Talking about language

Twentieth on the list is le radical, and it is the entry here that an English reader will misread with the most confidence. In English « radical » belongs to politics, to chemistry and to the square-root sign: it describes a person who wants the whole thing changed, a molecule with an unpaired electron, or a symbol on a page. None of those is meant. Le radical is the part of a word that does not move — parl- in parler, parlons, parlait — and what English calls it is « the stem » or « the root ». Underneath, the two are the same word: Latin radix is a root, and a radical in politics is somebody who goes to the root of the matter. French simply kept the grammatical sense as the everyday one, and it carries the political sense in the same noun, which the context sorts out. So the rule when reading a French grammar is worth fixing early: le radical is never an opinion, only a syllable or two at the front of a verb.