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The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is. It is necessary in the following ...
coup de main (pl. coups de main) a surprise attack. In French, [donner] un coup de main means "[to give] a hand" (to give assistance). Even if the English meaning exists as well (as in faire le coup de main), it is old-fashioned. coup d'état (pl. coups d'état) a sudden change in government by force; literally "hit (blow) of state."
What the French call complément d'objet indirect is a complement introduced by an essentially void à or de (at least in the case of a noun) required by some particular, otherwise intransitive, verbs: e.g. Les cambrioleurs ont profité de mon absence 'the robbers took advantage of my absence' — but the essentially synonymous les cambrioleurs ...
Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. (Sometimes, the use of one or more additional words is optional.) Notable examples are cuisines, cheeses, cat breeds, dog breeds, and horse breeds. (See List of words derived from toponyms.)
The word lès (French pronunciation: ⓘ, and with liaison) is an archaic French preposition meaning "near", "next to". [1] [2] Today it occurs only in place names to distinguish places with the same name. The word lès has two variants: lez and les. [1]
Various sentences using the syllables mā, má, mǎ, mà, and ma are often used to illustrate the importance of tones to foreign learners. One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37]
Silent final consonants may be pronounced, in some syntactic contexts, when the following word begins with a vowel or non-aspirated h.It is important to note that many words with silent final consonants have utterly lost them, e.g. neither the 'n' in million nor the 't' in art is ever pronounced.
Nowadays, the form of lequel is typically replaced with qui when the antecedent is a person: « la femme de qui j'ai parlé ». Further, if the preposition is de, even if it is not the de of the possession, dont has started to be used (with both person and non-person antecedents): « la femme dont j'ai parlé ».