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- "Cet homme a du poil sur la p…
25 Comments
622
It reinforces the misconception that "du" means "some". There is no equivalent word in English for the partitive article ("du").
The filler word "some" can sometimes be used to smooth over the gap that can sometimes be left in the flow of a sentence by the lack of a partitive article, but here there is no gap to fill.
Cheveu/cheveux is hair that grows from the human scalp. Poil/poils is hair that grows anywhere else.
As others have said, cheveux is hair on your head. Hair anywhere else on the body is "le poil / les poils". Also "le poil" is a coat on an animal - "Le chat a un poil marron." The cat has a brown coat.
In a previous exercise Duo wanted des poils, but here du poil. What is ordinary usage?
According to another post by Sitesurf du poil and des poils are interchangable, but I don't understand why.
in english, the word 'hair' can mean one single hair, or multiple hairs. when we say 'a man has hair on his chest' we most likely mean he has multiple hairs on his chest. we could just as well say 'this man has hairs on his chest'. i imagine the same thing is going on in french -- du poil, singular, or des poils, plural, can be used to communicate the idea of 'some hair'.
- 622
It's not quite the same thing. You could say "C'est vrai, cet homme a du poil sur la poitrine, mais il n'a pas la poitrine poilue.".
Outside of that specific kind of context, I believe that it is true to say that a native speaker would be more likely to refer to "le torse velu" than "la poitrine poilue".
The correct translation includes the possesive adjective, even though it's not in the French sentence. :/
- 1116
If you're talking about "la poitrine" vs "sa poitrine", I think it's because in French you usually don't use possessive for body parts if it's obvious who the body part belongs to. In this case, it's obvious we're talking about the man's chest, so we don't have to specify it's his. That's why the English translation would be "his chest", even though it looks like "the chest".
That would have to be "has" (because "man" is singular) but I don't know if that would be accepted, because it's not really what the French says.
- 1513
How can you tell which consonants are sounded and which aren’t? Repetion? I regularly pronounce the l at the end of poil but usually consonants at the end of a word aren’t sounded.
- 607
A good tip that I heard on a Michel Thomas course described a rule for this as the 'CareFuL' rule. Generally if a word ends in C, F or L the consonant is sounded (except for 'c' if f it ends with 'nc' in which case the c is silent e.g. blanc).
- 1370
To me "has hair on his chest" has exactly the same meaning as "has a hairy chest" and in English we would say the latter
sur "la" poitrine: pas sur "sa" poitrine , pourquoi utilisons "his" dans se cas ?
les cheveux = tête, on ne parle plus de cheveux pour les parties intimes par exemple ou sous les aicelles et autres endroit, pour les animaux également, on ne parlent pas de cheveux mais de poils, de plumes, de pelage ou de fourrure.
I wrote "hairs on his chest" - wrong!!! I suppose, after speaking English as my native language after 70 years, and having taught it for about 40 years, I really should know better. Well! That is ze live!
