# FR: soyant / étant



## lachryma

Hello all,

ok, I know that 'étant' is the present participle of 'être'. Today I was writing and I accidentally used 'soyant' instead. Then I thought... is that even a word? So I googled it, because I feel like I've seen it before, but I couldn't be sure. When you google it, a whole bunch of pages with sentences using 'soyant' and 'en soyant' come up. It seems as though they're using it more or less as a present participle would normally be used.

Here's an example: "...en sorte que les susdits rémèdes seule ne soyant pas capable de les guérir". That is from a book that is partially online here. 

What is this? Is it wrong?


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## Lépido

Yes, it is... The link leads to a publication that very obviously is a translation - and a very bad one. You cannot say "soyant", it is indeed "étant". 
Conjugaison du verbe "être": http://www.wordreference.com/conj/FRverbs.asp?v=etre


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## tilt

lachryma said:


> Here's an example: "...en sorte que les susdits rémèdes seule ne soyant pas capable de les guérir". That is from a book that is partially online here.


L'exemple que tu donnes ici est tiré d'un texte ancien ; peut-être que ce mot était-il correct alors. Il ne l'est plus, en tous cas.
Je pense que ce "mot" te semble familier car il sonne comme _soyons_, et ne choque donc pas l'oreille. D'ailleurs, dans la plupart des liens qu'il renvoie sur Google, il remplace _soyons _plutôt que de _étant_.


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## Fred_C

tilt said:


> Je pense que ce "mot" te semble familier car il sonne *un peu* comme _soyons_,


 
Bonjour,
Pour nos amis qui apprennent le Français, il faut peut-être préciser que les voyelles nasales AN et ON se ressemblent, mais ce ne sont pas les mêmes.
(Par contre, EN produit très souvent exactement la même nasale que AN. (Quand ce n'est pas le cas, EN produit la même nasale que IN))


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## CapnPrep

lachryma said:


> Here's an example: "...en sorte que les susdits rémèdes seule ne soyant pas capable de les guérir".


In this sentence the verb is a finite form (= _soient_), not a present participle.

The participial form _soyant_ has never been in widespread use, even in older French, but I believe that there are isolated examples. It is an overextension of the conjugation type found in _sachant_, _ayant_, _puissant_, _vaillant_ (the last two are no longer used as participles).


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## agantuk

I do not think the answer is quite as simple as a yes or a no or old French/current French and it certainly has nothing to do with pronunciation confusion.  Both forms exist and I find the "soyant" form will occasionally sound better, particularly if there is a slight subjunctive sense.  For instance when pointing out to a student that "dans" and "dents" were pronounced the same (as well as explaining that this sound -which exists also in Hindi, the student being from india, was NOT AT ALL like the nasalised sound "on") I found myself writing "la prononciation de ces deux mots étant la même" but subsequently corrected it to "soyant".  "Étant" sounds totally wrong here and jars when one re-reads the sentence.  "Soyant" no doubt is an older form and used relatively rarely nowadays, but it still has its place and one should not refuse to take advanatge of its particular resonance (la résonance des mots soyant d'une importance tout spéciale dans la langue de Molière).


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> "Soyant" no doubt is an older form and used relatively rarely nowadays, but it still has its place and one should not refuse to take advanatge of its particular resonance (la résonance des mots soyant d'une importance tout spéciale dans la langue de Molière).


"Relatively rarely" is a huge understatement. I'm afraid that one really must refuse to use this particular word, resonant as it may be.

la prononciation de ces deux mots *étant* la même 
la prononciation de ces deux mots *soyant* la même


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## Maître Capello

CapnPrep said:


> "Relatively rarely" is a huge understatement. I'm afraid that one really must refuse to use this particular word, resonant as it may be.


 Definitely!


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## agantuk

Maître Capello said:


> Definitely!



It is in my experience to be definite about language, although it is true that it is a traditionally French way of looking at language (chapeau bas aux immortels). The fact is that the 'rules' of language are determined by what is said and what is used not the other way round. That "soyant" is still in use is quite clear from any google search of the net. So there is really no "must" about it. 

One should be particularly careful as a teacher never to dismiss elements of language too lightly as "archaic". I remember, many many years ago, teaching English to foreign students, that I blithely told a class to ignore the word "steed" as it was an archaic word, only to be covered in embarrassment during the next few days when people kept referring to my girlfriend's bicycle as "her trusty steed". My girlfriend was also a student so I was taught a very important lesson about language that I have never forgotten.

In the seventies it was common for books on French to claim that the "vous" form was no longer used (as a polite singular) and the subjunctive was now defunct. All total nonsense of course but people are quick to assume that their own personal usage is everyone else's. Human enough but wrong.


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> The fact is that the 'rules' of language are determined by what is said and what is used not the other way round.


I agree with this, but the fact is that _soyant _(in place of _étant_) is only used erratically, by non-native speakers, children, and other non-normative speakers. I don't see any reason for French language learners to know about this form, and they *definitely* *must not* be told that there are contexts ("particularly if there is a slight subjunctive sense" ) where _étant_ "sounds totally wrong" and needs to be "corrected" to _soyant_.


agantuk said:


> people are quick to assume that their own personal usage is everyone else's.


I also agree with this. I wonder if you haven't fallen into the same trap in this instance.


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## agantuk

Let me clear about one thing.  I am not in the least intending to "tell" anybody (language learners or others) what they should or should not do but simply to record a personal impression and to attempt to understand actual (as opposed to theoretical) usage.  But I am certainly not assuming either that my personal usage (which is in any case uncertain, that of a non-native speaker and no grounds at all for prescription) is everyone else's and have, like the original questioner, looked at the internet usage.  And there the evidence seems to me rather interesting.  The use of "soyant" as a present participle is quite clearly not that rare ("relatively rare" is an understatement, dixit l'autre mais il me paraît que c'est, au contraire, plutôt exact) and I don't see that the dismissal of these users as "non-normative" holds up. Languages change and develop independently of "rules" and there is a point where this distinction between "normative" and "non-normative" speakers becomes extremely dubious and derives from an attitude towards language that is essentially prescriptive rather than descriptive.  

The problem with regarding "soyant" as "an error" (let us compare it for a moment with English "should of", now also  relatively common usage) is that it is difficult to see what it can be an error for.  No tenable theory has yet been proposed.  The origins of the usage "should of" (essentially phonetic) is on the other hand quite clear.  "Should've" and "should of" have an identical sound in English.  In the same way French native speakers (whether normative or non-normative I leave you to judge) will often "write" infinitives for past participles.  In both cases the user is "saying" the write thing and merely representing it wrongly in writing (where there are necessarily such things as prescriptive rules regarding the way sopunds are represented).  I do not on the whole buy the notion for instance that the use of "soyant"  represents a confusion with "soyons" because, to a native speaker, "ons" and "ant" really do not sound that similar.  The evidence of the net, however, suggests that this confusion DOES indeed occur but, as far as I can see, almost exclusively amongst maghrébins (and very possibly those who speak French as a second language).  On the other hand the commonest use of "soyant" is in "en soyant" (to me unsurprising a priori because "en étant" has such an inelegant sound) and this cannot possibly be a confusion with "soyons".  That "en soyant" is primarily used by young people may well be the case but beware! Once one starts regarding the young as "non-normative" speakers, then one risks perforce aligning oneself against any conception of a language as a living, developing thing. The middle-aged and the old are only "temporary kings" and the young are the "normative" speakers of tomorrow if not today.

The respondent is sceptical of the notion of "subjunctive sense" and I only proposed this as a mild theory but the phrase is not really that inexplicable or meaningless.  The subjunctive in my view is always much better approached as a semantic entity rather than as  a piece of grammatical mathematics.  I wish I had Orsenna's fine book on the subject in front of me to find a more apt quotation but the subjunctive "est le mode des fous de liberté, de rêves et de désirs" but more banally expresses a putative rather than actual situation.  Following "en", étant" can sometimes clearly mean little more than "étant" but will often on the other hand present a putative rather than actual situation.  In other words it can have either the sense "as it is/as I am" or the sense "should it be/should I be".  In trying to *describe *how "en soyant" is used, rather than assuming a large, diverse and dispersed community of the linguistically challenged, this might be a useful starting-point.

Consider for instance the 16-year-old (encore une fois gare aux préjugés, il n'est plus un "enfant", celui-ci) who wonders if he can work during the summer "en soyant payé".  The situation invoked is clearly putative where "en étant payé" would suggest (to me at least) a situation that is actual (qui existe actuellement). I am here looking at the phrase not to decide if it is "right" or "wrong" but rather to see how successfully it expresses the intended meaning and whether the usage implies a defensible distinction from the "normative" alternative. His phrase may not work in "google translator" (indeed it doesn't) but it does seem to me to express admirably the young man's meaning and to be justifiably distinct in sense from the "normative" alternative preferred by grammarians (and google translator).


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## Ashmada

I'm afraid CapnPrep and Maître Capello are right, though.     In both examples you gave, "étant" sounds right to a native, "soyant" does not.   I did a google search of "soyant", and while there are results, they are either:  - Old texts.  - Wallonian texts, where it is indeed the correct form of the verb "esse" (note: "soyant" pronounced differently from french, "esse" pronounced differently from latin).  - Texts with a plethora of other mistakes.


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> The problem with regarding "soyant" as "an error" […] is that it is difficult to see what it can be an error for.  No tenable theory has yet been proposed.


It is an error for _étant_. I explained the origins of the usage in my earlier post #5. It is the regular _-ant_ ending of the present participle attached to the wrong stem (present subjunctive _soy_- instead of the imperfect _ét_-), by analogy with forms like _sachant_ and _ayant_. You may also occasionally come across _fassant_ instead of _faisant_, for the same reason.


agantuk said:


> Consider for instance the 16-year-old (encore une fois gare aux préjugés, il n'est plus un "enfant", celui-ci) who wonders if he can work during the summer "en soyant payé".  The situation invoked is clearly putative where "en étant payé" would suggest (to me at least) a situation that is actual (qui existe actuellement).


The sentence you are referring to is:


J'aimerais savoir, si je peux bosser à 16 ans pendant l'été, en soyant un petit peu payé? (source)
 The putative nature of the situation is established by the context (_J'aimerais savoir si je peux_). Using the normative form of the participial phrase _en étant un petit peu payé_ would not transform this into an actual situation. Anyway, from this one sentence, you have no way of knowing if this speaker chose to use _soyant_ as a distinct alternative to _étant_, or if he simply uses _soyant_ all the time (or if he uses both _soyant_ and _étant_ with no semantic difference).

Your descriptive claims about _soyant_ are interesting; I don't believe that they are true, but I am prepared to be convinced by solid evidence. If you are serious about describing this usage, you will need to go well beyond a quick Google search.


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## agantuk

I do not put any great faith in google searches (remember that was not  where this all started either for the questioner or myself) but I  observe that everybody is finding different ways of dismissing what  those searches reveal none of which describes accurately what is to be  found.  We start with someone who follows a link (the original  questioner's) and decribes what he reads as "clearly a translation - and  a very bad one".  It is no such thing; it is a piece of  seventeenth-century French.  On the other hand it could be a  mistranscription, and as one more careful person correctly pointed out  it seems syntactically to be a present subjunctive (soient). I do not  know but it seems quite conceivable that "soient" and "soyant" were once  pronounced identically.  Others find "old texts".  I have found *NO*  old text where the supposed occurence of "en soyant" is not in fact in  error (presumably caused by some OCR programme) for "en fuyant".  Quite  why rests slightly mysterious.  One understand readily why an OCR  programme would (but should not) mistake an "f" for a "long s" but why  it should mistake an "o" for a "u" I do not know, but there are in fact  several examples of this.  So, although initially I accepted the  notion,  I am now a little sceptical of the "archaism" theory and am  more inclined to believe the usage is a neologism. Then there are those  who find all the examples to be by "non-normative" users (very few are  actually children but why children, for instance, should be regarded as  "non-normative" goodness only knows) and "texts with a plethora of other  mistakes" but there are actually plenty of examples. particularly of  "en soyant", which show no signs whatsoever of being by anyone in the  least "abnormal" and which appear in "texts" in otherwise completely  "normative" and correct French. That the usage is "relatively rare" I  have always accepted; that the consensus of opinion (also amongst native  speakers) regards the usage as "incorrect" I also accept (one can find a  case for instance where one native speaker "corrects" another in this  regard and the original user of the term - who appears, even if her  question is a mite unusual, to be a middle-class 55-year-old French  feminist of relatively refined tastes - accepts the correction.  But,  again, this question of "correctness" is a quite different matter from  currency of usage.  I personally loathe to hear people talk of "less  people" in English (and any grammar book you like to look at will  support me in deeming the usage "incorrect").  It is moreover a far  worse "error" to my mind in that, far from creating a distinction, it  obliterates one.  But so what?  I am sadly aware that it is not merely  in common current use by people of all levels of literacy but that is a  totally entrenched usage and utterly ineradicable. It is quite simply  what native speakers of English in their great majority say.  To regard  it as "incorrect" becomes in that context mere pedantry.  What is widely  used becomes perforce "correct" eevn when formally people go on  regarding it as "incorrect".

Revenons à nos moutons. Obviously it  is true that the use of "soyant" is by analogy with "ayant" and  "sachant" (themselves in turn related to the subjunctive and imperative  of the same verbs) but this describes a choice quite as much as it  describes an error (unlike for instance the confusion of "soyons and  "soyant").  I take the point about "fassant" but the occurrence of this  on the web really can be counted on the fingers of one....finger wheras  there are many examples of "soyant". For the young man cited, of course I  have no way of knowing if he is making a distinction (such things are  in any case not conscious in this way) or if he uses "soyant" all the  time.  But a little common sense tells one that this usage like any  usage must have its own "rules".  Rules do not determine usage but usage  does itself create patterns which can reasonably be described as  "rules". Is it for instance conceivable that in the expression "Etant  donné...., "étant" would be replaced by "soyant" (by the 16 year old  job-searcher or the 55 year-old feminist or the questioner or myself)?   Except as regards myself I acnnot *KNOW* but I think not.  Nor in the expression "étant sorti....". So virtually prima facie there  is a difference of usage between the two words.  "Soyant" is therefore  not simply used in error for "étant" (nor, note, was that the experience  of the questioner who states clearly that he "knew" the present  participle of être was "étant" nor was is it my own experience, hwre in  one particular sentence it seemed to me preferable).  I have suggested  what I think may be the basis of the usage and there is clearly a  perfectly coherent distinction that *can *be made (Etant  père - being a father, Soyant père - should I be a father).  There is a  case also on the web where someone invites people to describe what they  do or think or something "en soyant seul(e)".  Again it is not from an  "old text" or a "text" by any child, immigrant, vagrant, foreigner,  Wallon, terrorist or other abnormal.  Most the respondents, while not  explicitly correcting the usage, prefer the conventional formula but  maybe - just maybe - when talking of what they do "en étant seul(e)"  they are actually changing, arguably even trivialising, the original  sense ("when alone" rather than "should they be alone").  What seems to  me clear is that the usage is there and, like "less people", is most  unlikely to go away.  And it certainly won't go away when people refuse  to look it in the face or accept that it exists.  Hence my attempt to  try and understand it rather than dismissing it out of hand because one  would rather it did not exist.


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> I do not  know but it seems quite conceivable that "soient" and "soyant" were once  pronounced identically.


No, the third person plural ending _-ent_ has always been unstressed, and the _-ant_ of the participle has always been stressed. Anyway, I don't think OP's original example requires any further consideration: it's just an isolated error.


agantuk said:


> Then there are those  who find all the examples to be by "non-normative" users (very few are  actually children but why children, for instance, should be regarded as  "non-normative" goodness only knows)


You seem to think "non-normative" is a negative value judgment, equivalent to "abnormal", but it is not. "Non-normative" simply describes usages that do not belong to standard French, and non-normative speakers are those speakers that — for whatever reason — produce a significant number of non-normative usages. This is a term used to broadly classify usages and speakers in view of further study, not to dismiss them.

Saying that _soyant_ is a non-normative usage and that it should not be taught to learners of French is not at all the same as wishing it did not exist. I, for one, would be very interested to know if any variety of French has both _étant_ and _soyant_ as modally distinct forms in the way you suggest. But your isolated web examples have provided no evidence thus far. And it is easy enough to find examples where _soyant_ is used without any subjunctive/irrealis meaning:

[…] mais vous dites plein de choses negatives *en soyant sur* que c'est L'OPINION  la plus juste qui soit mais quand vous entendez quelqu'un dire du  positif,vous changez d'idée (source) 
j'ai été en cours jusqu'à juin quand même *tout en soyant enceinte*, mais  le regard des gens au collège n'étaient pas top du tout (source) 
What you need to do is find a native speaker who uses _soyant_ (unfortunately there seem to be none among the participants in this thread… ) and find out whether they also use _étant_, and in what contexts.


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## agantuk

Oh, on the question of what should and should not be taught, I have no  quarrel.  That is quite another matter. I have never for a moment  suggested "soyant" should be taught.  But a forum is surely to discuss  usage not merely to legislate for it.  And the whole interest here seems  to me to be in the questions behind the question, that is, when is  usage to be deemed erroneous and when not, how does usage change and  what purpose does the change serve. But what interests me too is the  reaction to what is seen as "non-normative".  I have no objection to the  term used neutrally but here the "non-normative" nature of the texts  and the writers thereof was clearly being assumed on no real evidence  because that is what the commentators wanted to believe. In practice  (and you are yourself multiplying examples of this) the majority of  users of "soyant" are perfectly "normative" in every other respect even  if not necessarily wonderfully endowed linguistically speaking.  Again I  have never objected to the description of the use of "soyant" as  non-normative (to describe it as "relatively rare" and "considered  incorrect by a consensus" says nothing different, merely somewhat elss  pejoratively) but to the characterisation of those who might use it as  "non-normative". which seems to me plainly nonsense in most of these  cases.  Of course non-normative does not mean abnormal but it has been  used here by extension as though it did.  And it is in any case, unless  used very carefully, a rather subjective term (in this case bearing  fairly clear signs of class and age prejudice) . Look back over the  thread.  There was no attempt whatsoever to "classify speakers in view  of further study" merely to stigmatise them so that their usage in this  case could be disregarded. A sort of panic.....

I exempt yourself  from this stricture.  You have actually bothered to look more carefully  at the examples but most have clearly not looked at all beyond what appeared to confirm their prejudices.  And I agree of course that your examples here do not  have "subjunctive sense".  But the whole question is worthy of further  investigation.  These sound like youngsters, again suggesting that we  are dealing not with an archaic or "going usage" but with a neologism  and "coming usage".  But I would still accept a large wager that none of  these people would say "Soyant donné" (there are no examples  to be googled that I can see) which fact (if fact it is) would alone means that the  word "soyant" is not simply being used instead of "étant" except in  selected instances and, whatever the basis for that selection may be,  there must nonetheless be a basis. "Soyant sorti" on the other hand I  have found (wikipedia Shattered Glass).

By the bye I do not think  you can be right about "soient" if by "unstressed" you mean  "unpronounced'.  It is intrinsically improbable that syllables exist  that have never been pronounced but for confirmation that the "ent" was  pronounced in old French see  http://homepage2.nifty.com/okadamac/old_french.pdf/PronAF_MArtu+Perc.pdf.  So in 1671, when spelling was still to soem extent variable, "soyant"  for "soient" would not necesarily have been an error, but could simply  have been a variant representation of the word as the writer pronouned  it.

I readily admit that I am here playing the part of Devil's  advocate if not agent provocateur but I feel the discussion has been  more interesting and enjoyable for it....


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> By the bye I do not think  you can be right about "soient" if by "unstressed" you mean  "unpronounced'.


If I meant "unpronounced" I would have written _unpronounced_. By _unstressed_, I meant "unstressed". 

Even during earlier periods when _-ent_ was pronounced, it was not pronounced anything like _-ant_. And by 1671 it wasn't pronounced at all in Parisian French. I cannot exclude the possibility that the royal surgeon Cosme Viardel had a strange pronunciation and/or poor spelling. On the other hand, here is his original text (from a 1678 edition):


> en sorte que les susdits remedes seuls ne *soyent* pas capables de les guerir


And here is the text as quoted by Ricci (1949, p. 162f):


> en sorte que les susdits remèdes seule ne *soyant* pas capable de les guerir


It seems pretty clear to me that all of these errors were introduced in the latter publication.


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## agantuk

Good work.  That is entirely clear.  Careless transcription. And no evidence therefore so far that the form "soyant" was an archaism.

It's not really relevant to the thread but I don't follow your distinction between "unpronounced" and "unstressed".  If the pronunciation is "swa" (or was it swoi" at the period) then is not the "ent" unpronounced.  Or are you using teh term "unstressed" to indicate that it always continues to exist as a ghost as it were and that elements at least of the "unstressed" syllable can and do reappear when necessary (before a vowel essentially)?


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## CapnPrep

agantuk said:


> And no evidence therefore so far that the form "soyant" was an archaism.


I found this example in a late 19th-century songbook:

Quoique soyant studieux, rien n'entrait dans ma mémoire
There are two examples (from a single 15th-century author) in the DMF:

… je soyant en la cité de Messine
… soyant et estant bien informé
And the following citation: Wunderli, Peter (1972), "_Soyant_". Zum Problem der Partizip-Präsens-Stämme im Französischen, _Romanistisches Jahrbuch_ 23, pp. 48-73.

But I wouldn't say that _soyant_ is an archaism. This is the sort of analogical form that could pop up spontaneously and independently at any period.


agantuk said:


> It's not really relevant to the thread but I don't follow your distinction between "unpronounced" and "unstressed".


I was just trying to say that _s*oi*ent_ would always have been stressed on the first syllable (whether or not the second syllable was pronounced), while _soy*an*t_ would always have been stressed on the second syllable. So the two words would never have been pronounced similarly.


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