Co-operatives

The third entry is l’assemblée des délégués, and the noun at the end of it is the one word on this page an English reader has to pronounce before translating. French has two separate forms and no ambiguity at all: déléguer is the verb, marked as one by its infinitive ending, and le délégué is the person, a past participle turned into a noun and carrying an article and a gender. English spells both of them « delegate » and sorts them out in the mouth. In the noun the last syllable is worn down to something close to « -git »; in the verb it is a full « gate ». The same trick runs through a whole class of words that reached us from Latin through French: « an associate » against « to associate », « a graduate » against « to graduate », « an estimate » against « to estimate ». A second family shifts the stress rather than the vowel, as « a record » does against « to record ». Nothing in the writing marks either of them, which is why a society’s « delegates » are heard correctly and read twice.