wherever else, you would say “Je voudrais une baguette, s’il vous plaît”. Jarringly, however, when I came to France, I discovered that no one speaks like this. Usually when I queue up for my daily bread, I find that most people would say something like “Je prends une baguette”, “Je vous prends une baguette” or even “J’aurai une baguette”. I suppose these sentences are the French equivalent to “I’ll get a baguette” or “I’ll have a baguette”, but as French doesn’t have a word for “get”, “take” is the closest equivalent. I remember a time when a French friend once said that he’ll “take a Coke” from a street vendor, which for some reason sounded suspiciously like he was planning to steal it.
But if stealing is generally frowned upon, it might not be as bad as sounding like a total noob in a boulangerie. As a part-time Francophile, it behooves me to try to integrate as much as possible into French society, and sounding like a local comprises a pretty major part of the mission. And so while I could pull out the classic “Je voudrais une baguette” and speak “proper” textbook French, I shy away from doing so lest I mark myself out as an obvious foreigner.
So why don’t people use this sentence structure? I think I know the answer. When I was on exchange at the Sorbonne, I asked a classmate if it were okay to say “Je voudrais une baguette, s’il vous plaît”. His response? It would sound super polite. And, well, I suppose that people generally just aren’t super polite. People don’t always say their pleases and thank yous because excessive politeness can be somewhat jarring, as if you wanted to distance yourself from others.
But beyond words like “please”, I think that English just uses the conditional tense far more often than French does. In French, someone might ask you, “Tu veux du pain ?”, but in English “Would you like some bread?” sounds so much nicer than “Do you want some bread?”. I also think that English uses the conditional tense a lot simply because the cultures where the English language dominates are relatively conflict-avoidant and hence prefer to make it easier for the one whom they’re asking the question to just say no - after all, it’s easier to decline a hypothetical situation described in the conditional tense than a real, present one. But as French is pretty direct, by comparison, the use of questions in the present tense just doesn’t sound as blunt in French as it does in English.
Not that I would know for sure.
