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This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French les tables sont les siennes, "siennes" or its base form "sien ...
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 ...
The clitics -moi and -toi become -m' and -t' respectively when followed by either -en or -y. In colloquial French, however, it is possible to keep -moi and -toi intact and change -en and -y to -z-en and -z-y respectively, or to put slot 5 before slot 3, or less commonly, before slot 1 or 2. ex. The imperative sentences corresponding to « Tu m ...
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 ...
The sentence Honni soit qui mal y pense (often with double n) can still be used in French as a frozen expression to mean "Let nobody think ill of this" by allusion to the Garter's motto. A more colloquial quasi-synonymous expression in French would be en tout bien tout honneur. hors de combat
Increased presence of complex sentences with main or dependent clauses using demonstratives: Mon rêve, c'est de partir en Afrique. (Mon rêve est de partir pour l'Afrique / en Afrique.) My dream is to leave for Africa. Relative clauses (1) using "que" as an all-purpose relative pronoun, or (2) embedding interrogative pronouns instead of ...
("Messieurs, je suis innocent de tout ce dont on m'inculpe. Je souhaite que mon sang que vous allez répandre ne retombe jamais sur la France.") — Louis XVI, king of France (21 January 1793), speaking to his executioners prior to his execution by guillotine "Help! help me, my dear!" [6] [62] ("Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!")
In colloquial speech, the combination of the preposition sur + definite article is often abbreviated: sur + le = su'l; sur + la = su'a or sa; sur + les = ses. Sometimes dans + un and dans + les is abbreviated to just dun and dins.