In formal language are those kinda similar the same way je vais manger and je mangerai are at least mostly the same thing
I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, “Je mangerais” == I would eat, “J’aurais mangé” == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It’s very much not a complete transition, but “vous allez manger” and “vous mangerez” are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.
To say “you will do as I say”, an angry mother will say to her kid “tu vas faire c’que j’te dis!” but an angry boss will say “vous ferez ce que je vous dis”. Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. “You will have done as I say” implies another causal event between “now” and “you will have done”, and French doesn’t have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.
Even in English, without that level of cultural baggage or institutional oversight, there have been many proposals for spelling reform, none of which ever go anywhere.
I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren’t always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).
I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, “Je mangerais” == I would eat, “J’aurais mangé” == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It’s very much not a complete transition, but “vous allez manger” and “vous mangerez” are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.
To say “you will do as I say”, an angry mother will say to her kid “tu vas faire c’que j’te dis!” but an angry boss will say “vous ferez ce que je vous dis”. Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. “You will have done as I say” implies another causal event between “now” and “you will have done”, and French doesn’t have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.
I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren’t always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).