5
ABSTRACT
Being given that French comes from Latin like all the Romance languages, it is
expected to contain some Latin grammatical rules. But in the passing phase from Latin
to French, we see that some of these rules gradually disappear.
The Latin substantives, pronouns and adjectives were being conjugated; they had
six conjugation: nominative case, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative.
Like German and many Slavic languages, Latin has a different sentence structure. It is
the conjugation of the nouns that decides the function of it, not where it is.
The old variation with six cases of classic Latin had been reduced as former
French to a conjugation of two cases. The disappearance of the substantive
conjugation, more precisely the disappearance of the subjet case, is the phenomenon
most characteristic of mid French period. From XIV century we don’t see the subject
conjugation case in French.
The system based on subject conjugation has failed; we thus tried to find which
elements of the French language replaced this system and which are the traces of the
Latin variation in French contemporary.
As for the Turkish language, Turkish uses substantive conjugation (like Latin)
which determines the function of the subject in the sentence. In connection with the
substantive conjugation, we noted that Turkish has some similar characteristics with
Latin. In this case, we decided to seek conjugation case of subject in Turkish language
which can correspond to certain functions in French language that will serve us as
clearness for analyzing the structure of the French sentence well. Because we, the Turks,
being people who are accustomed to making sentences in a free and flexible way, have
difficulties in understanding the rigid and inflexible structure of French sentence.