Talk:Passé simple tense

This page has a number of problems. To be honest, I think it should be deleted as non-encyclopedic, but here are some things that would need to be fixed if we are to keep the article:

• Its title: in French, the name of the tense is le passé simple, or more fully le temps passé simple. In English, the name of the tense is the simple past, or the simple past tense. A reasonable name for the article would therefore be French simple past tense, passé simple, or passé simple (tense). Sorry, but passé simple tense just sounds silly. (It's also rather hard to say, for me at least, since tense isn't obviously non-French, so my mind tries to pronounce it as tãs.)
• It gives very little encyclopedic information about the passé simple. It buries its origin — which I think is incorrect, BTW, but I'm not sure — at the bottom of the article (without giving links to more information about that, or explaining how/why tenses from Latin ended up in French); it doesn't explain how or when to use it; it ignores the use of the passé simple in literature.
• It gives a lot of conjugations, which isn't really the purpose of an encyclopedia. (I don't really mind this so much, except that the page gives almost no encyclopedic information, and I feel like all the conjugations "cover that up," so to speak.)
• It seems to think that a verb whose irregular preterite stem ends in -i is more regular than a verb whose irregular preterite stem ends in -u, simply because regular preterite stems can end in -i and cannot end in -u. That doesn't really make sense to me.
• It also seems to think, presumably for the same reason as in the prior point, that a stem-final -i is part of the ending, while a stem-final -u is part of the stem. I think of both as being part of the stem, and I think you could make a case that both are part of the ending; but I really don't think you can make a case that one is part of the stem and one is part of the ending. Even if you could make such a case, that seems needlessly confusing.
• For the conjugation tables, it would make more sense to use tables (see Help:Table). The blocks of preformatted text break up the page in an IMHO-confusing way.

I really must repeat, though, that I don't think this article is necessary to an encyclopedia. Anything encyclopedic that could be said here could be said just as well at French verbs, unless it turns out there's much more to say about the passé simple than I realize. Ruakh 18:11, 1 October 2005 (UTC)