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- "Les éléphants sont gros."
61 Comments
It's interesting that in French and Spanish "les [noun]" can refer to either the general category of [noun] or a specific set of [noun].
For instance, "les enfants sont jolies" can mean either "the children are pretty" (referring to a specific set of children) or "children are pretty" (the general class of children).
I guess it's just context that determines which interpretation to take.
1316
Les enfants is used when referring to a specific group of children. It is also used when referring to a general group of children.
Les enfants = those children right there
Des enfants = some children but not all
Les enfants = all the children in the world, all members of a community or group of children.
If you know you are referring to all the students in the class then you use les. If you don't know then you use des.
Les enfants (all the children) in that class are noisy. Des enfants (some of the children) in that class are noisy. Les enfants (just that particular group of children we talked about earlier) are noisy.
Which is better depends on context, what the speaker is trying to say.
1316
It's a problem for English speakers because we just drop the article any time we feel like doing so and leave it up to the reader/ listener to figure out what was meant. Because we drop the article we haven't developed an article that expresses generality.
But in French you can't just drop an article, it has to be included. Unfortunately, they didn't develop an article for generality either. They just gave le/ la/ les a dual role.
1316
Le éléphant = hard to say because one word ends in vowel and the next starts with vowel thus l'éléphant.
les éléphants = easy to say because one word ends in consonant and next starts with vowel.
The process of dropping one of the vowels and joining the two words together with an apostrophe is called elision and is used where ever the condition comes about. H is often silent in French and is considered a vowel for the purposes of elision.
We are not at school, so you can use a dictionary:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-french/huge