4.7 Prepositions à and de — and the contractions — Epoché
What you will be able to do Build the four contracted forms that appear when the two commonest prepositions meet the definite article, and recognise them on sight instead of hunting for an article that has vanished. Choose the right preposition in front of a country or a city, using the gender of the country rather than guesswork. Name six jobs that each of the two prepositions does, so that you stop expecting a one-to-one match with an English word. Say what English does instead at each point, and in particular why English can glue two nouns together in a way French never can. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Allons au cinéma. [1] Let's go to the movies. Appelle-moi au bureau. [2] Ring me at the office. Répondez aux questions. [3] Answer the questions. Prerequisites : 4.6 — you should already be able to ask a question three ways, because several sentences here are questions, and you need the gender and the plural of nouns from the two lessons before that. See 4.6 Grammar if you need it. Two small words carry an enormous share of the work in French. One of them points towards something: a place you are going to, a person you are speaking to, a time you will arrive at. The other points away from something: a place you come from, a person something belongs to, a subject a book is about. Between them they do the work of at least a dozen English prepositions, and they are the first two words in the language whose translation you must stop looking for. That is the real lesson here, and it is worth stating bluntly before any table appears. You cannot learn these two words by pairing each with an English word, because there is no pairing to learn. An English speaker who memorises one of them as to and the other as of will be right about half the time and baffled the rest of it. The second half of the lesson deals with a mechanical consequence. When either preposition runs into the masculine or the plural definite article, the two words fuse into one, and the four resulting forms are obligatory: writing the two words separately is simply an error. Once you can take those forms apart in your head, a great deal of French that looked opaque becomes ordinary. How English does it English has far more prepositions and uses each one more narrowly. English distinguishes at , to , in , into and on where French often has just the first of our two words, and it distinguishes of , from , about and off where French often has just the second. So the mapping runs one-to-many: one French word, many possible English ones, and you cannot pick the English word without reading the rest of the sentence. The reverse direction, the one you need in order to produce French, is much easier, because many English prepositions collapse onto one French word. English glues nouns together; French cannot. A car key , the kitchen table , a bus stop : English puts one noun in front of another and lets the reader work out the relation. French does this only in a small number of fixed compounds. Each of those has to be rebuilt with a preposition between the two nouns and the order reversed, so that the head noun comes first and the modifier second. This is one of the commonest sources of unnatural French written by English speakers. English contractions are optional; these French ones are compulsory, in writing too. An English speaker says something close to gonna and writes going to , and formal English prose often avoids even don't and it's . The fusions here are the opposite: they are obligatory in the most formal written French there is. Treat them as spellings you have to know, not as a fast-speech habit. English marks possession with an ending; French marks it with a preposition and the reverse order. My father's shirt puts the owner first and adds an ending. French puts the thing owned first, then the preposition, then the owner, in the same order as the English alternative the shirt of my father — stilted in English, and the only possibility in French. English uses one preposition for all countries; French uses three. In France , in Japan , in the United States : one word covers all three. French chooses between three forms according to whether the country is feminine, masculine or plural, so the gender you learned to worry about for ordinary nouns now decides a preposition too. It is annoying but entirely regular. The four fused forms Here is the whole mechanism. Each preposition fuses with the masculine singular article and with the plural article, and leaves the feminine singular article alone. That gives four fused forms and two pairs that stay apart. Preposition plus article What you actually write à + le au — one syllable, and the article has disappeared from sight à + les aux — sounds exactly like the singular unless a vowel follows à + la à la — no fusion; two words, as they were de + le du — identical in form to the partitive of the previous lessons de + les des — identical in form to the indefinite plural de + la de la — no fusion; two words, as they were Read the right-hand column again and notice the two entries that say identical in form . This is the one genuine difficulty of the section, and it is a reading difficulty rather than a writing one: two of the fused forms look exactly like the partitive and the plural indefinite article, and nothing in the spelling tells you which is which. What tells you is the verb. If the verb requires the second preposition — coming from somewhere, speaking about something, needing something — the form is a fusion and you should read the article back into it. If the verb takes a plain object, the form is an article with no preposition hiding inside. A handful of very common verbs account for most cases. French English Allons au cinéma. [1] Let's go to the movies. Appelle-moi au bureau. [2] Ring me at the office. Répondez aux questions. [3] Answer the questions. J'adore parler aux gens. [4] I