4.3 Plurals and the partitive — du, de la, des — Epoché
What you will be able to do Write the plural of a French noun in its three regular shapes, and explain why most plurals are invisible to the ear. Use the partitive article where French needs one and English needs nothing, so that you stop leaving nouns bare. Reduce any of these articles to a single small word after a negative, which is one of the tidiest rules in the language. Say what English does instead in each of the three cases, and recognise the three kinds of sentence in which you personally are most likely to leave the article out. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English J'adore les animaux. [1] I love animals. Aimes-tu les chevaux ? [2] Do you like horses? Ferme les yeux. [3] Close your eyes. Prerequisites : 4.2 — you should already be able to choose between the singular articles and to predict the gender of a noun from its ending, because the partitive form you need depends on that gender. See 4.2 Grammar if you need it. There are two separate jobs in this lesson and it is worth keeping them apart in your head. The first is morphology: how the written form of a noun changes when there is more than one of the thing. The second is the article system: which small word goes in front of a noun when the quantity is indefinite, whether that quantity is countable or not. English speakers find the first job easy and the second job genuinely hard, and the reason is the same in both cases. English marks the plural audibly and leaves the indefinite quantity unmarked; French marks the plural almost inaudibly and insists on marking the indefinite quantity. That symmetry is worth stating plainly before we start, because it tells you where to put your effort. Learning to write a plural correctly takes an afternoon. Learning to produce an article in front of every mass noun takes months, and no amount of understanding the rule shortens it. The rule is simple; the habit is not. How English does it The English plural is audible and the French plural usually is not. English adds a sound to the end of the word, and that sound is the whole signal: you hear it and you know there is more than one. French writes an extra letter that is normally not pronounced. In speech, the plural of an ordinary French noun sounds exactly like the singular, and the work of telling you how many there are falls entirely on the article in front. This is the single most important fact in the lesson. A French listener hearing the word for book learns nothing about number from the noun; the article carries it. English has no article for an indefinite plural. I have books is a complete and ordinary English sentence with nothing in front of the noun. In French the corresponding sentence must have an article. English can insert some , but it is optional and often sounds slightly odd; in French the equivalent is compulsory and sounds like nothing at all. English has no article for a mass noun either. Bring wine , I hear music , eat meat . The nouns stand bare, and inserting some is again optional. French has a dedicated article for exactly this case, called the partitive because it names a part of an unmeasured whole, and it is not optional. This is where English speakers fail most often and most audibly, because the temptation to say the French noun bare is very strong when the English sentence has nothing in front of it. English uses a bare plural for general statements, French uses the definite article. I love animals , I like cake . English marks a general statement by leaving the noun bare; French marks it with the definite article, so the French sentence looks like I love the animals . This is a second place where the two languages disagree in the same direction, and the two disagreements interact: for a plural noun you have to decide whether you mean animals in general, which takes the definite article, or an unspecified number of them, which takes the indefinite one. English changes nothing after a negative; French does. I have a car becomes I do not have a car , and the article survives. In French, any indefinite or partitive article in the object of a negated verb collapses into one small word. English has no equivalent move at all, so there is nothing to transfer and nothing to unlearn. That makes it one of the easier rules to install, provided you notice that it exists. Writing the plural Six patterns cover almost everything. Read the right-hand column and notice how little of it you would hear. Singular Plural — the pattern le livre les livres — the ordinary case: add a silent letter, and only the article changes for the ear le fils les fils — a noun whose singular already ends in -s, -x or -z does not change at all le gâteau les gâteaux — nouns in this ending take a different silent letter, still silent le cheveu les cheveux — the same silent letter for this ending; the plural is the form you will meet far more often l'animal les animaux — this group changes the ending itself, and this time you do hear it le travail les travaux — a small group behaves like the one above; the commonest member is the word for work The fifth and sixth patterns are the only ones that make a difference to the ear, and they are worth memorising as pairs rather than as a rule, because the group is small and very frequent: the words for animal, newspaper, horse and hospital all belong to it, and their plurals are the forms you will actually meet. There is one common noun whose plural is not related to its singular at all. The word for eye, which is short and begins with a ligature, becomes something completely different in the plural, and the plural is again the form you meet more often. Learn the pair outright. Now read the six sentences below and watch the article do the work of marking number that English does with the noun. French English J'adore les animaux. [1] I love animals. Aimes-tu les chevaux ? [2] Do you like horses? Ferme les yeux. [3] Close your e