Foreign Words with no proper English Translation
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 ex hibitionist  Hastings 22 Apr 18 5.01pm |
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Originally posted by chateauferret
Eh? Elle m'a branlé. A reflexive verb means that the subject and (direct) object are the same thing, and in that case the object is marked by the reflexive pronoun, the perfect tense takes etre* and the past participle agrees with the pronoun in number and gender. If she's doing it to you (ahem), then the verb isn't reflexive because the subject and object are different so it's a straightforward transitive verb. All transitive verbs take avoir (even the verbs that take etre when they're intransitive), and the past participle only agrees with the object if it precedes the verb (J'ai branlé Marie; je l'ai branlée). If you are doing it to yourself then it is reflexive. Je me suis branlé(e). Of course a reflexive verb may take a noun phrase introduced by a preposition (M. Zaha s'est plaint a l'arbitre*, Mr Zaha complained to the referee).
Edited by chateauferret (22 Apr 2018 11.09am) I stand corrected, quel branleur! It's like cacher to hide something and se cacher to hide oneself. Bien sur, naturellement, d'accord etc
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chateauferret  22 Apr 18 8.04pm |
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Originally posted by Midlands Eagle
Les gears du bicyclette It's *la* bicyclette
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| ex hibitionist Hastings 22 Apr 18 10.58pm |
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according to Lee Mack le or la is irrelevant - you ride a bike you don't f*ck it
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| chateauferret 23 Apr 18 2.22am |
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Originally posted by ex hibitionist
according to Lee Mack le or la is irrelevant - you ride a bike you don't f*ck it Then like most people whose mother tongue is English, he fails to understand the difference between natural gender and grammatical gender. In Russian there is at least one word for "man" which is feminine. Virtually all nouns in Russian ending in -a or -ya are feminine, no matter what they mean. In English, grammatical gender and natural gender coincide, which is unusual in Indo-European languages. Male animate nouns are masculine, female animate nouns are feminine, and inanimate nouns (with a couple of exceptions, such as ship which is feminine) are neuter. This gives rise to a range of abominations where the natural gender of an animate noun is indeterminate, including the use of plural pronouns covering both genders for singular nouns, as in the customer sends in their form. (The correct treatment is to use the masculine on the basis that it imports the feminine, but because the PC lot don't understand the point in the first sentence above, this causes them to spontaneously combust). Edited by chateauferret (23 Apr 2018 2.23am)
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