#stonefruit

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

glass brambleBOT
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Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

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Make it descriptive, including relevant context, but also to the point. This way you improve your chances of getting a more relevant and specific answer.

lethal hull
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it's not a question a preposition, it's a question of word
"le livre" and "la livre" are not the same word, they just happen to be homonymes
"livre" can be a masculine noun meaning a book
but another word is "livre", a feminine noun meaning a pound

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so by adding context (in this case the gender) you are narrowing the field of possibilities
just like "a bat" could be either an object or an animal
but by saying "a wooden bat" or "a cave bat", I am adding context, narrowing what I could possibly be talking about

civic ermine
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A couple things to unpack here:

  1. "un" and "le" are called articles or determiners. They aren't prepositions (although le can contract with some prepositions!)
  2. "un livre" doesn't mean that the book is unknown to the people talking about it just as "le livre" doesn't mean that the people talking about it know the book… you're simply dealing with indefinite and definite articles.
  3. Indefinite and definite articles don't really change the meaning of a word, they just modify its… definiteness. Some words like pâte will refer to different things depending on the number, however ("une pâte" → a paste/dough, "des pâtes" → pasta)
  4. With the le livre / la livre distinction it's not the article that changes the meaning of the word. It's that you have two distinct nouns that happen to have two different genders that also happen to be homophones.
bitter umbra
boreal thistle
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what's your native language?

bitter umbra
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So basically there is no such thing that I mentioned in my post

bitter umbra
boreal thistle
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oh yeah you guys don't do articles/determiners, so it's pretty alien to you

bitter umbra
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probably

boreal thistle
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I just read this however:

Like most Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, Polish classically uses no definite or indefinite articles, though certain words or grammatical features may substitute this, with a shift currently taking place in the language. A noun such as kot may mean either "the cat" or "a cat", while saying ten kot (lit. "that cat") can function similarly to a definite article in other languages.

bitter umbra
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I understand how they work in english, but I mix them up from time to time

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My knowledge of the english language should help me here

boreal thistle
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yeah English and French definiteness are basically the same

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try to think of “the” as “this/that specific one” and “a” as “any one”

bitter umbra
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wait so un/une = a
le/la = the

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??

boreal thistle
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yes

bitter umbra
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ok tyy

boreal thistle
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not everything between English and French overlaps of course, the partitive for example doesn't use a marker in English, but it does in French

I want bread
Je veux du pain

civic ermine
bitter umbra
bitter umbra
boreal thistle
lethal hull
bitter umbra
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Are you still here? I have a small question, but I don't want to make a post about it. What's the difference between "au pied" and "au pied de" ?

civic ermine
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You're better off just starting a new thread so that new eyes can see it

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"au pied" by itself is a dog command
"au pied de" means at the foot of

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"au pied" can also refer to what is literally on your foot

bitter umbra
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anyway, thanks!

civic ermine
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because I happened to see it!

boreal thistle
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yeah don't hesitate to make another post