blasphémer

From Old French blasfemer, which was borrowed from Late Latin blasphēmāre. Doublet of blâmer, which was inherited.

• IPA^(key): /blas.fe.me/

• Audio:

  (file)

blasphémer

1. to blaspheme
   • 1992, Amélie Nothomb, Hygiène de l’assassin [The Assassin’s Hygiene] (fiction):

     Cessez de blasphémer, vile créature ! Apprenez, ignorante, que saint Prétextat était archevêque de Rouen au VI^e siècle, et grand ami de Grégoire de Tours, qui était un homme très bien, dont vous n’avez naturellement jamais entendu parler.

     Stop blaspheming, you vile creature! You’d better learn, ignorant woman, that Saint Praetextatus was Archbishop of Rouen in the 6^th century, and a friend of Gregory of Tours, who was a very good man, which you, unsurprisingly, never heard of.

This verb is conjugated like céder. It is a regular -er verb, except that its last stem vowel alternates between /e/ (written 'é') and /ɛ/ (written 'è'), with the latter being used before mute 'e'. One special case is the future stem, used in the future and the conditional. Before 1990, the future stem of such verbs was written blasphémer-, reflecting the historic pronunciation /e/. In 1990, the French Academy recommended that it be written blasphèmer-, reflecting the now common pronunciation /ɛ/, thereby making this distinction consistent throughout the conjugation (and also matching in this regard the conjugations of verbs like lever and jeter). Both spellings are in use today, and both are therefore given here.

• blasphémateur
• blasphématoire
• blasphème

• “blasphémer”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.